The Beldangi refugee camp in Nepal, where some of the four Bhutanese Lotshampa refugees evicted from the United States are living. Credit: Diwash Gahatraj/IPS

By Diwash Gahatraj
JHAPA, Nepal,, Jul 31 2025 (IPS)

Four Bhutanese Lotshampa refugees—Aasis Subedi, Santosh Darji, Roshan Tamang, and Ashok Gurung—filed an appeal in Nepal’s Supreme Court on July 27, challenging a government order that would deport them from Nepal.

After being resettled in the United States through a UN refugee program, the four were deported back to Bhutan in April this year only to be turned away at the border. Bhutan refused to recognize them as citizens.

They entered Nepal without a visa and were imprisoned for 28 days. They were released in June only after Aasis Subedi’s father, Narayan Subedi, filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court of Nepal. The court then issued an interim order stopping their deportation.

The order instructed the government to release the men from prison and let them stay in the refugee camps in Jhapa district—Pathri and Beldangi. It also required them to report to the local police station once a week and asked the Immigration Department to complete its investigation within 60 days.

That deadline passed on June 20. Three days later, the family received a letter from Nepal’s Immigration Department.

“I was shocked to see the verdict. I felt sad and helpless,” said 36-year-old Aasis Subedi, reading the letter aloud. It stated that the Department had decided to deport the four men—either back to the U.S., or to Bhutan—after fining them NPR 5,000 (about USD 36.4) each. They were also told to pay visa fees and an additional USD 8 per day as an overstay penalty.

“This deportation order is deeply flawed,” said senior advocate Satish Krishna Kharel, who will represent the four men in court. “They were resettled to the U.S. from Nepal under a formal international program. Sending them away now, without any country ready to take them, violates basic legal and humanitarian principles.”

Kharel and the legal team argue that the decision by the Immigration Department disregards their history and undermines the credibility of the international resettlement process itself. With both the U.S. and Bhutan denying them citizenship, the four men are effectively stateless—caught in a legal no-man’s-land. Their fate now rests with Nepal’s highest court, which could set an important legal precedent on how stateless individuals are treated in the country.

Department of Immigration (DoI) spokesperson Tikaram Dhakal told a Nepali daily, “Even though they came from the US, they are Bhutanese. The sooner they arrange their travel documents, the sooner we can deport them. If they can’t go back to the US, Bhutan is the easier option for us. They will also have to cover the cost of their airfare.”

Until their travel documents are ready, they will remain in the camp.

Aasis’s father, Narayan Subedi, feels helpless about his son’s statelessness. “Last time, I filed a habeas corpus petition in the Supreme Court after my son and three others were arrested. We’re filing another petition now, still holding on to hope that a solution can be found for their future,” he says, before leaving for Kathmandu for the appeal.

“Money is always a challenge for refugees living in the camp,” says Narayan Subedi, father of one of the deportees. “Both last time and again now, we’ve only been able to cover travel and legal expenses in Kathmandu because of help from a few well-wishers—like Dilli Adhikari, a fellow Lhotshampa refugee now living in the U.S.”

Now 55, Narayan has no formal job. He supports himself by running a small grocery shop from his home within the refugee camp. Much like his son’s situation today, Narayan himself has lived as a stateless refugee since the early 1990s. Unlike his wife and children, he didn’t qualify for third-country resettlement when the U.S.-led program was active.

Similarly, refugee rights activist and head of INHURED International, Dr. Gopal Krishna Siwakoti, explains that the deportation order for the four individuals was made strictly by following the letter of Nepal’s Immigration Act, without considering the larger human and legal issues involved. He says the authorities seem confused and uncertain about how to find a fair and lasting solution to this complicated situation.

Normally, Nepal’s Immigration Department charges a heavy fine—NPR 50,000 plus USD 8 per day—for entering the country without proper documents or overstaying a visa. But in this case, the four deportees were treated with some compassion. They were asked to pay just NPR 5,000 each. However, they will still need to pay the USD 8 per day overstay fine once they get their travel documents and are ready to leave the country.

A Grim Outlook

The future for the four men deported from the U.S., and others like them, remains highly uncertain. Most possible outcomes offer little hope. Without strong international pressure or a shift in regional diplomacy, these individuals could remain trapped in a legal and humanitarian dead end.

Repatriation to Bhutan may seem like the most direct solution, but it is highly unlikely. Bhutan has consistently refused to take back Lhotshampa refugees—even those who were verified as citizens in past screenings.

Another option is permanent settlement in Nepal. But this, too, remains uncertain. Nepal is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention and offers no legal path to citizenship for refugees, making long-term integration nearly impossible.

Third-country resettlement is also improbable. The UNHCR-led program has officially ended, and most countries are unwilling to accept individuals with unresolved legal or criminal records.

According to Dr. Gopal Krishna Siwakoti, the most likely outcome is “prolonged area detention or legal limbo.” This has happened before. Thousands of refugees have spent decades in camps in Nepal without any durable solution. Nearly 7,000 Lhotshampas still live in the two camps in eastern Nepal. The newly deported face the same grim reality—stateless, stuck, and with no clear path ahead.

Way Ahead

For the deportees, this marks a return to statelessness. No country is willing to accept them, leaving them without citizenship, protection, or a clear future. Their deportation goes against international laws, including the right to seek asylum and protection from torture.

Nepal and Bhutan do not have formal diplomatic relations, and their talks to resolve the refugee issue have been stuck since the 15th round of negotiations. India has remained silent, and the United States has not acted beyond deporting the individuals.

Experts like Siwakoti say that the way forward now depends on international pressure.

“Support from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), global human rights organizations, and Bhutanese diaspora groups could help push for a humane and lasting solution.”

“On the legal front, the upcoming appeal in Nepal’s Supreme Court could become a key moment—setting a precedent for how stateless individuals are treated in Nepal going forward,” he adds.

Regional diplomacy may also help if Nepal raises the issue at global forums like the UN Human Rights Council, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR), or the European Union. That could increase pressure on Bhutan to respond and engage in resolving the crisis.

IPS UN Bureau Report

Follow @IPSNewsUNBureau
  

A child stands amid the rubble of what was once his home, after an aerial bombardment on the city of Idlib in northwestern Syria. Credit: Freedom House/CC-BY-2.0

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 9 2015 (IPS)

Barely 10 months ago, the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) said the refugee population from Syria had reached the three million mark. Today, the latest data from the field show that the number has passed four million.

“This is the biggest refugee population from a single conflict in a generation,” U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees António Guterres said in a statement on Jul. 9.

"I took [my son] to the field hospital in Tafas. They tried to help him but couldn't, since the appropriate equipment is not available in Syria. He needed to go to Jordan for treatment." -- Murad, the father of a 27-day-old baby injured in a barrel bomb attack in Syria
“It is a population that deserves the support of the world but is instead living in dire conditions and sinking deeper into abject poverty.”

Midway through its fifth year, the Syrian conflict that began in March 2011 has reached catastrophic heights, and yet shows no sign of abating.

What started out as mass demonstrations against long-time ruler Bashar al-Assad now involves multiple armed groups including fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

A quarter of a million people are dead, according to estimates by the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights. A further 840,000 are injured, with many thousands maimed for life.

And as U.N. agencies struggle to cobble together the funds needed to heal, house and feed millions who have fled bullet-ridden towns and demolished cities, the exodus just keeps growing.

A UNHCR press release issued Thursday said Turkey is hosting 1.8 million Syrians, more than any other nation in the region. Over 250,000 of these refugees are living in 23 camps established and maintained by the Turkish government.

Other countries in the region that have opened their doors to scores of families fleeing the fighting include Lebanon (currently home to over 1.7 million Syrians), Jordan (hosting 629,000 refugees), Iraq (249,000) and Egypt (132,000).

In every single one of these countries, health and infrastructure facilities are quickly nearing breaking point as the hungry, sick and wounded arrive in droves.

On Jul. 9 Doctors Without Borders (MSF) warned that Jordanian hospitals are groaning under a huge patient burden, including numerous Syrians injured by barrel bombs.

In the last two weeks alone more than 65 war-wounded patients turned up at the emergency room of Al-Ramtha hospital in northern Jordan – less than three miles from the Syrian border – where MSF teams have been working with the Jordanian Ministry of Health to provide emergency care to refugees.

The medical humanitarian organisation has called repeatedly for an end to the use of these deadly, improvised weapons, which are typically constructed from oil drums, gas cylinders or water tanks filled with explosives and locally-sourced scrap metals dropped from high-altitude helicopters.

Due to the wide impact radius of barrel bomb attacks, victim often suffer wounds that are impossible to treat within Syria’s borders, where many health facilities have been reduced to rubble in the past five years.

“More than 70 percent of the wounded we receive suffer from blast injuries, and their multiple wounds tell their stories,” Renate Sinke, project coordinator of MSF’s emergency surgical programme in Ramtha, said in the statement released Thursday.

Dr. Muhammad Shoaib, MSF’s medical coordinator in Jordan, added, “A significant proportion of the patients we receive have suffered head injuries and other multiple injuries that cannot be treated inside southern Syria, as CT-scans and other treatment options are limited.”

One of the patients at Al-Ramtha Hospital, the father of a 27-day-old child who suffered head injuries as a result of shrapnel from a barrel bomb, recounted his family’s plight, which mirrors the experience of millions of civilians caught in the crossfire of the deadly conflict.

“At 9:00 a.m., a barrel bomb hit our house in Tafas […]. When I heard the news, I dropped what I was doing and I ran to the house as fast as I could […]. I saw my little boy. He was quiet and his head seemed to be injured. I took him to the field hospital in Tafas. They tried to help him but couldn’t, since the appropriate equipment is not available in Syria. He needed to go to Jordan for treatment,” Murad, the boy’s father, told MSF staff.

“It took us one-and-a-half hours from the time of injury until we arrived at the border, and some more before arriving in Ramtha. Now, all I want is for my baby to be better and go back to Syria.”

It is families like these that comprise the bulk of Syrian refugees, the highest recorded since 1992 when Afghan refugees reached an estimated 4.6 million, says the U.N. Refugee Agency.

Indeed, the figure from Syria could well be even higher than field reports suggest, and does not include the roughly 270,000 asylum applications by Syrians in Europe. A further 7.2 million people are displaced inside Syria itself, in remote or heavily embattled regions.

Worse, officials say, is the apparently inverse relationship between emergency needs and humanitarian funding: with the former constantly rising, while the latter shrinks.

UNHCR and its partners had requested 5.5 billion dollars for relief operations in 2015, but so far only a quarter of those funds have been received.

The World Food Programme (WFP), tasked with feeding about six million Syrians inside the country and in the surrounding region, is facing a massive shortfall, and warned last week that unless immediate funding became available, half a million people could starve.

