With America and the world now facing what can only be described as a global exodus of people fleeing war, supporting refugees is more necessary than ever.” – David Miliband, President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee

By Ellen Gilbert

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) seeks to bring attention to forgotten or neglected crises, and to pressure governments and international organizations to take action to help and protect refugees, displaced people, and other victims of conflict. It began in 1933 at the suggestion of Albert Einstein, who foresaw a New York City-based committee, with counterparts in cities on the periphery of Nazi-occupied states.

 While it is true that Einstein began to work on his unified field theory soon after he settled in Princeton, his preoccupations—then and always — weren’t just those of a physicist. He was a refugee with profound humanitarian instincts.

 The IRC’s work has grown exponentially over the years.  At the Princeton Institute for International and Regional Studies’ 2008 Spring Colloquium on Refugees and Forced Migration, then-IRC President George Rupp described a “global challenge rooted in myriad local conflicts.”  Since then, the situation has only grown more acute.

“We are again seeing a double assault against some of the world’s most vulnerable people,” writes IRC President David Miliband in a recent article in The New York Review of Books.  “Their character and intentions are often impugned and they are denied dignified refuge.”

David Miliband, president of the International Rescue Committee (L) with Patrick, who was reunited with his younger brother and sisters as part of the International Rescue Committee's Family Reunification program.

“A Deeply Religious Non-Believer”

Einstein was quick to take action in 1933.  He organized a committee of 51 prominent American intellectuals, artists, clergy, and political leaders who formed a branch of what was then called the International Relief Association in New York.  Its mission, as The New York Times reported on July 24, 1933, was to “assist Germans suffering from the policies of the Hitler regime.”  Founding members of the group included the philosopher John Dewey, the writer John Dos Passos, and the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr.

 Momentum built. Another group of leaders formed the Emergency Rescue Committee when Paris fell to the Nazis in 1940, and as the crisis deepened into World War II, the two groups merged.  Eleanor Roosevelt came on board a year later, in apparent response to Einstein’s expression of “deep concern” at policies being followed under her husband’s watch as President.  In his letter to Mrs. Roosevelt Einstein described a “wall of bureaucratic measures, alleged to be necessary to protect America against subversive, dangerous elements.”

 In a forward to The Cosmic View of Albert Einstein, Alice Calaprice, compiler and editor of The Ultimate Quotable Einstein (Princeton University Press, 2010), writes about what Einstein described as his “cosmic religion,” suggesting that he  “most likely meant to convey that it is possible to be religious—that is, not an atheist—without belief in the  ‘personal’ God that most societies throughout the world see as the ‘real’ God.

 “Einstein was interested in the world,” agreed Princeton resident and self-described “avid historical hobbyist” Tim Fagin in a recent interview about his favorite historical figure.  “He read lots of philosophy, loved talking politics and cared deeply about society.”  Most of all, says Fagin, a guide with the Princeton Tour Company and recent speaker at the Monthly Meeting of The Women’s College Club of Princeton, “he himself was a refugee who had an interest in all matters concerning civic life.”

 An avowed pacifist, Einstein was a member of the “Two Percenters” who believed that if two percent of those considered eligible refused military service, it would be enough to preclude wars.  “He was a deeply religious non-believer,” Fagin observes.  As a “one-worlder,” another of Einstein’s suggestions was the creation of an armed international federation of nations, where no one nation would have more military might than another.

 Despite his pacificism, Einstein knew that the Germans were close to developing nuclear weapons and, as a result, encouraged their development in the United States.   “If he’d have known that the Germans couldn’t do it, he would never have supported developing them here,” says Fagin.   And despite being a “one-worlder,” Einstein became an American citizen in 1940 believing that democracy was the world’s best hope.  Calaprice observes that Einstein “was wise enough to change his mind as circumstances and the passage of time dictated, both in his physics and in his worldview.”

 Einstein’s admiration for democracy, however, went hand-in-hand with his sensitivity to injustices that were occurring right in his neighborhood.  As a result of his active interest in civil rights, Einstein became a friend of Paul Robeson and saw in Princeton, says Fagin, “a little of what he left in Germany:  the different treatment and even prejudice based upon a people’s culture from one group to another.”

IRC Help Over the years

At the end of World War II the IRC initiated emergency relief programs and began refugee resettlement in Europe.  In 1956, it began relief and resettlement efforts for thousands of Hungarian refugees who were uprooted when a revolt against Soviet rule was crushed by the Red Army.  In the 1960s, the IRC’s first resettlement office outside of New York opened in Miami, to assist Cuban refugees fleeing the Castro dictatorship.  Also in 1962, when 200,000 Angolans escaped their country’s colonial government during the war of independence, the IRC launched its first programs in Africa.

From 1954 to 1975, the IRC worked aiding Vietnamese refugees displaced by conflict. Following the Vietnam War, the IRC took a lead role in the largest refugee resettlement program in American history.  Within weeks of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, the IRC rushed to aid Afghan refugees who poured into Pakistan. More than three decades later, it continues to provide to a country still riddled by conflict.

The IRC began work in the former Yugoslavia in 1992 following the ethnic cleansing carried out by the Serbs in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Since 1993, it has resettled over 20,000 refugees from the Balkans in the United States. In 1994, as a result of the Rwandan genocide and civil war, the IRC established emergency programs to aid Rwandan refugees. In the years following, the IRC helped to reunite families separated in the chaos.

After a tsunami hit Indonesia on December 26, 2004, IRC mobile relief teams arrived to provide emergency aid to those affected—including providing child friendly spaces for children displaced by the disaster.

 As the conflict in Darfur displaced thousands, the IRC was one of the only organizations assisting refugees pouring into Chad at the beginning of the conflict. More than a decade later, millions remain displaced.

 Since the outbreak began in 2014, the IRC has been on the forefront of the fight to stem the spread of the Ebola in Sierra Leone and Liberia  while working closely with local partners to help communities to rebuild and recover.

IRC deployed an emergency team to the Greek island of Lesbos in July 2015 to aid thousands of refugees arriving to Europe from Turkey. It continues to work in Europe and in the Syrian region to assist Syrian refugees fleeing their country’s brutal civil war.

Widening Gap

In addition to bureaucratic roadblocks and problems with the public’s perception of refugees today, there is a desperate need for funds.  “The gap between needs and resources is widening,” writes Miliband.  “In 2015, the United Nations appealed for $20 billion in order to address global humanitarians needs; it received just $11 billion.”  This shortfall compromises the ability of agencies like the IRC to do its work of responding to the world’s worst humanitarian crises and helping to restore health, safety, education, economic wellbeing and power to people devastated by conflict and disaster.

 “The more than a dozen conflicts that have broken out or reignited since 2010 are behind much of the growth in global displacement,” Miliband notes. New horrors only compound old ones.  “Today’s conflicts burn for an average of 37 years,” reports Miliband.  Some 27 million Afghans and 1.1 million Somalis have been exiled for decades, and the global numbers only get worse.  On average, 34,000 people were forced to flee their homes every day of 2015.  “As in the 1940s, the longer the delay, the worse the reckoning,” writes Miliband.