Ommission of Tamil refugees from world report irks rights groups

Ommission of Tamil refugees from world report irks rights groups
EXPRESS NEWS SERVICE

BANGALORE, APRIL 3: The recent status report of the UN refugee agency makes it appear as if the Sri Lankan Tamil refugees no longer face any problems. However, Tamil refugees continue to arrive, sometimes getting pushed back to sea, at other times detained and harassed in camps after entering India.

Take a ride up to Hosur and one will find 68 refugee families languishing in camps. Cross the border into Tamil Nadu, where over 64,000 refugees live in camps, some of them in sub-human conditions, according to humanitarian groups. Several thousand more refugees live outside these camps.

Those who have reached the shores of India have braved the hostile attitudes and violence of officials from both sides of the Palk Straits. They reach in crowded boats, evading patrolling by the Coast Guard and the Navy.

The media has often carried proud claims of security personnel keeping the refugees off Indian waters at gun point -- possibly in violation of the international law that mandates refugee protection.

Human rights groups such as the South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre (SAHRDC) have brought the refugee issue to the fore. ``The Government has forbidden local Indian fishermen from rescuing refugees,'' alleged SAHRDC about an incident last year when several refugee families were stranded on an island en route to India.

What worries such groups is the stony silence about the issue in the latest report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) titled ``The State of the World's Refugees: Fifty Years of Humanitarian Action''. UNHCR's mandate is refugee protection worldwide.

Sri Lankan Tamil refugees are considered political untouchables after the assassination of former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi in 1991 by Tamil militants. Since then, the Government have cut these refugees' doles, restricted NGO access to their camps and pushed for their repatriation, notes the India Disasters Report, a publication of the Oxford University Press (OUP).

The Indian Government gave very limited access to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to look after Tamil refugees, citing security reasons. India, though historically a good host, is not a signatory to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Several other international humanitarian and human rights conventions and treaties, to which India is a party, also demand protection of refugees.

A refugee, by international and legal definition, is someone who is outside his country and cannot return owing to a well-founded fear of persecution on account of his race, religion, nationality or membership to a particular social group or political opinion. As per international law, a refugee cannot be returned so long as he or she has a well-founded fear of such persecution.

Critics have also often questioned the Indian practice of leaving the decision of whether to allow refugees to enter to low-level military or police personnel at the border.