There is also the very real possibility that over 1.7 million people will have to face the coming winter months without fuel or shelter.

As aid supplies dwindle, desperate and impoverished families are sending their children out to earn a living – according to a joint report released this week by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) and Save the Children, three quarters of all refugee households surveyed reported that children have become breadwinners.

Against the backdrop of soaring poverty rates, these findings are perhaps not unexpected. An estimated 86 percent of refugees outside of camps in Jordan, for instance, live below the poverty line, while a further 55 percent of refugees in Lebanon are living in “sub-standard” shelters, according to the refugee agency.

While world leaders oscillate between political and military solutions to the crisis, Syrians are faced with a choice: death by shrapnel at home or death by starvation abroad?

Edited by Kitty Stapp

A new mother watches over her child at the Ifo 2 Refugee Camp Hospital in Dadaab, Kenya, which is supported by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). Credit: UN Photo/Evan Schneider

By Roger Hamilton-Martin
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 18 2015 (IPS)

A horrific year of war, humanitarian crises, human rights violations and persecution has caused a sharp rise in global forced displacement.

The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNCHR) released Thursday its annual report of global trends on refugees, asylum seekers, stateless persons and the internally displaced. The report makes for sober reading two days before World Refugee Day on June 20.

The report states that global forced displacement reached unprecedented levels in 2014, with 59.5 million people fleeing their homes worldwide. An estimated 13.9 million individuals were newly displaced due to conflict or persecution.

High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres noted in a statement accompanying the report, “For an age of unprecedented mass displacement, we need an unprecedented humanitarian response and a renewed global commitment to tolerance and protection for people fleeing conflict and persecution.”

Syria became the leading country of origin of refugees in 2014, with 95 per cent of those fleeing the country for surrounding nations. Turkey, for the first time, became the largest hosting country worldwide, with 1.59 million refugees. One million Syrians registered there in 2014.

Many Syrian refugees fled to Lebanon in 2014, where at the end of the year almost one in four inhabitants was a refugee. In April, Guterres noted that the numbers of refugees Lebanon has absorbed would be unthinkable in most Western countries.

“The equivalent of what we have in Lebanon in the United States would be more than 80 million refugees coming into the U.S.,” he said.

If the United Kingdom received the equivalent influx, it would have to accommodate more than 15 million refugees.

The report highlighted the heavy burden being shouldered by developing regions. Two decades ago, they were hosting about 70 per cent of the world’s refugees. By the end of 2014, this proportion had risen to 86 per cent – at 12.4 million persons, the highest figure in more than two decades.

The 30 countries with the largest number of refugees per one dollar GDP per capita were all members of developing regions. More than 5.9 million people, representing 42 per cent of the world’s refugees, resided in countries whose GDP per capita was below 5,000 dollars.

Rising numbers have stretched resources to the limit, with the World Food Programme suffering acute shortfalls in funding, leaving it unable to feed refugees in desperate need of support.

Executive Director of the U.N. World Food Programme Ertharin Cousin released a statement Thursday saying, “South Sudan is on the verge of a hunger catastrophe, violence is worsening in Iraq and Syria, and there are new trouble-spots in Yemen and Nigeria. Needs increasingly outpace resources and this poses a moral and financial challenge to the international community.”

Data indicate that the number of unaccompanied or separated children seeking asylum has reached levels unprecedented since at least 2006, when UNHCR started systematically collecting data of that kind.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

Though he has suffered severe internal bleeding for eight months, 53-year-old Abul Kasim cannot seek proper medical attention. He is confined to the Say Tha Ma Gee IDP camp in Myanmar. Many refugees risk a dangerous voyage by sea to escape similar conditions. Credit: Courtesy Rob Jarvis

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 5 2015 (IPS)

For a while it went unnoticed: a boatload of migrants here, a vessel full of refugees there. But since 2012, the complex and unregulated movement of human beings through South and Southeast Asia– and the fate of those who put their lives in the hands of smugglers and at the mercy of the high seas – is becoming bleaker with each passing day.

On Friday, Jun. 5, the United Nations Refugee Agency announced a 13-million-dollar funding appeal, to meet the humanitarian needs of thousands of refugees, hailing mostly from Myanmar and Bangladesh and bound primarily for Thailand, Malaysia or Indonesia.

The situation stole international headlines in mid-May, when a group of journalists set out from a small island on the southwest coast of Thailand into the Andaman Sea, where they discovered a rickety fishing craft carrying hundreds of men, women and children, mostly members of the minority Rohingya Muslim community fleeing political persecution in Myanmar and economic hardships in Bangladesh.

Refused entry by Thai and Malaysian authorities, the boat’s caption and crew had abandoned the half-starved passengers who quickly became the face of a regional migration crisis involving up to 6,000 desperate migrants stuck in no-man’s land.

“With the monsoon season imminent, thousands of people may still be at sea,” Melissa Fleming, spokesperson for the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), told journalists at a press briefing in Geneva Friday.

In addition to those still in boats, an estimated 4,800 people have been brought ashore, and are now in dire need of food and medical supplies. Many are severely malnourished, while others bear the scars of both physical and mental abuse, likely at the hands of smugglers.

The Refugee Agency’s appeal comes on the heels of a regional meeting in the Thai capital, Bangkok, last week, of governments affected by the crisis, and echoes key features of a 10-point plan put forward by UNHCR, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime, and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), who seek a long-term solution to the problem.

Funding will be used to protect new arrivals, increase awareness for those considering embarking on the perilous journey and tackle the root causes of the exodus.

Officials say 88,000 people departed from the Bay of Bengal in a 15-month period: 63,000 between January and December of 2014 and a further 25,000 in the first quarter of this year.

Not only is the journey illicit, it can also be deadly. Over a thousand people are thought to have perished or gone missing at sea. Survivors have recounted stories of losing their fellow travelers to disease or hunger on the voyage; with nowhere to dispose of the dead, bodies are simply tipped overboard, while the vessels continue on their way.

According to the 10-point plan, migrants are at risk of being starved, beaten or sexually abused. Inability to pay the high ransom or exorbitant fees charged by smugglers can also result in death.

“The scale of deaths is unknown but, as the recent discovery of mass graves in smugglers’ camps attests, it is likely to be even higher than the 1.2 percent of travelers estimated to perish from disease or mistreatment,” the report found.

For this reason, a good deal of funding will be used to provide counseling services to those who make it safely ashore, a task that the UNHCR has already undertaken for new arrivals in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia.

In addition to meeting the immediate needs of refugees and migrants, the 10-point programme aims to expand legal alternatives to dangerous movements, support the safe return of those not in need of international protection, and strengthen search and rescue operations at sea within a regional framework.

Edited by Kitty Stapp

This photo, taken in 2012, shows desperate Rohingya refugees from Myanmar attempting to get past border patrol guards in Bangladesh. Now, in 2015, a fresh exodus of mainly Rohingya migrants from Myanmar and Bangladesh has the international community on edge. Credit: Anurup Titu/IPS

By Kanya D'Almeida
UNITED NATIONS, May 16 2015 (IPS)

On Thursday, May 14, a group of journalists rented a boat from Ko Lipe, a small island in Thailand’s southwest Satun Province, and headed out into the Andaman Sea – a water body in the northeastern Indian Ocean bounded by Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Strait of Malacca.

Ten miles into the journey, they came upon a sight not often spied in these waters: a three-storey, rickety wooden vessel, filled with ragged men, women and children who, upon seeing the boatload of journalists, began crying out for help.

“We don’t have a flotilla to go out and help them, but there are plenty of countries in the region that do, and plenty of reasons for them to do it – if they don’t, they’ll be dealing with a floating graveyard soon, rather than a flotilla of ships." -- Leonard Doyle, director of media and communications for the International Organisation for Migration (IOM)
This ship and its desperate human cargo – hundreds of migrants from the Rohingya Muslim community in Myanmar and Bangladesh – now symbolizes the plight of a persecuted people, and the harsh migration policies of a handful of Southeast Asian countries that have resulted in a game of ‘maritime Ping-Pong’ played out with human lives.

According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), smugglers abandoned the ship and its passengers after failing to dock in Thailand as a result of that country’s harsh crackdown on what it calls “illegal” maritime arrivals, but what rights activists say are beleaguered citizens fleeing ethnic persecution and economic hardship in their native lands.

Earlier, the boat made a failed attempt to land in Malaysia, and on Friday Thai authorities moved the vessel further out to sea, claiming that its passengers wanted to carry on with their journey – an unlikely scenario given that the emaciated group of refugees have been out at sea for three months, and have little to no food or water left onboard.

A regional crisis

And they are not the only ones – the IOM estimates that some 6,000 people out of roughly 8,000 who have been out at sea since early March remain marooned off the coasts of Thailand, Indonesia and Malaysia.

These countries, all members of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), have taken an uneven approach to the refugee crisis: the IOM says some 1,500 people have managed to disembark in Malaysia and Indonesia, while thousands of others have been turned away, with the navies of each respective country going so far as to tow some of the boats further out to see.

A statement issued through the spokesperson of the United Nations Secretary-General Thursday called on governments in the region to respond to the crisis by upholding international obligations, including the prohibition on ‘refoulement’ – the forcible return of persecuted individuals to their country of origin.

The U.N. chief also asked governments to “facilitate timely disembarkation and keep their borders and ports open in order to help the vulnerable people who are in need.”

However, these requests have so far gone unheeded.

Alarmed by the plight of those stranded out at sea, the IOM on Friday released one million dollars from its Migration Emergency Funding Mechanism, with the aim of expanding relief to refugees on shore and assisting those still on the water.

While the fund will provide potentially life-saving emergency aid to hundreds of people, “it’s really up to countries nearby to respond,” IOM Director of Media and Communications Leonard Doyle told IPS.

He said the emergency funds will be used to provide desperate migrants with whatever they might need, but they have to be brought ashore first.

“We don’t have a flotilla to go out and help them, but there are plenty of countries in the region that do, and plenty of reasons for them to do it – if they don’t, they’ll be dealing with a floating graveyard soon, rather than a flotilla of ships,” he stressed.

At the very least, he said, powerful emerging countries within range of the crisis should use their naval capacity to bring those needing medical attention ashore – it is believed that pregnant women are among the migrants still drifting well within reach of land – but no government has so far demonstrated a willingness to do so.

Risking death to flee their homes

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) believes that about 25,000 people “departed irregularly by sea” from the Bay of Bengal in the first quarter of 2015 – double the departure rate for the two preceding years.

The U.N. agency also says an estimated 300 people have died out at sea since October 2014, from starvation, dehydration or after being beaten severely by boat crews.

Hailing largely from Bangladesh and Myanmar, passengers pay between 90 and 370 dollars to board these ships, in addition to the thousands of dollars they might pay moneylenders in interest rates, or to immigration officials for their freedom once they land on safer shores.

