History terms in Conflict and displacement

The body through which the four occupying powers (USA, USSR, Britain and France) governed Germany as a whole from 1945; in November 1945 it planned the reception of the Germans transferred from Eastern Europe.

The US law of 1987 (in force from 1988) that allowed Vietnamese children of American servicemen, and their close relatives, to emigrate to the United States with refugee benefits.

A joint British–American committee that in April 1946 recommended the immediate admission of 100,000 Jewish displaced persons to Palestine; the British government did not accept the recommendation.

The programme run by UNHCR and Thailand from 1982 to 1991, funded by Western states, to protect boat people from pirates in the Gulf of Thailand through patrols, investigations and prosecutions.

Hostility, prejudice and discrimination directed at Roma, Sinti and other groups labelled as "Gypsies".

The Association of Southeast Asian Nations, founded in 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore and Thailand. In 1979 its members jointly refused to accept more Indochinese refugees without Western resettlement.

The official Allied name for a camp where displaced persons were gathered, registered, fed and housed after 1945, usually before repatriation or resettlement.

Decrees issued by the Czechoslovak president Edvard Beneš in 1945 that, among other things, removed citizenship from most Germans and Hungarians in Czechoslovakia and confiscated their property.

Refugees who fled by sea in small or overcrowded boats; the term was first widely used for those who left Vietnam after 1975.

The underground network (Hebrew for "flight") that moved Jewish survivors out of Eastern Europe to the DP camps of the western zones and towards Palestine in 1944–1948.

A declaration signed in Stuttgart on 5 August 1950 by leaders of German expellee associations, renouncing revenge and demanding equal rights, compensation and a "right to the homeland".

The alliance formed in June 1982 by the Khmer Rouge and two non-communist Cambodian resistance groups against the Vietnamese-backed government in Phnom Penh. It held Cambodia's UN seat and controlled many border camps.

A decline in public and government willingness to help victims of a long-running humanitarian crisis, used of Western attitudes to Indochinese refugees in the 1980s.

The plan adopted at Geneva in June 1989 that kept first asylum for Indochinese asylum seekers but screened those arriving after a cut-off date, resettling refugees and returning those found not to be refugees. It ended in 1996.

A boundary line between Poland and Soviet Russia proposed in 1919–1920; at Yalta in 1945 the Allies accepted it, roughly, as Poland's new eastern border.

A date after which new arrivals lose an entitlement given to earlier ones. Under the Comprehensive Plan of Action, Vietnamese arriving after the cut-off (14 March 1989 in most countries) had to be screened instead of being resettled automatically.

The official name of Cambodia under the Khmer Rouge regime, 1975–1979. After 1979 its representatives kept Cambodia's seat at the United Nations.

Disembarkation Resettlement Offers, a scheme from 1979 under which Western states guaranteed to resettle boat people rescued by ships of countries that did not take refugees, so that captains would stop to help. A later companion scheme was called RASRO.

In Allied usage after 1944, a civilian outside their own country because of the Second World War who needed help to return home or settle elsewhere; Germans were excluded. Today the term also covers people forced from their homes who remain inside their own country.

The US law of 25 June 1948, amended in 1950, that allowed displaced persons to enter the United States outside the normal quotas; about 400,000 DPs were admitted under it.

A camp in occupied Germany, Austria or Italy that housed, fed and registered displaced persons under Allied military and UN administration after 1945, usually organised by nationality.

One of the three permanent outcomes UNHCR seeks for refugees: voluntary return home, integration in the country of asylum, or resettlement in a third country.

A person who moves to another country mainly to find work or a better standard of living, rather than to escape persecution. Economic migrants have no claim to refugee status under international law.

The West German law of 1952 that taxed surviving property to compensate expellees and others who had lost homes and possessions in the war.

A displaced person recruited to work in Britain under government schemes of 1946–1949, usually in mills, mines, hospitals or farms.

A German or ethnic German forced out of, or not allowed to return to, a home in Eastern or Central Europe at the end of the Second World War.

The forcible removal of a population from its homes and from a state's territory by that state or its agents.

A Soviet camp in which returning soldiers, prisoners of war and deported civilians were interrogated by the secret police to decide whether they were loyal, collaborators or traitors.

Temporary protection given to refugees by the country they reach first while a lasting solution is found. In Southeast Asia after 1975 it was given on condition that other countries resettled the refugees.

Work done under compulsion by people who cannot leave, such as the millions of foreign civilians and prisoners of war deported to work in Nazi Germany.

The United Front for the Liberation of Oppressed Races, a resistance movement of Vietnam's highland peoples that fought for autonomy and continued armed resistance against the communist government after 1975.

