BROWSE THE ARCHIVES

Here is a curated collection of documents related to the 1978-1979 Southeast Asian Refugee Crisis. This selection includes archives from the United Nations Archives and Records Management (UNARMS) in New York, USA, and the Archives of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR) in Geneva Switzerland. It does not reflect the UNARMS’ or the UNHCR’s entire holdings on Indochinese refugees or the Third Indochina war. Here are only several documents related to the 1978 December Consultation, Kurt Waldheim’s official to Asia in the Spring 1979, and the July 1979 Conference on Indochinese refugees.

The archives of the UNARMS mainly refer to the Kurt Waldheim collection, except for two items from the Javier Perez de Cuellar collection. The tabs on the left reflect the different funds within the collection, and the number of files we have selected. 

The archives of the UNHCR come from the same series, International Conferences, but from two different funds: the December 1978 Consultation and the July 1979 Conference. 

You are free to use this document for educational or research purposes. Please do not cite this webpage, but its original citation. Please also refer to the UNARMS citation rules and the UNHCR citation rules below.

Information that must be included in any citation of United Nations archival material is:

  1. Repository: United Nations Archives (can be further abbreviated to UNA after the first mention)
  2. Reference number: typically, this will look like “S-0123-0456-78”
  3. Title: can be the title of the document, the title of the folder, or the caption of the photo
  4. Date: the date (or date range) of the document
  5. Depending on the citation style of your field, you may need to include the title of the folder, series, and fonds

Read the full Reading Room Guidelines here.

Citations should identify the item, the file unit, the series, the subfonds (if any), the fonds, and the repository. Each of these citation elements contains unique information that describe the context and source of the record. 

Read the full Citations guide here.