The sudden spike in departures could be driven by a number of factors, not least of which the harsh conditions in IDP camps in Myanmar where over 140,000 refugees, the majority of whom identify as Rohingya Muslims, have been interned since inter-communal violence in the country’s western Rakhine State displaced them from their homes nearly three years ago.

Other reasons for the exodus include economic hardships, or ethnic persecution, the U.N. says.

That so many are willing to risk death by drowning for a mere chance of a better life speaks volumes of their plight in their home countries.

An IOM statement released Friday explained, “In the past three years, an estimated 160,000 migrants from the coasts of Myanmar and Bangladesh were smuggled by boat to Thailand before being brought overland to Malaysia.”

But the discovery in early May of mass graves in smuggling camps drove a major crackdown on migrants in both countries, resulting in the current regional stalemate.

These and other issues are expected to be the focus of a regional summit scheduled to take place later this month, which U.N. Chief Ban Ki-moon called an opportunity “for all leaders of Southeast Asia to intensify individual and collective efforts to address this worrying situation and tackle the root causes, of which the push factors are often human rights violations.”

Others believe that such a settlement, if it comes at all, will come too late.

“These people are not going to last that long,” IOM’s Doyle told IPS. “They need to be rescued now and that’s what we’ve been calling for. As you can imagine, one day out on a boat is enough, but these people have been out there for [months]… This is shocking, really shocking treatment of human beings.”

Edited by Kitty Stapp

The Australian Human Rights Commission has condemned the government’s asylum seeker detention policies. Credit: Catherine Wilson/IPS

By Catherine Wilson
CANBERRA, Australia, Mar 11 2015 (IPS)

As conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere pushed the number of refugees to 13 million last year, the international community is struggling to shoulder the humanitarian responsibility of protecting those fleeing violence and persecution in their homelands.

But in Australia – a wealthy nation, far from major war zones, whose 23 million people enjoy a per-capita GDP of 67,458 dollars – the government has implemented ruthless policies for the roughly one percent of global asylum seekers who hope to find refuge on its shores.

“[Australians] are being systematically conditioned into accepting the cruel treatment of others as necessary and inevitable.” -- Australian writer and social ecologist Isobel Blackthorn
Why, in a country boasting of prosperity and peace, are asylum seekers demonised for seeking safety and freedom? Why have policies resulting in degrading human treatment, amounting to torture, as recently found by the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, been implemented with so little public resistance in Australia?

Last year Australia received 4,589 asylum applications compared to 29,009 in France and 51,289 in the United States. Over 37 years Australia received a total of 69,445 asylum seekers, only slightly higher than the 67,400 Germany received during the first six months of last year.

Immigration is a contentious issue in many countries, but Australia is the only one to indefinitely incarcerate asylum seekers in immigration detention centres on arrival.

Those who arrive by sea are transferred to offshore detention centres in the developing Pacific Island states of Nauru and Papua New Guinea. They are refused resettlement in Australia, even if assessed as refugees. More than a year ago the government began turning asylum-seeker boats back at sea.

“There is no greater deterrent to protecting our borders and stopping boats coming to Australia than by stopping the boats physically […],” Scott Morrison, then Minister for Immigration, said to media this past November.

This is necessary to stop people drowning at sea, the government argues, despite the policy threatening the lives of vulnerable people and violating the principle of non- refoulement laid out in the 1954 U.N. convention referring to the status of refugees.

In a report submitted to the U.N. Human Rights Council Monday, Juan Mendez, the U.N.’s special rapporteur on torture, concluded that Australia’s “Migration and Maritime Powers Legislation Amendment, which has passed both the house and the Senate of Australia at this point, violates the [Convention Against Torture, or CAT] because it allows for the arbitrary detention and refugee determination at sea, without access to lawyers.”

Mendez’s report also found that the indefinite detention of asylum seekers on Papua New Guinea’s Manus Island, together with reports of ill-treatment and outbreaks of violence, constituted a violation of the human right “to be free from torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, as provided by articles 1 and 16 of the [Convention Against Torture].”

In a statement published on Mar. 9, Daniel Web, director of legal advocacy at the Melbourne-based Human Rights Law Center, said, “Under international law, Australia can’t lock people up incommunicado on a boat somewhere in the middle of the ocean. Nor can we return people to a place where they face the risk of being tortured. Yet these are precisely the powers the Government has sought to give itself through recent amendments to its maritime law.”

Australia’s mandatory and prolonged immigration detention policies are also “in clear violation of international human rights law”, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Australian Human Rights Commission (AHRC) recently reported.

Refugee assessments were suspended more than two years ago to remove advantage to those arriving by irregular means. By mid-2014, approximately 3,624 asylum seekers, including 699 children, were in detention centres.

Long confinement on average for 413 days in harsh living conditions were key factors in 34 percent of children and 30 percent of adults being diagnosed with serious mental disorders. There were 1,149 recorded incidents of serious assault, including sexual abuse, in detention centres, and 128 of children self-harming, the AHRC found.

The government’s recent announcement that children below 10 years will be released into community detention with bridging visas won’t apply to those who arrived before Jul. 19, 2013.

There is recognition by Australian legal and policy experts that “critical to any asylum policy is not whether it deters, but whether the needs of those seeking protection are met.” Organisations such as the Asylum Seeker Resource Centre and Refugee Action Coalition also provide refugee advocacy and support.

But a 2010 public survey revealed more than 60 percent of respondents accepted the government’s hard-line stance.

Conditioning the public to accept cruelty

For some experts, even more disturbing than the policies themselves is public acceptance of routine ill treatment of refugees.

“Australia has fought its ideological war with as much moral insanity as would be found in a dictatorship,” the Australian writer and social ecologist, Isobel Blackthorn, wrote in the National Forum last year.

“We are being systematically conditioned into accepting the cruel treatment of others as necessary and inevitable.”

Professor Nick Haslam, head of Melbourne University’s School of Psychological Sciences, told IPS, “Activists have been quick to criticise successive governments while letting the general public off the hook.”

Official references to asylum seekers as “illegals”, suggesting criminality – despite the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) stating clearly that “seeking asylum is not illegal and respecting the right to seek asylum includes provision of humane reception” – have not been sufficiently challenged.

There has been little public resistance to the electoral point-scoring of politicians who ignore the ‘push’ factors, such as global conflict, and regale the ‘pull’ factors, that the good life in Australia is attracting an invasion. This theory ignores the fact that the vast majority of asylum seekers head to Europe and the United States.

According to Blackthorn, “Many in Australian society adopt without question the views and falsehoods promulgated by politicians and the media that set out to inflate our sense of entitlement in ‘the lucky country’.”

In the 1990s, Robert Manne, Emeritus Professor at Melbourne’s La Trobe University, identified a “new complacency” in Australia following the demise of communism, when many western leaders believed their actions were now beyond reproach.

During the Australian Liberal Government, led by Prime Minister John Howard from 1996-2007, “[National] self-criticism gradually became confused with un-Australian self-hatred,” Manne wrote in 2011, with social and political passiveness encouraged.

Complacency and parochialism have been exacerbated by geographical isolation and two decades of uninterrupted economic prosperity due to the mineral resources boom.

“Lacking a history that makes it easy to imagine the kind of desperation borne of political oppression and fear, many Australians are genuinely disturbed by the disorderly nature of the refugee scramble for safety,” Manne stated.

Haslam told IPS that public indifference is “driven primarily by the perception that asylum seekers are undeserving opportunists who are seeking entry to the country in an unfair manner” and that many are economic migrants, rather than in need of protection.

In reality, more than 88 percent of asylum seekers between 2008 and 2013 were found to be legitimate refugees.

Blackthorn suggests that the “asylum seeker issue feeds a nationalism that comes dangerously close to the far right”, adding that if the public doesn’t collectively use its democratic right to demand change of their government it is possible that “Australia will fall foul of the sorts of extremisms that have led to so many fleeing their homelands.”

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

For most Sri Lankans seeking asylum in Australia, there is no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow, just a sad return journey home. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
COLOMBO, Feb 25 2015 (IPS)

Weerasinghearachilage Ruwan Rangana had it all planned out last year in September: the big break that would change his life and those of his extended family had finally arrived.

The Sri Lankan youth in his early twenties was not too worried that the arrangement meant he had to make a clandestine journey in the middle of the night to a beach, board a two-decade-old trawler with dozens of others and be ready to spend up to three weeks on the high seas in a vessel designed to carry loads of fish.

“Besides trade and security, a large driver of the Australian government’s foreign policy is its single-minded focus on ensuring that all asylum seekers or refugees are processed at offshore facilities." -- Human Rights Watch
He and his fellow commuters prayed that the boat would not crack in two before it reached Australian waters, where they all expected to find a pot of gold at the end of the proverbial rainbow.

Rangana told IPS that most of the roughly three-dozen people on board were leaving in search of better economic prospects, though members of the minority Tamil community are known to take the same journey to escape political persecution.

The boat ride was the relatively easy part. After reaching Australia, Rangana would have to seek asylum, land a job and secure an income, before beginning the process of bringing his family there to join him.

“At least, that was the plan,” said the young man who was a contract employee of the state-owned Ceylon Transport Board in the remote village of Angunakolapelessa in Sri Lanka’s southern Hambantota District earning a monthly salary of 12,000 rupees (about 90 dollars) when he took the boat ride.

Half of the plan – the life-threatening part – worked. The other part – the life-changing one – did not.

Despite a leaking hull, the vessel did reach Australian waters, but was apprehended by the Australian Navy, newly emboldened by a policy to turn back boatloads of asylum seekers after fast-tracked processing at sea, sometimes reportedly involving no more than a single phone call with a border official.

By mid-September Rangana was back in Sri Lanka, at the southern port city of Galle where he and dozens of others who were handed over to Sri Lankan authorities were facing court action.

Thankfully he did not have to spend days inside a police cell or weeks in prison. He was bailed out on 5,000 rupees (about 45 dollars), a stiff sum for his family who barely make 40,000 rupees (about 300 dollars) a month.

Now he sits at home with no job and no savings – having sunk about 200,000 rupees (1,500 dollars) into his spot on the rickety fishing boat – and makes ends meet by doing odd jobs.

“Life is hard, but maybe I can get to Australia some day. I did get to the territorial waters; does that mean I have some kind of legal right to seek citizenship there?” he asks, oblivious to the tough policies of the Australian administration towards immigrants like himself.

Clamping down on ‘illegal’ entry

Since Australia launched Operation Sovereign Borders in September 2013 following the election of Tony Abbott as Prime Minister, at least 15 boats have been turned back at sea, including the one on which Rangana was traveling, to Indonesia and Sri Lanka.

Last year only one boat reached Australia, according to the government.

