Monday September 15, 2014 12:10:02
PM
By Nita Bhalla
NEW DELHI (Thomson Reuters
Foundation) - When Kohinoor, a stateless Rohingya Muslim, fled her home in
Myanmar after a wave of attacks by majority Buddhists, she hoped for a chance
to rebuild her life in a new country.
She knew she would have to trek for
days with little food and water and risk her life being smuggled across borders
by traffickers. But she and her family did not imagine their present life of
destitution and discrimination in India, the country they had chosen as their
refuge.
"We were chased out of Burma
(Myanmar). We were chased out of Bangladesh. Now we are in India, the people
here tell us that India is not our country. So where will we go?" asked
Kohinoor, 20, sitting in a makeshift tent on a patch of wasteland in southern
Delhi.
"We don’t have any land of our
own. Our children don’t go to the government schools as they refuse us
admission. When we go to the hospital, they don't admit people from our
community," said Kohinoor, who fled Myanmar two years ago with her
2-year-old daughter and her sister’s family.
Though the Rohingya minority have
lived for generations in Myanmar's western state of Rakhine, the largely
Buddhist government passed a citizenship law in 1982 which excluded them,
denying them the identity cards required for everything from schooling and
marriage to finding a job and getting a birth or death certificate. They became
stateless.
Hundreds died in communal violence
between Buddhists and Rohingya in 2012, worsening their plight, and in the last
two years more than 86,000 Rohingya have left, fleeing to countries such as
Thailand, Malaysia, India and Bangladesh.
The Rohingya are among an estimated
10 million stateless people worldwide. Their plight will be discussed during
the first global forum on statelessness opening in The Hague on Monday, ahead
of an ambitious U.N. campaign starting in November to eradicate statelessness
worldwide within a decade.
India, despite hosting some 30,000
registered refugees, has no legal recognition of asylum seekers, making it
difficult for them to use essential services like schools and hospitals, human
rights groups say – and the Rohingya community is among the most vulnerable.
IN NEED OF A HOME
According to the United Nations refugee
agency (UNHCR), there are around 9,000 Rohingya registered in Delhi. Thousands
more, unregistered, are living in other parts of the country such as Jammu and
Hyderabad.
In Delhi, most of them lead
impoverished lives in tented settlements dotted around the city, eking out a
meagre existence collecting and selling garbage or doing manual work for
Indians, often underpaid and exploited.
Because they have no identity
documents, they cannot send their children to school or use health services at
government hospitals. They cannot rent accommodation and face problems getting
work.
Many say they have been forced to
sleep under plastic sheets on roadsides or patches of wasteland for weeks or
months, before local residents or authorities move them on.
"Our home is Myanmar but they
chased us out," said 21-year-old Abdul Sukur at a camp housing some 60
families in Delhi's Okhla district.
"Here also we don't belong.
People abuse us for living on the streets and say we are making the place
dirty. We have to shift constantly. We need permanent land in India where we
can settle and have proper identity documents which we can show," he said.
HAVEN FOR SOME
Considered a haven in a volatile
region, India has for decades hosted refugees fleeing conflict or persecution
in countries like Sri Lanka, Bhutan, Afghanistan, China and Myanmar.
But its refugees have no legal
status. Decisions about refugees are taken on an ad hoc basis and some groups,
such as Sri Lankan Tamils and Tibetans, have been given certain rights and
support.
Others, such as the Rohingya, have
been less fortunate.
Dominik Bartsch, UNHCR India's chief
of mission, said the UNHCR identity cards given to registered refugees are
often not recognised as they are not issued by the government. The agency is
partnering with non-governmental organisations which are going into refugee
communities to help them negotiate access to basic services, he added.
"Overall if you look at how
India looks after refugees, it is a functioning protection regime. There are no
big violations of refugee rights, although there are lots of things that could
improve," Bartsch said.
"There is differential
treatment of refugees. You have to analyse the period when they arrived and
also look at the bilateral relationship with the country of origin. These are
the two factors that shape how India has treated refugees over time."
New Delhi has twice blocked draft
laws on refugee recognition. Because of its porous borders, often hostile
neighbours and external militancy, it wants a free hand to regulate the entry
of foreigners without being tied down by any legal obligation, analysts said.
UNHCR's Bartsch said the inability
of refugees to state their claim to asylum was actually driving them
underground, making them more exposed to militancy.
"Currently, there is no channel
available to present a case to the government," he said. "Anyone who
runs away from their country is forced to go underground and that results in
people being off the grid, bereft of any support and subject to criminal
activity and, worst case, even fundamentalism."
For Kohinoor, little of this makes
sense.
"I don't know about laws,"
she said. "Every country is kicking us around like a football. From one
country to another, people are playing with us. We want the world to make a
decision about us. We want them to give us some land in any country which we
can then call home."
(For more stories and videos on
statelessness see: stateless.trust.org)
(Editing by Tim Pearce)
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