Refugees Quotes

A long and difficult settlement looms. For Houston or Baton Rouge, these are huge numbers of people for them. They are desperately poor, seriously depressed, lost individuals with nothing. They are going to be hard to absorb. It`s an enormous burden for a city to take it on. After the shock and warmth and compassion wear off, these refugees are going to have to find a way to become new citizens in these new places.

And though various organizations in America and England collected money and sent food parcels to these refugees, nothing was ever received by the Spanish.

Environmental degradation, overpopulation, refugees, narcotics, terrorism, world crime movements, and organized crime are worldwide problems that don`t stop at a nation`s borders.

Last time, I don`t think we had more than half a dozen people who were real refugees. We had more Texas National Guard here than flood victims. Now, it looks like we`re going to have almost 200 by tonight.

After meeting with Louisiana officials last week, Rev. Jesse Jackson said, quote, `Many black people feel that their race, their property conditions and their voting patterns have been a factor in the response.` He continued, quote, `I`m not saying that myself.` Then I`ll say it. If the majority of the hardest hit victims of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans were white people, they would not have gone for days without food and water, forcing many to steal for mere survival. Their bodies would not have been left to float in putrid water. They would have been rescued and relocated a hell of a lot faster than this. Period. I mean, reporters and crews are getting to stranded people, and government and military agencies can`t? Why don`t the networks run FEMA? When I saw pictures of black people taking things from stores, my first thought was: `How are those Nikes necessary for your survival?` And then it hit me: People need shoes and clothing. Some escaped the floods with just the clothing on their backs. We have American citizens, not `refugees` from an underdeveloped country, waiting for food, water, shelter, and electricity for four, five, six days.

We do not condone hostility toward these people. We know they`re economic refugees.

We feel that the refugees and victims have already gone through enough and to send a bunch of unorganized things just adds to their chaos and adds to their problems.

Stopping these attacks against women, children, the displaced and refugees and ensuring their protection is our number one priority.

We are also assisting the refugees who have fled across the border to Chad. As many of them have been subject to attacks by militia crossing from Sudan, UNHCR is mounting a major logistical operation to establish camps and transfer refugees away from the border zone.

Every time we walk along a beach some ancient urge disturbs us so that we find ourselves shedding shoes and garments or scavenging among seaweed and whitened timbers like the homesick refugees of a long war.

(Refugees) think they are alone and that no one cares. All they know are their own problems. We try to show them what America and Canada looks like and then how people are caring about them from different places in the world.

(Some refugees in Jackson were angry about what they said were failures by authorities to set up relief efforts and restore power.) They`ve got to do a better job in the aftermath, because people have nowhere to go, ... There`s no plan for us.

We were the only westerners in our neighbourhood, ... Our goal was to cover the realities of the occupation on the ground and we had not got the same security concerns as, say, CNN. Maybe at some levels they don`t trust Iraqis with their security. There`s a part in the book where I`m trying to take CNN to a refugee camp, and they wouldn`t go. And so no one sees Falluja refugees.

We plan to keep the site up whether we get a mass of refugees or not. It still can be a resource for people coming into the state who want to know what kind of housing is available.

(To survive has required tenacity. Koreans are reported even to have murdered children and mixed their flesh with pork to eat. When I have encountered North Korean refugees in Asia, they look barely human - stunted figures with sallow, terrified faces. Some North Koreans have tried to grow their own food, potentially a sign of independent thinking. But for years Kim had them stopped, though he has begun to open the economy slightly in the past three years. Those who protested were sent to an extensive gulag system, which may have resulted in the deaths of one million people. In this internal slave state, Becker suggests, tests of chemical weapons are carried out on prisoners, and pregnant women whose children were tainted with foreign blood have been forced to have abortions. Kim Jong Il has) resisted adopting every policy that could have brought the misery to a quick end, ... the suffering he inflicted on an entire people an unparalleled and monstrous crime.

The 21 Arab states that could easily have absorbed the original 650,000 Palestinian refugees in 1948 refused to do so, even though their combined land mass was 700 times greater than that possessed by Israel. By contrast, the Jewish population of the new state was only 600,000, yet Israel willingly absorbed some 820,000 Jewish refugees from Europe.