The programme has resulted in a significant drop in the number of illegal maritime arrivals in Australia. Compared to the one boat that reached Australia in 2014, the 2012-2013 period saw 25,173 persons reaching the country safely.

In the 10 months prior to the controversial military programme, 281 unauthorized boats arrived with a total of 19,578 people on board, according to the Australian Department of Immigration.

Just this past week, Australian authorities interviewed four Sri Lankans at sea, and sent them back to the island. Officials claim that the new screening process saves lives and assures that Australian asylum policies are not abused.

“The Coalition government’s policies and resolve are stopping illegal boat arrivals and are restoring integrity to Australia’s borders and immigration programme. Anyone attempting to enter Australia illegally by sea will never be resettled in this country,” Immigration Minister Peter Dutton’s office said in a statement this week.

As of end-January, there were 2,298 persons in immigration detention facilities in Australia, of whom 8.1 percent were Sri Lankans.

The policy has been criticised by activists as well as rights groups, including by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“UNHCR’s position is that they (asylum seekers) must be swiftly and individually screened, in a process which they understand and in which they are able to explain their needs. Such screening is best carried out on land, given safety concerns and other limitations of doing so at sea,” the agency said in a statement earlier this month.

According to the international watchdog Human Rights Watch, “Besides trade and security, a large driver of the Australian government’s foreign policy is its single-minded focus on ensuring that all asylum seekers or refugees are processed at offshore facilities.

“The government has muted its criticism of authoritarian governments in Sri Lanka and Cambodia in recent years, apparently in hopes of winning the support of such governments for its refugee policies,” the rights group added in a statement released last month.

The end of Sri Lanka’s 26-year-long civil conflict and the election of a new, possibly more democratic government in January this year add to Canberra’s justification for turning away those who seek shelter within its borders.

In reality, the risk for asylum seekers is still high. Newly appointed Minister of Justice Wijeyadasa Rajapakshe told IPS that the government was yet to discuss any changes to accepting returnees. “They will face legal action; change in such a policy is not a priority right now,” he added.

Lawyers working with asylum seekers say their clients are unlikely to face extended jail terms, but could be slapped with fines of up to 100,000 rupees (750 dollars), still a lot of money for poor families.

Even if the legal process is swift, and those impounded are able to post bail, their reasons for wanting to leave remain the same.

Take the case of Kanan*, a young man from the war-torn northern town of Kilinochchi. He took a boat in August 2013 after paying a 750-dollar fee, agreeing to pay the remaining 6,750 dollars once he reached Australia.

He never even made it halfway. Six days into the journey, the boat broke down and was towed ashore by the Sri Lankan Navy.

He was fleeing poverty – his home district boasts unemployment rates over twice the national figure of four percent – and possible political persecution, not an unusual occurrence among the Tamil community both during and after Sri Lanka’s civil war.

He knows that very few have gotten to the Australian mainland and that even those whose cases have been deemed legitimate could end up in the Pacific islands of Nauru or Papua New Guinea.

But Kanan still hopes to give his ‘boat dream’ another try. “There is no hope here; even risking death [to reach Australia] is worth it,” says the unemployed youth.

*Name changed on request

Edited by Kanya D’Almeida

Spanish Refugee Aid Commission centre in the southern city of Malaga. The banner on the second floor balcony reads, “The right to live in peace.” Credit: Inés Benítez/IPS

By Inés Benítez
MALAGA, Spain, Jul 21 2014 (IPS)

Little Samir covers his face with his hands as he plays under the orange tree in the centre of the inner courtyard of the Spanish Refugee Aid Commission (CEAR) centre in the southern city of Malaga. He is four years old and has spent nearly a year in Spain, where he arrived with his parents, fleeing the war in Syria.

Samir (not his real name) and his family, who remain anonymous at their request, were among millions of Syrians who abandoned their homes and way of life to escape the conflict that flared up in March 2011.

Some of those who seek protection in the European Union come to Spain by plane with a visa, but others come through Morocco, crossing the borders into the Spanish enclaves of Ceuta and Melilla in North Africa, with fake documents purchased on the black market.

“The journey from Syria to Spain can take up to three or four months,” Wassim Zabad, who is from Damascus and has lived in Malaga for 11 years, told IPS.

“Why does Spain offer less help to refugees and take longer to process asylum applications than Germany or Sweden? If I had known it, I would have travelled to another country." -- Adi Mohamed, a 33-year-old Syrian
Many people reach Morocco after travelling through Egypt, Libya and Algeria, said Zabad, who owns a travel agency specialising in taking Spanish tourists to Lebanon, Egypt and Syria. Business is bad because of the conflicts in those countries.

In his view, the conditions for refugees “are quite bad” in Spain, which is why “98 percent of Syrians” move on to other countries where they may have relatives or believe there are better facilities and economic assistance, especially France, Germany or Sweden.

Francisco Cansino, the CEAR coordinator for eastern Andalusia, told IPS that the majority of Syrians his organisation helps, coming from the Melilla Centre for the Temporary Stay of Immigrants (CETI), prefer to request asylum in other EU countries, although the standard procedure is for them to seek asylum in the country of entry, and this is what they are told.

The European Commission’s Dublin II Regulation of Feb. 18, 2003 establishes the principle that the first safe country entered by an asylum seeker is responsible for examining the asylum application, and provides for the transfer of an asylum seeker to that EU country.

“They don’t stay. They leave because they think their chances are better in other countries. They ask to leave the same day they arrive. They say they have relatives in Europe,” Cansino said. In his view, Syrian refugees are “suddenly facing an abyss of uncertainty.”

Four Syrians – a couple with two children – have been living at the Malaga CEAR centre for the past few weeks. They receive shelter, food, clothing, a monthly allowance (equivalent to 68 dollars per person), Spanish language classes and job training programmes. CEAR is an independent volunteer-based humanitarian organisation.

So far in 2014, some 200 people from Syria have been cared for in this centre, Cansino said.

“Only a minority of Syrian refugees come to Spain. The majority are displaced within Syria itself or seek safety in neighbouring countries,” David Ortiz, the head of the Red Cross Refugee Reception Centre in Malaga, told IPS.

At this Red Cross centre, one of seven in the country, 13 of the 20 beds are occupied by Syrians and Palestinians who were living in Syria. Among them are two families with children, who have been attending school since they arrived.

A total of 100,000 people have died in the war in Syria, 10,000 of them children. About 2.6 million people have fled to other countries, and 6.5 million are internally displaced, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

“Syrian refugees come to us tremendously traumatised,” said Ortiz. They have to rebuild their lives, learn a new language and find work in a country like Spain, where the unemployment rate is over 25 percent, he said.

A report on the situation of refugees in Spain, presented by CEAR in June, indicates that the country received 4,502 applications for asylum in 2013, compared to 2,588 in 2012, owing to an increase in applications from persons from Mali (1,478) and Syria (725).

According to Eurostat data cited in the CEAR report, in 2013 some 435,000 asylum seekers came to the EU. The largest group came from Syria (50,000) and the applications were mainly directed to Germany, with 109,580 applications, followed by France and Sweden. But only three percent of Syrian refugees have been granted asylum in Europe.

“I hope to find stability here in Spain,” said Adi Mohamed, a 33-year-old Syrian, who had a visa that allowed him to fly to Malaga in April, where he lives with some Syrian friends. He owns a restaurant in Palmira, near Homs, and he is worried about the safety of his parents and the five brothers and sisters he left behind.

Mohamed, who ran a restaurant with fifty employees, asked, “Why does Spain offer less help to refugees and take longer to process asylum applications than Germany or Sweden? If I had known it, I would have travelled to another country,” he said.

The length of stay in the refugee reception centres is six months, renewable for the same period in the “very frequent” case that the asylum application has not yet been determined. Families with children may stay for up to 18 months, Ortiz said.

“Asylum processing times are different in different EU countries, and so are benefits for refugees,” said Ortiz. He complained that the Dublin Regulation was “unfair” to oblige refugees to apply for asylum in the country where they first enter the bloc.

In a report published Jul. 9, Amnesty International (AI) says that while 1.82 billion euros (2.46 billion dollars) of EU funding was allocated to control of its external borders between 2007 and 2013, only 700 million (950 million dollars) was spent on improving the situation for asylum seekers.

The AI report accuses EU migration policies of “putting the lives and rights of refugees and migrants at risk” when they try to cross into the EU, especially through Bulgaria, Greece and Spain, and warns that some 23,000 people have lost their lives trying to get into Europe since 2000.

Several NGOs have denounced inadequate conditions at the Melilla CETI, which houses hundreds of Syrian and sub-Saharan migrants, as well as delays in processing asylum applications, which prevents them from leaving Ceuta or Melilla under Spanish law.

According to the UNHCR report ‘Syrian Refugees in Europe: What Europe Can Do to Ensure Protection and Solidarity’, published Jul. 11, the CETI was housing 2,161 people as of Jun. 12, when its maximum capacity is 480. Among them were 384 Syrian adults and 480 children.

(END)

Subashini Mellampasi, a 34-year-old single mother of three, including a disabled child, raises goats to provide for her family. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
VALIPUNAM, Sri Lanka, Jul 7 2014 (IPS)

The village of Valipunam, 322 km north of Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, occupies one of the remotest corners of the country’s former war zone. The dirt roads are impossible to navigate, there are no street lights, telephone connections are patchy and the nearest police post is miles away, closer to the centre of the battle-scarred Mullaitivu district.

Here, even able-bodied men fear being alone in their homes. But 35-year-old Sumathi Rajan knows that if she leaves her small shop unattended at night, there is a good chance there’ll be nothing left in it the next morning.

Determined to preserve her sole income source, she sleeps on the shop floor every night, along with her 12-year-old son, despite the very real threats of theft, and even rape.

“I know what I have to do, I know how take care of my son, and myself,” the feisty woman, a single mother, tells IPS, standing in front of her humble establishment.

Rajan’s life has been one of upheaval and turmoil in the last five years.

“I think what these [women] have gone through in the past three decades - as individuals, as families, and as an entire community - has made them resilient." -- M S M Kamil, head of the economic security department at the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC)
In early 2009, when Sri Lanka’s three-decade-old civil conflict showed signs of reaching a bloody finale, Rajan and her family – living deep inside the area controlled by the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) – prepared to face a drawn-out period of violent uncertainty.

By April of that year Rajan and her son, only seven years old at the time, were among tens of thousands of Tamil civilians trapped in a narrow swath of land in between the Indian Ocean and the Nandikadal Lagoon on the island’s north-east coast as the Tigers fought a final bloody battle against government forces.

The two escaped the fighting alive but with no possessions except the clothes they were wearing. For the next two-and-a-half years, ‘home’ was a massive displacement camp known as Menik Farm in the northern Vavuniya district.

When the family finally returned to Valipunam in late 2011, Rajan was faced with the seemingly impossible task of building her life from scratch.