The agreements of July 1954 that ended the First Indochina War, recognised the independence of Laos and Cambodia, and temporarily divided Vietnam at the 17th parallel pending elections that were never held.

The Soviet system of forced labour camps, run by the secret police, in which millions of prisoners were held from the 1930s to the 1950s.

The displaced persons, mostly the old, sick, disabled and those with tuberculosis, whom no resettlement country would accept and who remained in camps into the 1950s.

The report of August 1945 by Earl G. Harrison to President Truman on the conditions of displaced persons, especially Jews, in Germany and Austria, which led to separate and better camps for Jewish DPs.

A highland people of Laos (and of China, Vietnam and Thailand). Many Hmong fought in the CIA's secret army in Laos and fled to Thailand after the communist victory of 1975.

The ethnic Chinese of Vietnam, concentrated in Cholon (Saigon) as traders and in the North as workers and peasants. In 1978–1979 they were the largest group fleeing Vietnam, after the closure of private trade and the break with China.

A camp in Thailand, run with UNHCR, for Cambodians who crossed the border in 1979–1980, such as Khao-I-Dang, from which refugees could be considered for resettlement.

Thailand's policy from 1981 of keeping its border open to refugees but holding new arrivals in austere camps without access to resettlement, to discourage others from coming.

The severe winter of 1946–1947, when food and fuel shortages left much of occupied Germany and Europe cold and underfed.

The US law signed on 23 May 1975 that funded the transport, reception and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam and Cambodia, extended to Laotians in 1976.

An organisation founded in 1951 to organise and pay for the transport of migrants and refugees from Europe overseas; it later became the International Organization for Migration.

The UN specialised agency that cared for refugees and displaced persons from 1947 to 1952; its main task was resettlement, and it resettled more than a million people.

The organisation at Bad Arolsen in Germany, set up after the war, that holds records of Nazi persecution and traces missing persons for families.

Italian soldiers disarmed by Germany after Italy changed sides in September 1943 and held as forced labourers without the rights of prisoners of war.

The Cambodian communist movement led by Pol Pot, which ruled Cambodia as Democratic Kampuchea from 1975 to 1979, emptying the cities and causing the deaths of an estimated 1.5–2 million people.

The killing of 42 Jews by a crowd including soldiers and police in Kielce, Poland, on 4 July 1946, which led tens of thousands of Polish Jews to flee the country.

A white supremacist organisation founded in Tennessee in 1866 that used terror against Black Americans and their white allies during Reconstruction; later versions revived in the 1910s and 1950s.

An association of German expellees from the same home region, such as Silesia or the Sudetenland, formed in West Germany after the war.

A person's official family and political background in communist Vietnam. A "bad" background, such as service to the South Vietnamese state or a family of landowners or traders, led to discrimination in jobs, education and rations.

The US programme of economic aid to Western Europe from 1948 to 1952, officially the European Recovery Program, worth about 13 billion dollars; it speeded recovery, helped absorb refugees and was meant to hold back communism.

A French name ("mountain dweller") for the highland peoples of central Vietnam, many of whom fought alongside US Special Forces and were persecuted after 1975.

An area of undeveloped land in Vietnam to which the government moved urban people after 1975 to clear and farm, often with few tools or supplies; for many it was a form of punishment or forced relocation.

The principle that a state must not return a refugee to a country where their life or freedom would be threatened; Article 33 of the 1951 Refugee Convention.

The border between Germany and Poland along the rivers Oder and western Neisse, set at Potsdam in 1945; it moved Poland westwards and led to the expulsion of the Germans east of it.

The US airlift of about 2,500–3,000 Vietnamese children, most of them orphans, for adoption abroad in April 1975, shortly before the fall of Saigon.

The final US helicopter evacuation of Americans and Vietnamese from Saigon on 29–30 April 1975.

The name later given to the forced repatriation of Soviet citizens, many of them former soldiers, from the American zones to the USSR in 1946–1947.

The reception and processing of more than 111,000 Vietnamese evacuees on Guam between April and November 1975, before their onward movement to the United States.

The forced resettlement in 1947 of about 140,000 Ukrainians and Lemkos from south-eastern Poland to the former German territories in the west and north.

The scheme agreed by UNHCR and Vietnam in 1979 that let Vietnamese emigrate legally by air to resettlement countries, mainly for family reunion, instead of risking escape by boat.

"Eastern workers": civilians from the occupied Soviet Union deported to work in Nazi Germany, who were made to wear an OST badge and lived under harsh controls.

The agreement signed on 27 January 1973 by the United States, North Vietnam, South Vietnam and the Viet Cong, which allowed the withdrawal of US forces but did not end the war between North and South Vietnam.

