Zazula

Basic facts
The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was established on December 14, 1950 by the United Nations General Assembly. The agency is mandated to lead and co-ordinate international action to protect refugees and resolve refugee problems worldwide. Its primary purpose is to safeguard the rights and well-being of refugees. It strives to ensure that everyone can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another State, with the option to return home voluntarily, integrate locally or to resettle in a third country. In more than five decades, the agency has helped an estimated 50 million people restart their lives. Today, a staff of around 6,540 people in 116 countries continues to help 19.2 million persons.

World Refugee Day
On 20 June, UNHCR salutes the indomitable spirit and courage of the world's refugees, giving them the encouragement, support and respect they deserve. Every refugee story is different, every loss is a personal one. But around the world different crises affect different groups. Some conflicts are almost resolved. Others are new, with fresh refugee problems. And still others are shadowy, long-running guerrilla wars whose victims are often the ordinary people the revolutionaries claim to represent.

What to do?
A. If you've adopted a religious doctrine, pray - and ask your local religious establishment if they have any active plans for helping refugees in any way, or if they can link/refer you to someone who has. Or you can simply look for that yourself through your local UN Committee or the UNHCR site.
B. If you are agnostic, just check out your local UN Committee or the UNHCR site.

Find out more (including ways to help)
The UN Refugee Agency

40sondacurb

The UN is under rated.

bry623

The UN is over rated!

Fox

Feel free to back that up with some supporting arguments...

bry623

http://www.4forums.com/political/showthread.php?t=396

Since this guy has links, we can use em.

Don't forget oil for food.

40sondacurb

The merits of the organization are very apparent. The fact is they have more successes that failures.

A few mistakes and you can write off all the children that would be dead right now if it weren't for the UN food for life program.

Fox

Typical right wing argument, to focus only on the negative.

Seems like you guys don't even want the U.N. to work.

bry623

Actually, that is a typical left wing approcah. Be all negative. I merely provided the proof for which you asked.

Fox

That's not proof, that's a laundry list of the unfortunate shortcomings that are sure to exist when you have an organization as far-reaching as the U.N.

And maybe you forget, but I'm not a member of the left wing.

40sondacurb

If America is ever down and out we're going to wish we hadn't been so High nosed with the UN and other countries. You reap what you sow.

bry623

I never called anyone left wing.

My whole point is that while the UN does do some good humanitarian things, they do some bad as well. They have no spine. They make all kinds of threats and sanctions and resolutions against countries that are not playing nicely with the rest of the world and never back it up. If they had any power at all, the U.S. would not have to bw the world's police force. In fact, we would never have went into Iraq, either out of respect or fear of the UN.

Fox

If we'd had any patience with the U.N., we wouldn't have gone to Iraq, and we would have been a lot better off for it.

Iraq was Bush's impulse buy, and now we all have to suffer for it.

Zazula

This thread has sprung a discussion about the value of the UN, and I'm glad that all approaches regarding this important matter found here an appropriate place to be unfolded and put under everybody's valuation. This is something that I personally consider of paramount importance, and I'll get back to it. However, since the starting point of this interesting conversation was our fellow 19.200.000 humans who suffer being refugees around the world, please let me state some more thoughts on that.

The refugees are not anything new on our planet; they've been around since the beginning of time - however, now we pride ourselves (especially in the developed countries) for having reached a very high humanistic awareness. And I'm simply wondering: why then we do not show our humanistic qualities by relieving this situation? Are we so easily forgetting the lessons History teaches us? There isn't a single place on this planet that did not witness hordes of refugees being turned away from their land.

Some might say that in the States it's more difficult to raise a public awareness regarding the refugees, because USA have fortunately been free of conflicts for a long time. Really? Accepting this approach would mean that we utterly forget how America came into being: The Pilgrims were displaced people due to their religious beliefs; they had fled England and then Holland. Or may be we should forget about the Russians who came to USA in 1917 or the Germans and Jews who fled the nazist Germany and landed in USA before WWII? Or the boat people from South Vietnam, Cambodia, Haiti and Cuba?

Don't forget that USA has had two refugees as State Secretaries: Henri Kissinger and Madeline Albright. And don't forget that, no matter how the God one believes in is called, one's religion contains a refugee figure of paramount importance: Jesus, Moses, Muhammad, Dalai Lama.

So, you might wish to think over about what to do... You don't like or trust the UN? No problem! What about the American Refugee Committee, the U.S. Committee for Refuggees and Immigrants, the Boat People SOS or hundreds of other organizations that I'm sure exist in USA, as a result of the utmost human value: the compassionate love for the sufferer. A simple google search produced above results; I believe if one is adamant to find ways to help, there will be numerous additional options.