She was no stranger to the hard decisions that accompany the life of a single mother. Even before the war forced them to flee Rajan had to toughen up, since her occupation as a moneylender meant she had to be firm with her clients about repayment and interest rates.

She continues the business today, facing many of the same challenges as she did three years ago. “When people don’t return the money on the due date, I will go to their homes to collect it,” she asserted.

Her shop received a boost earlier this year when she was chosen as the recipient of a one-off 50,000-rupee (380-dollar) grant from the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

“It helped me to expand the shop,” Rajan said, looking proudly around at the shelves that carry everything from dhal to single-use packages of shampoo. But new supplies mean fresh fears of theft and little peace for Rajan, who deposits her meagre monthly savings of some 25 dollars in her son’s account for safe keeping.

Stories like Rajan’s are not rare in Sri Lanka’s war-ravaged Northern Province, where between 40,000 and 55,000 female-headed households struggle to eke out a living, according to aid and development agencies in the region.

An assessment by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in June 2013 found that 40 percent of all women out of some 467,000 returnees who were displaced during the last stages of the war still felt unsafe in their own homes, while 25 percent felt similarly vulnerable venturing outside their villages by themselves.

The situation is worse for families headed by single mothers.

“From field assessments, there is a clear indication that children of the estimated 40,000 female-headed households are the most vulnerable to sexual abuse,” stated a protection update by the Durable Solutions Promotion Group, a voluntary coalition of international organisations and agencies, back in March.

Despite such odds, women who run their own households are some of the most resilient in the former conflict zone, according to humanitarian workers in the region.

“These women have a lot of fortitude,” M S M Kamil, head of the economic security department at ICRC, told IPS.

“I think what they have gone through in the past three decades – as individuals, as families, and as an entire community – has made them resilient. They feel that they can survive [and] take care of their families whatever the circumstances are,” he added.

Subashini Mellampasi, a 34-year-old single mother of three children aged between five and 14 years, is living proof of the truth behind Kamil’s statement.

Her eldest boy is disabled, and cannot hear or speak. To make matters worse, her husband left her and the three children after they returned to their village following the war’s end.

In early 2014, the ICRC gave her the funds to start up a small business. Mellampasi chose to raise goats and purchased a small herd of about 10 animals. Six months on she has a herd of 40.

She has sold ten animals at roughly 100,000 rupees (about 700 dollars) and is using the money to construct a small house. Each beast fetches anything from 10,000-20,000 rupees (75 to 150 dollars).

The remaining animals must meanwhile be cared for, and their milk collected each morning for the family’s consumption.

“It is a hard life, but I think I can manage,” Mellampasi told IPS.

Because the sale of male goats does not provide a steady income, she has found employment as a cleaner in the nearby village school, for a daily pay of about 600 rupees (roughly 4.50 dollars).

She says she needs at least 10,000 rupees (about 80 dollars) a month in order to survive, but other families say they need at least twice that amount, especially those who use transport regularly.

Many cut corners by having neighbours look after their children while they are at work, or pawning their jewelry in order to purchase schoolbooks and uniforms for their kids.

While women like Mellampasi scratch out a barebones existence, thousands of others have fallen through the cracks altogether, according to Saroja Sivachandran, head of the Centre for Women and Development in Jaffna, capital of the Northern Province.

“There are thousands of women who are not receiving any kind of assistance,” she told IPS. “There are limited on-going programmes that target this extremely vulnerable group. What we need is a large programme encompassing the full province and all the single female-headed families,” she added.

But financial aid to the country has been dwindling steadily since the war’s end. Three successive joint appeals for aid in the region have reported a shortfall of 430 million dollars.

With the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) also winding down its work in Sri Lanka, a substantial programme for single mothers remains, for now, only a promise on paper.

(END)

Tamils protest Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa's speech at the U.N. General Assembly, Sept. 24, 2013. Credit: Samuel Oakford/IPS

By Kalinga Seneviratne
SINGAPORE, Jun 12 2014 (IPS)

The recent arrest and deportation from Malaysia of three Sri Lankan Tamils on U.N. refugee status, under suspicion of trying to revive the disbanded Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), has raised questions about regional security and minority politics.

For many, disputes over the South China Sea and the proliferation of Islamic terror networks are the defining peace and security issues in South and Southeast Asia. As a result, the arrests of the three men last month went largely unreported, with the exception of local Malaysian and Sri Lankan media.

But with a large and restive Tamil minority in South India, huge Tamil diasporas in Malaysia, Singapore and Mauritius, as well as unhealed wounds from the recently concluded civil war in Sri Lanka that decimated the separatist LTTE, experts say that Tamil nationalist aspirations could end up shaping regional politics.

“About 90 percent of Malaysian Tamils are ardent supporters of the Tamil freedom movement in Sri Lanka. Is the [police inspector-general] going to arrest more than two million of us just because we support their struggle?” -- P. Ramasamy, deputy chief minister of Penang state
Created in 1976 with the aim of carving out an independent state for Tamil people in the north and east of Sri Lanka, the group quickly went on to become synonymous with suicide bombers and child soldiers, earning it the title of one of the most deadly terrorist organisations in the world.

Considered defunct since 2009, when the Sri Lankan army stormed the remaining rebel-held territory and eradicated its top leadership in the final phase of the country’s 30-year-long civil war, the LTTE still holds a powerful place in the collective imaginary of the region.

Referring to the May 15 arrest of the three Tamil men by Malaysian police under a Red Notice issued by Interpol, a regional terrorism expert speaking to IPS on the condition of anonymity said this was a significant development in thwarting attempts to revive the LTTE in Malaysia under the cover of U.N. refugee status.

The arrests followed hard on the heels of another deportation from Malaysia, in March this year, of the deputy leader of the LTTE’s international network, Nanthagopan, who was arrested in Iran on a tip-off from Sri Lanka and sent back to Malaysia before being subsequently deported to Colombo.

In announcing the arrests, Malaysian Inspector-General of Police Khalid Abu Bakar charged that the suspected persons had “used Malaysia as a base to collect funds, spread their propaganda, and were attempting to revive the defunct terrorist group at the international level.”

Police also seized propaganda material promoting the LTTE and a large amount of cash in over 24 different currencies.

The alleged offenders, registered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), had been living in the country without visas since 2004.

“We will not allow the country to be used as a place for them to hide or conduct any terror activities in the country or on foreign soil,” the inspector-general stressed, adding that the UNHCR office in Malaysia should undertake a thorough review of its procedures to ensure that terrorist suspects don’t abuse its offices for activities that threaten regional stability.

He also pledged to screen the roughly 4,000 Sri Lankan Tamil refugees in Malaysia in efforts to “flush out” suspected terrorists.

A spokesperson for UNHCR in Malaysia, Yante Ismail, told IPS that while the High Commissioner’s office cannot comment on individual cases, they did urge the Malaysian government not to deport the three suspects until investigations could be completed.

“UNHCR regrets that despite our representations to the Malaysian Government, this group has been deported to a place where they may be at serious risk of harm,” she said.

UNHCR is not alone in its concern – since 1983 thousands of Sri Lankan Tamils have sought refugee status in other countries on the grounds that their rights have been trampled upon by the majority-Sinhalese state.

Unresolved charges that the Sri Lankan army committed war crimes against the minority population during the last days of the conflict, coupled with reports that Tamils have experienced systematic detention in the years following the war, add to the fear that some Tamils are not safe in Sri Lanka.

But since Malaysia is not a State Party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, the government is not bound by UNHCR guidelines.

Others believe the issue runs deeper than just regional security.

P. Ramasamy, deputy chief minister of Malaysia’s northwestern Penang state, who acted as a legal advisor to the LTTE during peace negotiations a decade ago, has accused the Malaysian police of falling into the trap set by the Sri Lankan government to frustrate international efforts to conduct a full investigation into possible rights violations in the country.

“About 90 percent of Malaysian Tamils are ardent supporters of the Tamil freedom movement in Sri Lanka. Is Khalid [Abu Bakar] going to arrest more than two million of us just because we support their struggle?” he remarked in an interview with The Edge.

Roughly eight percent of Malaysia’s population of some 29 million people is Tamil, mainly descendants of indentured labourers brought by the British to work in the rubber plantations in the 19^th century.

At the height of the HINDRAF rebellion in December 2007, the then Malaysian police chief Mussa Hassan accused the group of “actively canvassing for support and assistance from terrorist groups”, including the LTTE.

HINDRAF’s leaders were subsequently arrested and jailed under the Internal Security Act and the movement officially banned in October 2008. However, in January 2013 the ban was lifted and in April HINDRAF signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with the governing Barisan Nasional (BN) coalition to work towards uplifting the Tamil community.

According to Ramanathan Sankaran, a scholar on the Indian diaspora in Malaysia, many Malaysian Tamils are sympathetic to the cause of Sri Lanka’s minority and have thus supported the LTTE. HINDRAF once represented these sympathies but since joining the ruling government has been much more cautious in its message.

“My support for HINDRAF has declined because they did not make any comments on the arrest and deportations,” Sankaran told IPS, adding, “Their failure to act on this matter is a disgrace.”

Some say the Malaysian government’s biggest fear is the reawakening of the sentiment once expressed by HINDRAF, and the radicalisation of Malaysian Tamils.

The government has been particularly concerned about the recent creation of a group calling itself the Tamilar Progressive Team, which is modeled on a similar group in India’s southern state of Tamil Nadu that one of the arrestees – 38-year-old Selvathurai Kirubananthan, also known as Anbarasan – is alleged to have been involved with.

Other experts, like leading Malaysian rights activist Chandra Muzafar, say these fears are unfounded.

“Tamil support for the ruling coalition has been increasing since the last General Election in May 2013,” he told IPS. The more likely scenario, he says, is that the Malaysian government is legitimately apprehensive about Sri Lankan Tamils “using Malaysia as a base to revive the LTTE.”

(END)

Residents of Douma, a suburb about 10 km northeast of the centre of Damascus, inspect the site of an airstrike. Douma has been a major flashpoint and has witnessed numerous demonstrations against the Syrian government and armed clashes against the Syrian Army and security forces. Photo taken on Jan. 8, 2014. Credit: Freedom House/cc by 2.0

By Thalif Deen
UNITED NATIONS, Jan 10 2014 (IPS)

When Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon chairs a U.N. pledging conference next week for urgently needed aid to Syria, he is expected to warn the donor community that the humanitarian crisis in the politically-troubled Arab nation is threatening to reach biblical proportions.

Since the conflict erupted in March 2011, more than 100,000 people have been killed, over eight million driven from their homes and more than two million have sought refuge in neighbouring countries – and these numbers are growing."The numbers are staggering; the suffering is massive." Jens Laerke of OCHA

The figures are alarmingly higher compared to the combined figures for refugees and displaced persons, running into thousands, in two other political hotspots in Africa: South Sudan and the Central African Republic.

The Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) estimates about 4.1 million Syrian refugees, including over two million children, will need assistance by the end of 2014.

“The numbers are staggering; the suffering is massive,” Jens Laerke, spokesperson for the U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), told IPS.

The pledging conference, scheduled to take place Jan. 15 in Kuwait City, is to be hosted by the Emir of Kuwait, Sheikh Jaber Al-Ahmad Al-Jaber Al-Sabah, and has been described “a very important humanitarian pledging event”.

The first Kuwaiti pledging conference for Syria, which took place in January 2013, also in Kuwait City, raised about 1.5 billion dollars in humanitarian aid.

The United Nations last month estimated the funding needs for Syria at about 6.5 billion dollars in 2014 – “the biggest amount ever requested for a single humanitarian emergency,” Laerke said.

Of the 6.5 billion dollars, 2.3 billion has been earmarked for assistance inside Syria and 4.2 billion dollars for refugee response in neighbouring countries.

The 2014 appeals represent the support plans of more than 100 partner organisations, including U.N. agencies and national and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs), which are working together to address the needs of Syrians.

Asked whether there was a target for next week’s pledging conference, Laerke told IPS: “I do not at the time of writing have a target.

“What I can say is that we, as also expressed by the secretary-general, call on member states to participate in the conference and to remain generous,” he said.

Among those affected in the Syrian crisis are children caught up in the crossfire between the warring parties.

Yoka Brandt, deputy executive director of the children’s agency UNICEF, told IPS, “Kuwait is a chance to give a voice to the millions of children now affected by the Syrian conflict and for the world community to respond.”

She said tangible support will not only save children’s lives today but also help provide for a more secure future through crucial investments in education and protection of children.

Laerke said it is critical to bear in mind that half of all those affected are children. “We must ensure that a generation is not lost,” he stressed.

At the moment, another harsh winter is increasing the suffering among communities already tested by two and a half years of deprivation. Families need shelter, warm clothes, heating materials and hot food to survive, Laerke added.

A joint appeal by U.N. agencies last week called for one billion dollars in funding to save Syria’s children from becoming a “lost generation.”

“The future of these children is slipping away, but there is still a chance to save them,” said Antonio Guterres, the U.N. high commissioner for refugees.

Meanwhile, one of the biggest problems facing the United Nations is gaining access to the needy amidst the continued fighting inside Syria.

Valerie Amos, the U.N.’s emergency relief coordinator, who has pointed out that all the warring parties were responsible for the current constraints, said: “We continue to stress the need for a political solution to the crisis.”

She described the funding needs as “unprecedented” for a humanitarian crisis.

“The key constraint is access,” U.N. spokesperson Martin Nesirky told reporters last month.

“And the key requirement is always for aid to be delivered in an impartial manner, and that is what the United Nations will continue to do,” he said.

Nesirky also said the secretary-general has “the greatest of faith in the work being done by our humanitarian workers in the field at great risk, and he also has the greatest of respect for the work that’s being done to try to improve access.”

Syrian refugee children learn to survive at a camp in north Lebanon. Credit: Zak Brophy/IPS

By António Guterres and Anders Danielsson
GENEVA/STOCKHOLM, Dec 6 2013 (IPS)

The terrible bloodshed in Syria has been going on for over two and a half years. It has caused one of the worst humanitarian crises in recent history, with more than half of Syria’s pre-war population now needing humanitarian assistance for their survival.

Nearly 2.3 million Syrians have fled to neighbouring countries, including over 1.1 million under the age of 18. The suffering caused by the conflict is particularly devastating for these children – they experience trauma and isolation, over half of them are missing out on schooling, and far too many are forced to work to help feed their families.As this cruel conflict drags on, future generations will look back at today and judge those who had the means to alleviate the human suffering.

Syria risks losing an entire generation – and with it, its future, as today’s children are the ones who could rebuild their country when peace finally sets in.

What is unfolding on Europe’s doorstep today is not only a humanitarian crisis unparalleled in recent history. The impact of the enormous refugee influx on host countries in the Middle East is also fuelling fundamental, structural problems in an already fragile region. The crisis in Syria threatens peace and stability far beyond the country’s borders: a threat that can no longer be downplayed.

This is why we are joining our voices today to urge the international community to recognise and act upon the pressing need to step up international solidarity in response to the refugee crisis.

For European Union member states, this means concretely to focus less on protecting borders and more on protecting people, and to turn into action their commitments for more solidarity and burden-sharing with the countries in the Middle East that host the vast majority of Syrian refugees.

Sweden has granted protection to the largest number of Syrians outside the Middle East – over 20,000 since the beginning of the conflict, including asylum seekers and refugees resettled from countries in the region. Under Sweden’s chairmanship, a number of resettlement countries have formed a Contact Group with UNHCR to promote international resettlement as well as other forms of admission for up to 30,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2014.

Already earlier this year, Germany set an important example by offering humanitarian admission to 5,000 Syrian refugees who had fled to Lebanon.

In addition to resettlement, European countries must show more solidarity with Syrians who arrive in the EU, for example through swifter access to effective asylum procedures and, in many cases, better reception conditions.

In September 2013, Sweden marked an important milestone by becoming the first EU member state to grant all Syrian refugees permanent residence. As the world begins to realise that the conflict in Syria is unlikely to be resolved in the short term, more countries have to provide refugees with permanent residency. This would allow them to rebuild a life without a return date looming. It also facilitates integration and family reunification for Syrians in in the host country.

More countries must now follow suit and come forward with protection schemes similar to those of Sweden and Germany. Far too many people fleeing Syria have already lost their lives trying to cross the Mediterranean Sea, such as in the recent shipwrecks off the Italian island of Lampedusa. Many others are abused by smugglers as they attempt to enter Europe through remote land borders.

There is something fundamentally wrong in a world where people who are desperately seeking protection from violence and conflict are forced to take such perilous journeys. Providing them with alternative ways of accessing safety, such as family reunification, resettlement, and better reception and asylum conditions, will help to reduce the number of people putting their lives at risk and resorting to smugglers and other irregular means of entry.

Showing solidarity or doing nothing are not options to be debated. As this cruel conflict drags on, future generations will look back at today and judge those who had the means to alleviate the human suffering by their determination to put these means to use. Europe – all of Europe – must do better in this.

António Guterres is the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. Anders Danielsson is General Director at the Swedish Migration Board.

The younger of the Afghan refugees in Pakistan have never known Afghanistan. Credit: Ashfaq Yusufzai/IPS.

By Ashfaq Yusufzai
PESHAWAR, Pakistan, Nov 10 2013 (IPS)

Seventeen-year-old Usmanullah Shah has never been to Afghanistan, the land of his forefathers. The son of Afghan parents who fled to Pakistan 34 years ago to escape war, he shudders at the thought of going there.

“I was born here and grew up here. I have never seen my native country and I consider myself a ‘citizen’ of Pakistan,” Shah, a Grade 10 student, told IPS.

“We consider Pakistan our second home and don’t want to go back,” he said.“I was born here and grew up here. I have never seen my native country and I consider myself a ‘citizen' of Pakistan."

There are around 1.6 million registered Afghan refugees in Pakistan, the largest refugee population in the world, according to the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

In July, Pakistan extended the deadline for their repatriation to December 2015 – a decision hailed by people like Shah.

Neither he nor his three younger brothers wants to move out of Peshawar, a border city and the capital of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. One of them, Ikramullah Shah, said, “We are extremely happy with Pakistan’s decision to extend our stay here.”

The boy, who studies in Grade 7, said that after 35 years of war Afghanistan was not liveable anymore. “From what we hear, there are no educational, health or civic facilities there. In Pakistan, we are better off.”

That’s a thought shared by many Afghan refugees, especially the younger ones.

Usmanullah Shah said his parents left Kabul when the erstwhile Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979. That was the time when the Afghan influx into Pakistan began, only to continue, propelled by bloody conflict in that country.

Islamabad has been consistently pushing the UNHCR and the international community to help repatriate the refugees. UNHCR spokesman Qaisar Afridi said 3.8 million Afghan refugees had been repatriated over the past 11 years.

In December 2012, the remaining refugees were given a six-month extension and asked to return by Jun. 30 this year. But again, with the help of the U.N. refugee agency, they were allowed to stay on in Pakistan, Afridi said.

The decision was taken at a meeting in Kabul attended by Afghan, Pakistani and UNHCR officials in July this year. Afghan refugees with Proof of Registration (PoR) cards were legally entitled to stay on, Afridi said.

Abdul Qadir Baloch, Pakistan’s minister for states and frontier regions, said Islamabad had agreed on humanitarian grounds, especially in view of the law and order situation in Afghanistan.

“We aren’t going to force out anyone who has legitimate documents for a temporary stay. The government has been extending hospitality to the Afghans and wants them to go back with dignity,” Baloch told IPS.

He said registered Afghan refugees were entitled to bank accounts, driving licences and connections for telephone, electricity and gas. But the nearly two million illegal refugees would face action from authorities, Baloch said, without elaborating.

Afghans are found in large numbers in cities like Peshawar, Quetta, Karachi and Islamabad. There is also a large population of Afghans residing in Pakistan illegally.

Jamaher Anwari, the Afghan minister for refugees, who had travelled to Islamabad to hammer out the agreement on refugees, told IPS: “Pakistan has hosted our people with open hearts despite its own hardships.”

“The situation in Afghanistan is rapidly returning to normal and we hope all Afghan refugees in Pakistan will proceed to their own country within the specified period,” Anwari said.

But that may be easier said than done.

“The Pakistani government’s decision to extend the deadline for repatriation brought relief for refugees who run businesses or have other interests here and could not have left for Afghanistan immediately,” Muhammad Hashim, a 51-year-old carpet dealer in the Board Area of Peshawar on Jamrud Road that leads to Afghanistan, told IPS.

Hashim, who is originally from Jalalabad, said many Afghans now had homes in Pakistan and Afghanistan and travelled frequently between the two countries. He pointed out that a sprawling market had come to be called “Mini Kabul” as it was completely dominated by Afghan shopkeepers.

Hashim said in Pakistan he lived in an upmarket neighbourhood and his three sons and two daughters were studying in an English-medium school.

“Our younger generation doesn’t want to leave Pakistan for Afghanistan. The situation there offers no hope for young Afghans,” he said.

Life is, however, not always comfortable for refugees.

“Police demand bribes from us,” Muhammad Rafiq, a taxi driver who hails from Kabul, told IPS. “We pay because most Afghan drivers don’t have valid documents,” added the 44-year-old father of two boys, aged 10 and 12.

“The Pakistani government, as well as the people, see us as parasites,” he said. “But my sons don’t want to go back despite the problems here.”

