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BUDAPEST, April 25 (Reuter) - The United Nations' hard-pressed refugee
agency will increasingly have to rely on grassroots groups to help it
cope with mass movements of people driven from Europe's trouble spots,
officials said on Monday.
We have to define our impact and see how others can help up handle
refugees and asylum seekers,
John Horekens, director of the European
secretariat of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told
Reuters.
He spoke after opening a regional conference to help strengthen
cooperation among 120 humanitarian, human rights, religious and child
defence groups from 36 countries.
Sponsored by the UNHCR and the International Council for Voluntary
Agencies, the three-day conference was discussing how to assist the
world's 40 million registered refugees, help them in crisis situations
and integrate them into society.
Calling the UNHCR very thinly stretched
, Horekens said such
non-governmental organisations (NGOs) would become increasingly
important allies for the UNHCR.
If there was a major problem right now, given our heavy involvement in
just two places -- Yugoslavia and Rwanda -- we would have great
difficulty in moving fast,
he said.
That poses potential trouble given the number of areas that could
develop refugee crises.
If one looks at the former Soviet Union there are plenty of
possibilities,
he said, calling the Caucusus a troubled area and
citing political development in countries like Ukraine and the
situation of minorities in the Russian federation.
We are fairly new in Central and Eastern Europe, and if we want to
expand we have to take (resources) away from somewhere else,
he added.
Hungarian President Arpad Goncz told the conference's opening session
that grassroots groups had a wider role to play in Eastern Europe and
that countries long used to tacking problems alone should welcome this.
Governments in this region will now have to learn to live with NGOs,
how to cooperate with them, to learn to look at grassroots movements
without suspicion,
Goncz said.
(c) Reuters Limited 1994
