DUSHANBE, June 22, 2009, Asia-Plus — Over the past two years, the number of refugees arriving in Tajikistan has considerably increased, UNHCR Representative in Tajikistan, Mr. Ilija Todorovic, remarked at a press conference in Dushanbe on June 19. The press conference was dedicated to World Refugee Day, which is marked on June 20.
According to him, compared to 2007 the number of newly arriving refugees in Tajikistan has increased by 80 percent. “In 2008, 1,361 people applied to the Tajik government for asylum,” said Todorovic, “According to the Ministry of Labor, 377 people have applied to the government for asylum over the first quarter of this year.”
Tajikistan currently hosts refugees and asylum seekers mostly from Afghanistan. “If earlier, mainly residents of Afghanistan’s northern provinces had applied to Tajikistan for asylum, now, they are arriving practically from the whole Afghanistan,” the UNHCR representative said, attributing that fact to deterioration of the situation in Afghanistan.
He noted that newly arriving Afghan refugees strongly differed from those who had arrived in Tajikistan in the 1990s. They, in particular, have considerable education and health needs, Mr. Todorovic said.
He noted that from 2001 to the first quarter of this year, 1,788 people were resettled to other countries: 1,456 to Canada; 170 to the United States, 124 to Norway; 27 to Sweden; 8 to the Netherlands; and 3 to Finland.
On the refugees that fled Tajikistan during the civil war in the country, Todorovic said that more than 53,000 people had returned to Tajikistan since 1993.
UNHCR opened an office in Tajikistan in 1993, when the country was torn by civil war two years after the country declared its independence from the Soviet Union. That year, Tajikistan became the first country in Central Asia to accede to the 1951 Refugee Convention and its 1967 Protocol. It was also the first country in the region to adopt national refugee legislation.
UNHCR has helped people displaced by the civil war to return home as well as assisting refugees.
In 2000, the United Nations General Assembly decided that as from 2001, June 20 will be celebrated as World Refugee Day to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees. The Organization of African Unity had agreed for it to coincide with their Africa Refugee Day.
Each year, the United Nations High Commissioner fro Refugees (UNHCR) selects a theme a theme and coordinates events across the globe.
This year, with the world economic crisis threatening to slash aid budgets and amid enormous global uncertainty, the theme selected by UNHCR for World Refugee Day is “Real People, Real Needs.”