The presence of Afghan refugees is often frowned upon by Pakistanis, who see them as competing with the locals for jobs and housing.

Mian Ziaul Haq, secretary of the Hayatabad Estate Dealers’ Association here, said: “They have caused a shortage of housing not only in Peshawar but in all major Pakistani cities. They are looked down upon by Pakistanis, though house owners are happy with the fat rents they get.”

Despite the resentment they face, many refugees want to stay put.

Muhammad Sadiq, a 23-year-old Afghan who owns a mobile phone shop in Mardan, one of the 25 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, has never been to Afghanistan and doesn’t intend to go either.

“What is left in a country ruined by three decades of endless war?” he asked.

Sadiq told IPS, “My parents visit their native home in Jalalabad regularly, but I and my brothers never accompany them. We live here comfortably and don’t see any reason to go back.”

Beneath a veneer of development, reflected in this newly laid railtrack, Sri Lanka's former war-zone is plagued by poverty, debt and lack of jobs. Credit: Amantha Perera/IPS

By Amantha Perera
KILINOCHCHI, Sri Lanka , Nov 7 2013 (IPS)

When the first trains in almost two and a half decades started running through this war-ravaged town in Sri Lanka in mid-September, Sinngamuththu Jesudasan could not resist the temptation to go and have a look – repeatedly.

The last time the 62-year-old had seen a train on the track in Kilinochchi was somewhere in the late 1980s. “They suddenly stopped,” Jesudasan told IPS, staring motionlessly at the blue train speeding on the track towards Kilinochchi.

He was not alone. The first trains on the Kilinochchi track, declared open by President Mahinda Rajapaksa, attracted dozens of fans every time they sped by on the northern line.

Fathers brought young kids on bicycles closer to the track to see the train, and at least during the first few days, schoolchildren lined up at the newly refurbished Kilinochchi station, the train’s final destination on the northern line, to get on to the carriages.

“It is impressive isn’t it,” Jesudasan asked as he watched the train pass by.

Impressive indeed – the northern rail track is part of a multi-billion dollar infrastructure development undertaken by the government. By the Central Bank’s account, since the end of the war in May 2009, over three billion dollars have been spent in the North on infrastructure development.

The changes are visible to all. The A9 road that runs through the Northern Province is a six-lane highway, a far cry from the pot-hole infested dirt track it was for most of the last three decades. There are new hospitals, new electricity distribution systems and new banks.

Two recent U.N. surveys, one by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and another by the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), finalised in June this year also found impressive progress in the former war zone, especially in infrastructure works.

Similar sentiments were expressed by U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights Navi Pillay soon after she toured the region in August.

But just beneath the veneer of development lie the lingering issues of unemployment, poverty, food insecurity and mass debt. There are new roads, but they don’t seem to have brought in new riches.

Despite the impressive development spending, in the last three years, Sri Lanka has been struggling to harness donor funding for humanitarian work in the former war zone.

Since 2010, three successive joint appeals for work in the region have run into a collective shortfall of 430 million dollars. The U.N. has undertaken a new needs evaluation and the next appeal is likely to be released during the first quarter of 2014, OCHA officials in Colombo said.

“The era of cheap aid is over. Increasingly it will become tougher and tougher for the government to look for development aid at concessionary rates,” said Anushka Wijesinha, research economist at the national research agency Institute of Policy Studies of Sri Lanka.

Part of the aid slowdown has actually been blamed on the country’s economic progress. In early 2012, the World Bank categorised Sri Lanka as a low middle-income country, effectively limiting access to concessionary funding.

“The middle-income status directly affects donor contribution towards post-war reconstruction, rehabilitation and remaining humanitarian assistance,” stated the OCHA survey that is yet to be made available freely.

It also pointed out that there were regions of extreme poverty and vulnerability in the island. One of the most vulnerable regions is the war-hit north.

The UNHCR survey that interviewed 917 of the 138,651 families that have returned to the six northern districts since the war’s end found that only nine percent had regular wages. Over 55 percent said their income was based on irregular work, and over 43 percent of the families earned a paltry Rs 5000 (38 dollars) a month – less than one-sixth of the national average monthly income.

And debt seems to be rampant: “52 percent of the respondents report a total household debt of Rs 50,000 [380 dollars] or less, and a total 47 percent of respondents [report a] total household debt at Rs 100,000 [760 dollars] or more,” the survey found.

Experts say the slowing down of funding now puts the onus on the government to step in to carry out the remaining humanitarian assistance work.

“The issue of assistance is definitely one of the current dominant problems to addressing the IDP [internally displaced persons] problem,” said Mirak Raheem, who recently authored an extensive research study on protracted war displaced in Sri Lanka. “Donor financial support has played a crucial role in humanitarian work and now it will be incumbent on the government to fill the gap.”

Chandana Kularatne, an economist with the World Bank in Washington, told IPS that the government should first use the massive investments in infrastructure to foster growth in the region and build transport links.

“Development projects such as the building of roads are expected to improve connectivity and hence economic activity,” he said.

Attracting new investors would work as a great boost to the two main income generators in the region – agriculture and fisheries. Over 90 percent of the provincial population’s income is linked to the two sectors, and over 50 percent of the provincial economic output comes from them as well.

However, both sectors still crave outside buyers who can negate the impact of middle-men who drive down prices.

Wijesinha said that government should be much more astute with development spending and should also look at ways of expanding domestic tax revenue so that more funds could be generated within the island.

The OCHA survey said that its ongoing needs assessment survey will give a clear picture on the most vulnerable communities to help set priorities for aid and assistance.

It also said that things should change from the last three years, when there was a distinct separation between development and humanitarian work, with the government taking over the bulk of the former, and the humanitarian agencies taking the lead in the latter.

“The remaining and current humanitarian needs should be addressed concurrently with the development assistance,” the survey said.

But before all that, there should be sufficient funds to carry out the work, something that has been lacking.

Ornela Mbenga Sebo during the interview with IPS in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Fabíola Ortiz/IPS

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 1 2013 (IPS)

Ornela Mbenga Sebo, a young Congolese woman, escaped in 2011 from a rebel camp in an unidentified location in Africa where she was being held as a slave and stowed away in the garbage bay of a merchant ship, with no idea where it was headed.

When the ship reached its destination two weeks later, she found out she was in Santos, an Atlantic ocean port in southeast Brazil.

She is one of hundreds of people from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) who have sought refuge in Brazil.

Mbenga Sebo was born in Walikale, in the eastern DRC province of North Kivu. Armed groups and the army are fighting over the gold, cassiterite, coltan and other minerals in that region.

But until 2011, she appeared to be safe from the violence. Her family had a comfortable life. Her father taught at the university, and she was studying journalism and working in a bank. She had learned English and French and had travelled abroad.“We walked for two weeks. I found other people who were also escaping: people who were sick, children, women and men.” -- Ornela Mbenga Sebo

Her odyssey began in January 2011, when she was 21. Walikale became the target of an attack by insurgents, who slaughtered local residents and set fire to homes and public buildings.

She was at work when the rebel invasion began. She hid there until things calmed down, before running home. But her house was burning and there was no sign of her family.

Alone, with just the clothes on her back, she walked for weeks with other people who were running away from the violence. Her aim was to reach the capital, Kinshasa, where her grandparents lived.

“I was on foot,” she told IPS. “We walked for two weeks. I found other people who were also escaping: people who were sick, children, women and men.”

The DRC, a vast, resource-rich country in Central Africa, has been caught up in armed conflict between government forces and different armed groups for decades. Some of the insurgent groups have ties to neighbouring Rwanda and Burundi.

In 2010, a United Nations fact-finding mission documented a range of human rights crimes, including mass rapes, by the militias and the army itself in Walikale.

Mbenga Sebo described the terror she felt as she walked through ghost towns, abandoned and destroyed, only inhabited by the bodies strewn along the streets.

“It’s so vivid in my mind that when I talk about it it’s like I’m back in that place again,” she said.

The biggest danger was running into armed groups, “who roamed from town to town looking for people to kill,” she said.

On more than one occasion she pretended to be dead, to save her life.

But she ended up being captured and taken to a camp, where she was kept as a slave along with dozens of other people.

The armed men who seized her were Rwandan, she said. They loaded her and the rest of the group she was travelling with onto three helicopters. The trip took about two hours. From what she could see from the air, the camp they arrived at was not near a town or any populated area.

Charly Nzalambila, a Congolese volunteer with Caritas Brazil who helped transcribe Mbenga Sebo’s story to submit to the authorities in Brazil, believes the men were members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda.

When they were communicating by radio, her captors spoke Swahili and some English, Mbenga Sebo said.

She spent all day hauling buckets of water to supply the rebel camp. The insurgents “forced the women to sleep with them, wash their clothes, and cook their meals. I slept on the ground. They would beat me. I suffered moral, physical and mental abuse,” she said.

But one day she met a young man who took pity on her and helped her escape, showing her that the camp was near a port. He told her they were in Tanzania, but IPS was unable to verify this.

Late one night in February, she climbed over the wall surrounding the camp, and made it to a merchant ship. “It was a matter of life or death,” she said.

The only thing she found to eat were some peanuts. Two weeks later, after discovering that she had landed in the Brazilian port of Santos, the second surprise was realising that she could understand the local language – Portuguese – because she had once spent a year in Angola with her family.

She quickly made contact with people from Angola and DRC living in Brazil, and not long after her arrival, she was living as a refugee in Rio de Janeiro.

This country of 198 million has no limits on the number of people who can be granted refugee status. According to the law on refugees, passed in 1997, even people who have entered the country using false documents can apply for refugee protection.

Destination unknown

Fleeing overseas with no clear destination may not be so uncommon among Africans desperately escaping violence and armed conflict.

“Many young people fleeing these situations end up in Brazil by chance,” Angolan refugee Fernando Ngury told IPS in 2007, 10 years after the law on refugees took effect.

“Many stow away on ships that they believe are heading to Europe, and find themselves instead in Brazil. But some are thrown overboard at sea,” said Ngury, the head of the Centre for the Defence of Refugee Human Rights (CEDHUR).

According to the latest official figures, there are 4,715 people from 74 different countries who have been granted refugee status in Brazil today. The largest groups are made up of nearly 1,700 Angolans, 700 Colombians and some 500 people from the DRC.

Of the 4,715 refugees, 2,012 still receive assistance from the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

There are also 1,441 people who have applied, and are still waiting, for refugee status.

The process of requesting refugee protection in Brazil begins at the National Committee for Refugees (CONARE), in the Justice Ministry.

Rebuilding

Now 23, Mbenga Sebo is rebuilding her life little by little. Today she shares a house with four Congolese roommates in a suburb of Rio. As a refugee, she has the right to work and has full access to public services, such as healthcare and education.

