Hungary - The 50th anniversary of the Hungarian Uprising next week marks a milestone both for refugee crises around the world and IOM. The first post-WWII refugee crisis, the Hungarian Uprising which began on 23 October 1956 with anti-Soviet student protests that led to Soviet tanks being deployed on the streets of Budapest, resulted in an exodus of refugees into neighbouring Austria and Yugoslavia. The crisis stirred a new sense of international solidarity on refugee resettlement in the Cold War era with about 200,000 people given the chance for a new life in another country. Among the first countries offering to take Hungarian refugees were Australia, Chile, France, the Federal Republic of Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK.

It was also the first inter-organizational refugee operation in the post-war period. For IOM, then known as the Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM), the Hungarian Uprising was also a defining moment in the organization’s history. Created to deal with the aftermath of human displacement and unemployment in post-war Europe, the exodus of about 200,000 Hungarian refugees meant the organization had a real-time crisis on its hands. When, together with UNHCR, ICEM was asked by Austria to help with the influx of refugees, more than 10,000 people from all walks of life with few belongings if any had already crossed the border and by the end of November 1956, about 8,000 refugees were arriving in Austria on a daily basis. Within a few months, Hungary lost a large part of its intelligentsia, its students and skilled workers. ICEM was responsible for the coordination and arrangement of travel to other countries for temporary asylum or permanent resettlement, while UNHCR and the Red Cross took care of legal protection issues and local humanitarian assistance, respectively.

This division of labour has provided a model for subsequent refugee emergencies. In order to minimize family separation and to gain a detailed picture of the operation ahead, ICEM also registered the refugees. In addition, it created hard fact profiles of the refugees, without names or photos, which were sent to resettlement governments and voluntary organizations.  These showed the refugees for what they were: humans in need of human solutions. As a result, Sweden for example, selected people with tuberculosis, while Australia changed its selection criteria to take in many elderly people among the 12,000 refugees it resettled. By the end of 1959, ICEM had assisted in one way or another, nearly 163,000 refugees.  It was not until 1978, during the Indochinese refugee crisis, that the organization moved more refugees in any one year than during the Hungarian crisis. The expertise and experience gathered during this crisis came during a formative period for the organization and set the seal for what it did in the future. 

Flexibility and speed of response became trademarks and hundreds of thousands of people have since been given the chance to start a new life around the world. For photographs from the crisis, please go to: http://www.imagelibrary.iom.int/search.asp?catalogue=historical and from the "Operation/Programme", drop-down menu, please select "Hungarian Exodus”

***

For further information, please contact: Tina Szabados IOM Chief of Mission in Hungary Tel: +361 472 25 00 E-mail: tszabados@iom.int