December 17, 2001	Monday	Shawwal 1, 1422

BRUSSELS: The humanitarian group Doctors Without Borders has strongly criticized governments’ attitudes to asylum-seekers accusing them of failing to meet their international obligations and endangering lives. The international community has become inured to the plight of refugees over the past decade and governments were therefore not under pressure to take more in, said Rafael Vilasanjuan, the director general of the group known as MSF after its French name Medicins Sans Frontiers.

“Right now, the image of refugees is related to conflicts, crises, infectious diseases and so on. So what the international community does is to find solutions to the problem without increasing the right of choice for refugees,” he said upon the release of MSF’s “Activity Report 2000-2001”. “Their solution is the return of refugees, no matter what the conditions in the country. They are providing funding for repatriations, but little money for refugees to be attended to outside these troubled regions,” said Vilasanjuan.

People suffering because of war, violence, exclusion, displacement, famine and neglected diseases have been the focus for the organisation, which on Dec 21 will mark its 30th anniversary. This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Refugee Convention, which was created to define protection and rights for those who flee countries because of insecurity and persecution.

A ministerial conference attended by 156 countries, NGOs and other groups in Geneva held on December 12-13 adopted a declaration which committed signatory nations to ”implement our obligations under the 1951 Convention and/or its 1967 Protocol fully and effectively” and hailed the treaty as one of “relevance and resilience” and of “enduring importance.” At a time when countries are reaffirming the Convention, “we see a continuous deterioration of the conditions on these people,” said Vilasanjuan.

MSF notes that in West Africa, tens of thousands of refugees were trapped in a “particularly exposed and dangerous situations” in late 2000 and early 2001. The organization believes the political response of containment and non-asylum threatens the basic right of people to flee and be given refuge.

“The image of the refugee has been eroded over the last 10 years,” said Vilasanjuan, “and we, the international community, are getting used to their suffering and are not taking the decisions we should be taking” on their behalf.

The head of the MSF said that governments frequently seek to return refugees “no matter what the conditions in the country.” As people are being denied refuge, aid organizations are finding it increasingly difficult, if not impossible in some cases, to reach people in distress.

Christopher Stokes, MSF Director of Operations in Brussels, finds Afghanistan an “extremely worrying and revealing example of this unfortunate trend to diminish the protection afforded to refugees.” “Afghanistan has probably over five million refugees living abroad, mainly in Pakistan and Iran. Its recent history of war, ethnic and religious persecution and environmental collapse has driven its inhabitants in all directions,” he told a news conference on Dec 13.

“Afghans have lived under an incredibly repressive regime, whose control on the country - and intolerance - grew from 1994 onwards. Yet, in spite of this, neighbouring countries progressively closed their borders. It took the events of the 11th of September for the outside world to fully acknowledge the persecution of ordinary Afghans,” said Stokes.

Pakistan and Iran, in particular, reinforced their borders, making the trip across the frontiers to relative safety as dangerous and as uncertain as possible. In part, he said, these states have been forced to take such positions because of the lack of international help in managing their huge refugee populations over the past decade. “I fear that the same hostile policies towards the Afghan civilians will now be used to push them back to Afghanistan before the country is ready to receive them,” said Stokes. “We think that there is a danger that the “right to choose” when to go back will be secondary to the desire of other countries to create a “normal” Afghanistan.”

Liesbeth Schockaert, a jurist who works in the MSF Brussels Operation Centre, said that the European Union as a whole was applying border control policies, non-arrival policies and other deterrents, to push for reception of people in the regions they come from. Diversion policies are also put in place to return asylum seekers to countries considered to be safe. —Dawn/InterPress Service.