The destinations for resettlement have diversified too. Starting up a new resettlement programme is enormously challenging. I hope that some of you will share your expertise and good practices with counterparts from Africa and South America next April at the international conference on the reception and integration of resettled refugees in Sweden. I am sure that the exchange will be mutually beneficial. From a global perspective, the third area I see for closer cooperation with the Catholic Church is to help reconstruct communities affected and divided by conflict.
Reconstruction following refugee return means more than just rebuilding houses, roads and factories.
It must include rebuilding communities and restoring the complex web of social, economic and psychological relations destroyed by war and exile. Refugees often return to live with the very people they had fought against from Bosnia to Rwanda and from Liberia to East Timor. Kosovo is perhaps the starkest example today. Unless a degree of coexistence is attained, no amount of material reconstruction will be sufficient to eliminate the causes of conflict. In other war-torn parts of the world such as Colombia and in many parts of Africa the Catholic Church provides the only grassroots social network that crosses all frontlines.