Social integration: a major challenge for host countries.

• Position: Integration of refugees, World Summit for Social Development

Refugees and displaced persons were among the most tragic victims of social disintegration and closing borders was net going to make the problem go away, High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata told the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen on 10 March.

And. she said, ranks of the world's 23 million refugees would continue to swell unless Governments tackled the root causes of displacement, supported aid programmes in host countries, and promoted the social integration of those returning to their homelands.

She said: "Social stability is not threatened by refugees, but by human rights violations and gross social inequities which uproot people. This reinforces the need to address the underlying causes. so that people will no longer be forced to flee." Citing strife-torn nations such as Rwanda, Burundi. Bosnia and Herzegovina, Somalia and Afghanistan, Mrs. Ogata warned that the threat of new refugee flows "remains very much alive".

Over the past five years, the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) had helped nearly 9 million refugees go back home to such places as Afghanistan, El Salvador, Iraq, Ethiopia, Cambodia and Mozambique. But the ultimate success of those repatriation programmes, Mrs. Ogata said, would depend on the social integration of the returnees, "a major challenge" for all the war-torn countries to which refugees were returning.

To promote social integration at the grass-roots level, UNHCR had a worldwide programme of "quick-impact micro-projects': which addressed the needs not only of returning refugees but also of the internally displaced and the local community. These ranged from building schools and clinics and drilling wells to constructing access roads so people can get their produce to market.

"A multi-dimensional concept of peace must include not only freedom from war, but also from want", Mrs. Ogata stated. "Without that, people may come home, but for how long? And at what cost to the peace process itself?"

In addition to helping countries of origin, she said, the international community must also support host countries, citing the examples of the United Republic of Tanzania and Zaire, which had to absorb some 2 million...