[Congressional Record Volume 154, Number 185 (Wednesday, December 10, 2008)]
[Senate]
[Pages S10878-S10879]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



  (At the request of Mr. Reid, the following statement was ordered to 
be printed in the Record.)

                        TRIBUTE TO ALBERT CORCOS

 Mr. KENNEDY. Madam President, it is a privilege to bring to 
the attention of my colleagues the remarkable record of humanitarian 
work and numerous accomplishments of Albert Corcos, one of the truly 
great humanitarian leaders of our time
  He is now 98 and lives in Concarneau, France, with his loving wife 
Camille. He recently completed his memoir spanning his incredible 
career, during which he was awarded the Legion of Honor in France and a 
distinguished Royal Award from Thailand.
  I first became acquainted with Mr. Corcos's humanitarian activities 
when I was serving as chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on 
Immigration and Refugees in the 1970s. In fact, Mr. Corcos had begun 
his extraordinary career a generation earlier, by coordinating the 
international effort in 1945 to resettle millions of displaced persons 
and refugees uprooted by World War II. He was a young man of immense 
energy and compassion and had been persuaded to use those talents to 
work with the new United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation 
Administration to help refugees and displaced persons in Europe. He had 
actually had an even earlier role, performing the hazardous duty of a 
young courier for the French resistance during the war.
  The good work that best exemplifies Mr. Corcos's compassionate 
concern for the disadvantaged was his indispensible role in coming to 
the aid of the Indochinese refugees. After an already very full career 
with the International Organization for Migration and its predecessors 
working to resettle the displaced, he blazed a unique trail in 
developing and implementing the initial response to one of the great 
humanitarian crises of the time--the international response to the 
exodus of 1.5 million Indochinese refugees in the 1970s.
  As Indochinese refugees flowed into neighboring countries in 
Southeast Asia, in 1975, it was a monumental challenge to find 
opportunities for their resettlement in the United States and other 
Western nations and to provide the logistical support to make it 
possible. It was vital to move the refugees out of the region rapidly, 
in order to keep the doors open in the first asylum countries of the 
region. The goal was to prevent the land borders from being closed, 
which would have forced refugees to take to the sea in desperation and 
cost thousands of lives.
  Mr. Corcos postponed his retirement and put together and oversaw the 
system for processing and transporting refugees to the United States 
and other countries for resettlement. The challenges were 
extraordinary. The refugees were strewn across dozens of camps from 
northern Thailand to Indonesia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, and the 
Philippines. Each refugee had to be documented, fingerprinted, 
photographed, given medical examinations and issued transit papers. The 
refugees

[[Page S10879]]

then had to be booked on flights to resettlement countries, even as air 
commerce shrank in Southeast Asia after 1975. The creativity, courage, 
and perseverance of Mr. Corcos and his team in making this process run 
smoothly was amazing and won him well deserved international praise.
  Mr. Corcos came out of retirement again in 1979 to deal with a second 
surge of Indochinese refugees. This time, the numbers were even more 
enormous, but he was skillfully able to replicate the process of 
earlier years on a much larger regional basis.
  Mr. Corcos is a true humanitarian and made a vast difference in the 
lives of countless refugees fleeing from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in 
the 1970s. He is a legend among those who created and benefitted from 
the Indochinese Refugee Program, and his legacy will forever be 
remembered.

                          ____________________