Mr. Speaker. I was privileged to participate as one of the congressional members of the U.S. delegation to the United Nations sponsored conference on refugees in Geneva last week. This conference will go down in the annals of history not only as the most successful international refugee conference of all times. but as the only successful refugee conference ever held. The success of the Geneva Conference was in large measure due to the outstanding leadership of the President and the Vice President of the United States whose tireless efforts and diligent diplomacy focused the attention of the world community on alleviating the human tragedy which has engulfed Southeast Asia with over 375.000 Indochinese refugees. Vice President MONDALE. in an outstanding address to the delegates of the 65 nations at Geneva. sounded a clarion call for this conference to go beyond the posturing and legalisms of previous refugee conferences. He reminded the world of the disasterous results of the Evian Conference of 1938. which failed to alleviate the plight of 500.000 German Jews and thus facilitated Hitlers implementation of the "final solution"-the destruction of 6 million European Jews. It is a tribute to the strong human rights commitment and moral integrity of this administration. so ably demonstrated by the Vice President in Geneva. that the U.S. efforts this time produced concrete actions that will alleviate the sufferings of the Vietnamese. Laotians. and Cambodians forced to flee from their homelands. And this time our leadership produced a significant humanitarian response from the other nations of the world. who pledged to resettle 100.000 more refugees and to meet the increased costs for care and maintenance of the refugees provided by the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. Mr. Speaker.
Keywords matched
Refugees refugee refugees