Human Cargo by Caroline Moorehead Read Free Book Online

people, their right to flee from oppression, to express their own views, to practice their own faiths, and to choose for themselves where they wanted to live. Refugees, lacking state protection, became people of international concern and subject to international protection. And their problems were no longer understood simply as a matter of groups of people, fleeing and assisted together, but of individuals, with their own cases, their own choices and fears and anxieties. According to Article 14 of the Universal Declaration, every individual was to have the “right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.”
    UNRRA had been established to deal with repatriations. As its chief funder, America now decided to wind up its activities. In the face of bitter opposition from the Eastern Bloc, which continued to call on its former citizens to come home, the United States voted to create a new body, the International Refugee Organization. The IRO’s mandate was subtly different: to “resettle” people uprooted by war. The Soviets refused to join, accusing the West of turning refugee camps into centers of anticommunist propaganda and usingthem to recruit the forced labor needed to rebuild western Europe’s shattered countries. But an important step had been taken. Under IRO’s mandate fell a vital new element: the protection not merely of groups but of individuals with valid objections to being repatriated. During the four and a half years of IRO’s existence, barely 50,000 people returned to their former homes in central or eastern Europe.
    The question now was what to do with those who remained in the camps for displaced people. The fit and healthy were soon recruited for the very labor schemes so condemned by the Russians. In return for volunteering to build roads, or work in the mines, industry, and agriculture in the United States, Canada, and Australia and across Europe, refugees could apply for citizenship in the countries that offered them work. No one, however, wanted the sick or the elderly, and as the Cold War dragged on, 400,000 “hardcore” cases lingered on in the camps. Before finally shutting down its operations—which, at $428.5 million, had proved expensive—IRQ officials warned that what once had seemed a temporary phenomenon would in time turn out to be a very permanent one.
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    IT WAS NOW 1950. The United States, having spent many millions of dollars on refugees in Europe, decided that the problem was no longer theirs to deal with, particularly as they were now helping European countries directly through the Marshall Plan, which in turn would, they argued, benefit the refugees as well. What neither they, nor it seems anyone else, envisaged was a world in which refugees would keep on coming, as the IRC) had warned. War, famine, violence, and poverty would send people fleeing across borders, and as fighting broke out in Korea and Palestine and starvation spread across China, it became plain that yet another measure would be needed to counter these new flows of displaced people. In the United Nations, talks began about the setting up of a new body, an Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and a new convention that would spell out their rights. Louis Henkin was a young lawyer at the U.S. State Department, interested in internationallaw, when he was invited by his boss, Dean Rusk, to sit with the U.S. team negotiating what became the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. With him were delegates from twenty-six countries. Professor Henkin, a courteous, upright man with a bony face and rather large ears, is now in his late eighties and the only member of the committee still alive. He remembers many hours devoted to wrangling over the meaning of the word “refugee,” and a general ill-defined feeling that the topic did not have great significance for the modern world. There was much talk about whether there should be a “right” to