Word: unhcr
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Hong Kong, for instance, where the population resents the aid given Vietnamese, the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) found itself so short of funds last week that it decided to cut off the $1.20 daily food allowance provided for 17,000 Vietnamese refugees in the colony who are unemployed but capable of working. Of the 8,200 refugees who have found work in Hong Kong's factories, many are paid $4.20 for an eight-hour day, or about half of what local employees earn...
...Western countries pledged at Geneva to raise their refugee immigration quotas, nothing has yet been done to shorten the shocking delays involved in resettling the homeless who are languishing in camps in Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand and Hong Kong. In Bangkok, where the U.N. maintains a 15-story skyscraper, the UNHCR has only 48 full-time employees to deal with a refugee population currently totaling 175,000. At the country's 16 refugee camps, a swamped staff of just twelve field workers is assigned to monitor aid and assist in resettlement. At least 40,000 of the inhabitants have been...
...processing problem is just as bad in Hong Kong. More than half the 67,000 refugees there have not even been interviewed by the understaffed local UNHCR office...
Inevitably, the refugees pay in shattered hopes for the administrative confusion and excessive red tape. When vacancies appear in a country's quota, refugees are ordered to go, even if the country is Norway and their relatives are in Arizona. Says Hong Kong's UNHCR Director Angelo Rasanayagam: "We take the necessary measures to those who refuse an offer. We explain the realities. We disabuse them of their illusions." Explains one volunteer caseworker who quit a Hong Kong refugee program in disgust: "Those who refuse are told they'll go to the bottom of the list...
...GATT). Last week the branch of the U.N. Children's Fund (UNICEF), Paris-based since 1946, disclosed plans to move its headquarters to Geneva by next summer. Soon to come is a helter-skelter maze of smaller programs, ranging from the Office of the High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), to the International Bureau for Declaration of Death, which identifies victims of civil wars and natural disasters, to the U.N. Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), which now has more member countries (142) than the U.N. itself...