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Afghan Refugees face Insecure Refuge

Relations between Afghan refugees and the New Delhi based office of UNHCR have deteriorated far beyond the "all-time low" reached in 1995. This is a conclusion reached in the recent South Asia Human Rights Documentation Centre (SAHRDC) report "Abandoned and betrayed: Afghan refugees under UNHCR protection in New Delhi". The report is based on a three-month investigation into the conditions of Afghan refugees in Delhi and its environs. The report highlights the predicament of the Afghan refugee population in New Delhi. It examines services offered by United Nations High Commission on Refugees (UNHCR) to Afghan refugees in Delhi, the relevance, accessibility, and overall effectiveness of services available, policies of the Indian Government which pertain to Afghan refugees and the problems faced by Afghan refugees in Delhi.

A million refugees fled to neighbouring countries and further abroad since the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. Approximately 60,000 Afghans live in India, of whom a mere 16,000 possess certificates issued by the UNHCR. They are not recognised as refugees by the Indian Government. India, which is not a signatory to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, allows UNHCR to operate a programme for the refugees in New Delhi, most of whom are Afghans. Relations between the local UNHCR mission and the Afghan refugees have turned very sour in the 1990s.

These tensions burst into the open most recently on 29 July 1999 when a group of more than 100 Afghan refugees staged a sit-in protest outside the UNHCR mission in New Delhi, effectively hijacking a smaller demonstration by Somali refugees that had been going on for the previous week. Worried by the mass denial of residence permits by the Indian Government and angered by UNHCR’s lack of assistance for refugees seeking resettlement in a third country, the Afghans were demanding a substantive answer to a letter they had sent to UNHCR on 11 July 1999 expressing these concerns. At issue also were allegations that UNHCR had opaque procedures for much-coveted sponsorships for resettlement in Western countries. The UNHCR has so far failed to address these issues.

"Betrayed and abandoned: Afghan refugees under UNHCR protection in New Delhi" states that after years of providing monetary subsistence allowance to Afghan refugees in India, UNHCR, for a variety of reasons, shifted its emphasis in mid-1993 from providing direct aid to an emphasis on assisting refugees in attaining financial self-sufficiency. Financial self-sufficiency, however, is almost impossible to achieve for Afghan refugees, who have not been allowed by the Indian Government to pursue any kind of gainful employment. Yet, UNHCR undertook "needs assessment" home visits to arbitrarily and unfairly declare most Afghan refugees as being "financially self-sufficient," and thus being ineligible to receive subsistence allowance. This policy appears to have remained relatively unchanged both before and after the start of an "implementation partnership" between UNHCR and the Indian YMCA in 1996.

UNHCR has also slashed its subsistence allowance rolls, from 12,000 families at the end of 1994 to 1,500 families in 1998. The wholesale cancellation of many of these allowances was conducted in an arbitrary and insensitive fashion, and impoverished thousands of Afghan refugee families, adversely affecting their standard of living and driving many of them into debt. Yet, UNHCR in its annual compendium, The State of the World’s Refugees: A Humanitarian Agenda 1997 mentions that Afghan refugees have been "encouraged to take a lump sum payment, to set up small-scale businesses, and to gain new skills". When UNHCR gave lump sums to the Afghan refugees, UNHCR failed to provide any clear explanation as to the purpose of the payment. Due to the lack of work permits and residence permits, it has been impossible for refugees to use lump sum grants to start self-sufficient economic activities, whether in the organised or unorganised labour sectors. Nearly every Afghan refugee who has accepted a lump sum grant did so only after termination of his or her subsistence allowance.

It is precisely for these reasons that the vocational training courses sponsored by UNHCR and the YMCA, as well as the YMCA’s job placement services, proved woefully ineffective. Despite this, the focus of UNHCR strategy rests on helping Afghan refugees achieve mythical "self-sufficiency."

While UNHCR blithely claims that it found that "many of the Afghans actually had substantial resources of their own and had found some kind of gainful employment," the majority are still unemployed. Of those who are not, the most common occupation of Afghan refugees interviewed by SAHRDC was working as street vendors for between Rs.1,500 and Rs.2,000 (US$ 35 to US$ 45) per month to support relatively large families. After the denial of residence permit renewals en masse by the Indian Government and the heightened anti-Afghan feeling in India over alleged Afghan fundamentalist involvement in the Kargil conflict in Kashmir, many of these refugees have not gone to work, fearing harassment or deportation.

UNHCR has, to its credit, continued its policy of reimbursing refugee families for the school fees of their children. Despite this, many Afghan refugee children have been forced to discontinue schooling for financial reasons due to the cancellation of the subsistence allowance.

UNHCR has continued a policy of reimbursing refugees for their medical expenses if they are incurred at a government hospital and for serious medical problems. The ineffectiveness of this policy is clearly demonstrated by the number of refugees whose chronic health problems are not being adequately addressed. In addition, the medical reimbursement scheme is deeply flawed. SAHRDC interviewed refugees who were refused reimbursement for emergency treatment both at private and government hospitals, in clear violation of UNHCR’s own stated policies.

Since the beginning of 1999, the Foreigners Regional Registration Office (FRRO) of the Indian Government has denied residence permit renewals to Afghan refugees by requiring that refugees hold valid passports. As a result, an overwhelming majority of the Afghan refugees in Delhi are now living illegally in India facing deportation. It is believed that the Indian Government has already done this in several cases, effectively violating the internationally accepted principle of non-refoulement. This problem has only heightened the anxieties of Afghan refugees and intensified the demand for assistance from UNHCR for resettlement abroad.

It is clear that since India is not a signatory to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, UNHCR operates in New Delhi only at the whim of the Indian Government. Overly mindful of its precarious position, the UNHCR mission in New Delhi has failed to act as a strong advocate for the refugees under it care.

The report shows how in the past several years a constellation of parties, including UNHCR, the Indian Government, the Indian YMCA, and Voluntary Health Association of Delhi (VHAD), have formed a web of bureaucratic insensitivity, indifference, and ineffectiveness in which many Afghan refugees find themselves trapped without meaningful assistance. The lack of hospitality of the Indian Government has only been exacerbated by the fact that the organisation that is supposed to be the most vocal and active champion of the refugees, namely UNHCR, has not lived up to its task. The refugee agency’s policy of ending direct assistance to refugees in favour of encouraging self-sufficiency has been undertaken in blatant disregard of the reality that gainful employment and financial self-sufficiency are impossible for the overwhelming majority of Afghan refugees in India.

UNHCR has maintained opaque operational processes, used NGO "implementation partnerships" to insulate itself from refugees and redirect their grievances ad infinitum, and shamefully cloaked its practices in the vocabulary of empowerment. In addition to all of these efforts to evade or ignore its responsibilities, UNHCR has never adequately explained the rationale of a policy which claims to help refugees stand on their own two feet while ignoring the fact that they are standing in shifting quicksand.

-Human Rights Features

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