In US immigration law, the attorney general's power to admit people temporarily in an emergency outside the normal quotas. It was used to admit Indochinese refugees until the Refugee Act of 1980.

The Lao communist movement, backed by North Vietnam, which fought the royal government and its US-backed forces and took power in 1975, proclaiming the Lao People's Democratic Republic.

The British law of 1947 that allowed Polish servicemen who would not return to communist Poland, and their families, to settle in Britain.

The genocide of Roma and Sinti by Nazi Germany and its allies; the Romani words mean "the devouring" and "mass killing".

The meeting of the USA, USSR and Britain from 17 July to 2 August 1945 that set the Oder–Neisse line, divided Germany into zones and accepted the transfer of Germans from Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary.

Recognition of a whole group as refugees on the basis of the evident conditions they fled, without examining each person's claim. Vietnamese boat people received it from 1978 until the cut-off dates of 1988–1989.

A system, pioneered by Canada in 1979, in which groups of citizens, churches or organisations take on the cost and support of resettling particular refugees.

Turning back refugees at a border or towing their boats back out to sea, a practice used by Malaysia and Thailand against Indochinese refugees, especially in 1979.

An escape route, mainly through Italy and Spain to South America, by which some Nazi war criminals and collaborators fled Europe after 1945.

A prison camp in which communist governments in Vietnam and Laos held people linked to the former regimes, without trial, for forced labour and political indoctrination, often for many years.

A person outside their country of nationality who cannot or will not return because of a well-founded fear of persecution, as defined by the 1951 Refugee Convention. The word is also used more loosely for anyone who has fled war, persecution or violence.

The US law of 17 March 1980 that adopted the UN definition of a refugee, set annual admission ceilings and created a permanent system for admitting and resettling refugees.

The UN treaty adopted in Geneva on 28 July 1951 that defines a refugee as a person outside their country with a well-founded fear of persecution, and sets out refugees' rights, including protection from forced return. Its date and European limits were removed by the 1967 Protocol.

The legal procedure for deciding whether an individual asylum seeker meets the definition of a refugee. Under the Comprehensive Plan of Action it was called screening.

German citizens of the German Reich, as distinct from ethnic Germans who were citizens of other states.

The return of a person to their country of nationality or origin.

The permanent settlement of a refugee or displaced person in a third country, neither their home country nor the country where they first found refuge.

"The surviving remnant": the name Jewish Holocaust survivors in the displaced persons camps used for themselves.

Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, General Eisenhower's command of the western Allied armies in 1944–1945, which planned the first care and repatriation of displaced persons.

The breakdown of relations between communist China and the Soviet Union from the late 1950s, which by the 1970s made them rivals and shaped the conflicts in Indochina, where China backed Cambodia and the Soviet Union backed Vietnam.

A person who is not recognised as a citizen by any state.

A government ban on some or all trade with a particular country, used to put pressure on it without fighting, such as the US oil embargo on Japan in 1941 and the US embargoes on Cuba from 1962 and on Vietnam until 1994.

The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, created in December 1950, which protects refugees and supervises the 1951 Refugee Convention.

The UN body set up in January 1982 to supply food and services to Cambodians in camps along the Thai border. It had no mandate to protect them or to find lasting solutions.

The United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (1943–1947), which provided relief to liberated countries and helped run displaced persons camps, with repatriation as its aim.

The United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia, the UN peacekeeping and civil administration mission of 1992–1993 set up under the Paris Agreements of 1991. It organised the return of refugees from Thailand and the elections of May 1993.

The communist-led independence movement founded by Ho Chi Minh in 1941, which declared Vietnamese independence in 1945 and defeated France in the First Indochina War (1946–1954).

Ethnic Germans living outside Germany as citizens of other states, such as the Sudeten Germans or the Danube Swabians.

A charitable, often religious, organisation independent of governments, such as the JDC or the Red Cross, that provided relief and services to displaced persons.

The violent, largely unregulated expulsions of Germans from Poland and Czechoslovakia in May–July 1945, before the Potsdam Agreement.

A UN campaign from June 1959 to June 1960 to raise funds and close the remaining refugee camps in Europe and help refugees elsewhere.

The meeting of Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin in February 1945 that agreed Poland's new borders, the division of Germany and the repatriation of liberated Soviet and Allied citizens.

The 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, which removed the 1951 Convention's limits of time and place so that it applied to refugees anywhere in the world.

The market reforms ("renovation") adopted by the Vietnamese Communist Party in December 1986, which allowed private business, family farming and foreign investment while keeping one-party rule.