The fact that she speaks several languages helped her get a job as a receptionist at the Technological Park of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, where she has also made friends.

Recently, through the online social networking site Facebook, she received wonderful news: that her parents and siblings are still alive.

She learned that her family had managed to flee by bus to Senegal, with the savings they had in their home. Today they are living in Chicago. Her mother is working as a waitress in a hotel and her father is unemployed.

Her dream is to join her family in the U.S. Her friends and office mates are trying to raise funds over the Internet to buy her a plane ticket for Chicago.

She said she had no intention of returning to the DRC. “I love my country, I am African, but I would only go back if the situation changes and it is safe. And even then, only to visit my grandparents, who are still there.”

Her workmate, George Patiño, told IPS: “She is an example of strength, conviction and hope.” It was his idea to turn to crowdfunding, on the Brazilian web site Vakinha, to send Mbenga Sebo to Chicago.

Patiño hopes to raise the necessary 2,500 dollars in three months. The Ornela Mundi campaign was launched on Vakinha Sept. 5, and 26 percent of the funds needed have been raised so far.

“She has always managed to overcome, and she’ll find happiness in the end,” Patiño said.

Mbenga Sebo’s story deserves to be told in a book, according to Brazilian journalist Ana Paula Laport, who is preparing to write her biography.

Excerpt:

Refugees dig for water in a dried up watering hole in Jamam camp, in South Sudan's Upper Nile state. Credit: Jared Ferrie/IPS

By Walter García and Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

Yves Norodom, a 21-year-old refugee from the Democratic Republic of Congo living in Brazil, is one of 45.2 million displaced people around the world – the largest number in 20 years.

In its annual report Global Trends 2012: Displacement, the New 21st Century Challenge, released Wednesday, the UNHCR said 28.8 million of that total were internally displaced persons (IDPs), 15.4 million were refugees outside their own countries, and nearly one million were asylum-seekers.

Some 35.8 million people were under the UNHCR mandate by late 2012 – the second highest number on record.

On average, 23,000 people were forced to flee their homes every day in 2012.

Norodom told IPS that he fled his country, the DRC, for Kenya, and from there to the United Kingdom, before finally making his way to Brazil in 2010 without documents or belongings.

“In Congo, everyone feared for their lives,” he said. “I was struggling to survive, I did the impossible to make it. My job was to save my own skin, and I was 17 years old at the time.”

His father, a member of the opposition, had to flee the DRC nearly a decade ago, and Norodom’s 15 siblings gradually found refuge in other countries, until the family ended up spread out across the globe.

“They threatened us, and six of us landed in Brazil. Others had already found refuge, some in Africa, others in France. We had to split up,” he lamented.

One of Norodom’s biggest challenges has been learning Portuguese. “I had never heard the language before. It took me six months to learn the basics, and a year to speak it a little better.”

He is currently unemployed, but he dreams of one day returning to school and attending the public university in Rio de Janeiro to study chemical engineering.

“I wouldn’t say I’m very happy, but at least I’m alive and I’m ok,” he said.

Norodom is one of 4,715 refugees of 76 nationalities in Brazil, according to figures from CONARE, the government’s national refugee agency. Of that total, 2,012 receive assistance from the UNHCR.

“They are people who belong to ethnic groups fleeing for reasons of thought or conflicts. Our challenge is to offer the refugees better conditions to adapt and integrate,” said CONARE vice-president João Guilherme Granja.

Brazil has adequate laws on refugees and offers them the same public services that are enjoyed by the country’s citizens. But this country of 198 million people receives a far smaller number of refugees than much poorer countries like Pakistan, which currently hosts over 1.6 million refugees.

At the launch of the Global Trends report ahead of World Refugee Day (Jun. 20), UNHCR representative in Brazil Andrés Ramírez said armed conflict was still the main cause of forced displacement.

He said more than half of the world’s refugees came from five countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan and Syria.

On average, war and other crises drove one person from their home every 4.1 seconds, last year, Ramírez said. “The political will to prevent conflicts has been lacking at a global level,” he added. “The refugee issue is a human tragedy of enormous magnitude.”

As it has for the past three decades, Afghanistan headed the list, accounting for one of every four of the 10.5 million refugees under the UNHCR mandate, or 2.5 million. It was followed by Somalia (1.1 million), Iraq (746,700), and Syria (471,400).

The report says about four-fifths of the world’s refugees flee to neighbouring countries.

The list of countries hosting the largest refugee populations includes Pakistan, the DRC, Kenya, Iran, Syria and Kenya.

In 2012, Brazil received over 1,200 requests for asylum, and the number will be bigger this year, Ramírez said.

“We have more requests now because of the crises around the world,” the UNCHR representative said. “Brazil is a country of continental dimensions and could receive more refugees, but it is far away from the places where the humanitarian crises are occurring.”

The rise in the cost of living in Brazil’s cities and the day-to-day difficulties in making a living faced by a large part of the population also affect the quality of life of refugees, said Aline Thuller, with the Catholic NGO Caritas.

“A majority of the refugees live in favelas (shantytowns) and other poor neighbourhoods. They have the same rights to public services and face the same difficulties as Brazilians. Most of them work in the informal sector,” she told IPS.

“There is still a lot of prejudice” against refugees, Thuller said.

In the past, the refugees assisted by Caritas were mainly Angolan men, who were fleeing forced recruitment during the 27-year civil war in that former Portuguese colony in southern Africa.

But today, many pregnant women and entire families reach Rio de Janeiro as refugees.

The state of Rio de Janeiro, which receives the second-largest number of refugees after São Paulo, is in the final stages of designing a state-wide refugee policy.

Under the new policy, “working groups will be created by thematic area and will organise practical activities, to facilitate refugees’ access to basic rights,” Thuller said.

Mu Kyi, a migrant worker in Thailand, fears for the future of her children. Credit: Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau/IPS

By Simba Shani Kamaria Russeau
BANGKOK, May 7 2013 (IPS)

In the hustle and bustle of Thailand’s capital, Bangkok, a small learning centre located in the Bang Bon district is helping children hailing mostly from the war-torn provinces of Myanmar (Burma) gain access to a basic education.

Established by the Foundation for Rural Youth (FRY), the learning centre is one of the few that offer Thai language lessons to migrant youth, and prepare children for entrance into Thai schools, by “introducing them to Thai culture”, Pao Hom, an organiser with FRY, told IPS.

Most other learning centres for migrants lack methodologies specifically targeted at early childhood development, and few are recognised by the Thai Ministry of Education.

Although teachers that come through FRY are “trained in early childhood development under the supervision of the Ministry of Social Development and Human Security,” according to Hom, many of the teachers do not have formal educational qualifications.

Hom says migrants who come here to avail themselves of low-paying jobs in Thailand’s many garment, textile and furniture factories struggle to educate their children. Immigrant communities and neighbourhoods are some of the “worst environments for learning,” she said.

Dr. Panadda Thanasetkorn, a professor at Mahidol University’s National Institute for Child and Family Development, told IPS that without professional training for teachers and a better formal education system, migrant children will remain trapped in the cycle of poverty and unemployment that plagues these border zones.

Located in the heart of Southeast Asia, Thailand has long been the final destination for massive human migrations, as hungry, unemployed or war-weary residents from neighbouring countries flock to its industrial border towns and bustling urban centres.

Recent statistics from the Labour Ministry estimate that there are nearly 2.5 million migrant workers from Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Myanmar and Cambodia in Thailand – nearly half of whom are undocumented.

In addition, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has said there are some 84,900 registered refugees and an estimated 62,000 unregistered asylum-seekers in nine camps along the Thai-Myanmar border.

At least 10 percent of this population are estimated to be children. A 2011 report by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) suggests that there were approximately 377,000 children from neighbouring countries residing in Thailand.

Lacking social protections and legal status, migrant children represent one of the most disadvantaged groups when it comes to early childhood development, a critical period that the World Bank defines as occurring between birth and eight years of age, during which a child’s rapid brain growth forms the basis of their future physical, emotional and cognitive development.

Although migrant children are eligible to attend state schools in Thailand, a number of barriers prevent them from fully accessing their right to education.

According to Thanasetkorn, “Most parents of migrant children do not speak Thai, are without legal documents and fear discrimination, which prevents them from approaching public social services (such as education, health care and the justice system).”

She said children who fall in the “low-income” bracket – meaning from families who earn between five and 10 dollars a day – often sacrifice going to school in order to work and support their families. The shrimp industry, fisheries, sugar cane plantations and garment factories have all come under scrutiny after a 2012 PBS documentary exposed widespread use of child migrants in these sectors.

According to Thanasetkorn, preventing child labour requires early intervention in the form of education, to equip children with the skills they need to “improve their quality of life”.

In 2005, under the Education for All (EFA) policy, the Thai government extended the right to education for all children in Thailand regardless of their legal status.

However, a recent report by VSO International Thailand/Myanmar suggests that less than 20 percent of registered migrant children attend Thai schools. This estimate is likely to be lower for early childhood development.

In comparison, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) suggests that the national gross enrolment rate for lower secondary education was over 90 percent and for upper secondary education it was about 60 percent in 2010.

VSO International Researcher Hattaya Wongsaengpaiboon says there is a major disconnect between policies that seem to exist solely on paper, and practical barriers to accessing educational facilities.

“Thai policy clearly states that anyone, regardless of legal status, can attend Thai schools but in reality very few do,” Wongsaengpaiboon said. “Many of the Thai schools we approached would request a birth certificate or a letter of recommendation from either a Thai person or a local organisation” before agreeing to enroll a student.

Given that only a third of the migrant children born in Thailand have birth certificates, the stringent admission rules lead to questions “about child protection and the right of every child to have an identity,” she stressed.

According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), nearly five percent of all births – or roughly 40,000 children – go unregistered in Thailand every year, most amongst vulnerable groups including migrant children and those from ethnic minorities.

Thailand has taken some steps towards confronting this issue, particularly with tools like the 2010 Civil Registration Act, which grants all children born in the country the right to birth registration regardless of status.

This also aids migrant children in accessing the educational system, health care and better employment opportunities in the future.

But here again, activists and advocates have found that while such policies look good on paper, things are not nearly so rosy on the ground.

“What we discovered in our research was that families were not always informed by the hospital staff that they had the right to provide their children with birth certificates,” said Wongsaengpaiboon.

Migrant learning centres like the one in Bangkok have been taking the first steps towards bridging this gap. According to Hom, civil society “partnerships with government-run schools break any barriers to migrant children receiving a Thai education. By taking this route, children are far more likely to enter the university system and break the cycle of poverty.”

However, unlike FRY, which receives generous funding from major donors like USAID, Save the Children and the European Union, many informal institutions that are not recognised by the Thai government and receive little to no funding are unable to provide services like the state’s free lunch programme, forcing many migrant children to attend school without proper nutrition.