Concerns over Thai plans to return Burmese asylum seekers
Liam Cochrane
Last Updated: Wed, 6 Oct 2010 17:06:00 +1100
Human rights groups have expressed concern over Thailand's plan to repatriate Burmese asylum seekers to Burma after the country's November 7 elections.
Thailand's foreign minister, Kasit Piromya, who made the announcement in New York, says repatriating Burmese asylum seekers is a priority for his government.
"I am going back to Bangkok, and one of the first things I will be doing is to launch a more comprehensive program for the Myanmar (Burmese) people in the camps."
"The displaced persons, the intellectuals that run around the streets of Bangkok and Chiang Mai province, to prepare them to return to Myanmar (Burma) after the elections," he said.
More than 140,000 Burmese asylum seekers live in nine camps spread along the Thai-Burma border.
Most of them have fled conflict, and persecution along ethnic or political lines.
David Mathieson, senior researcher on Burma for Human Rights Watch, says the idea of making those Burmese return is "absurd".
"It's simply not safe for them to go back. Just because Burma's holding elections in November doesn't mean the conditions have changed at all."
Rights groups, as well as the United Nations, have expressed concern about the credibility of the election system, which reserves a quarter of all seats for the army and will take place without the main opposition party.
The National League for Democracy chose to not take part because its leader Aung San Suu Kyi wasn't allowed to be involved and remains under house arrest.
Thailand's foreign minister, Mr Kasit says it is unlikely Burma�s elections will be completely free or fair, but he says it is the first step on the road back to an open and democratic Burma.
"We are going to prepare the Myanmar (Burma) people in Thailand for an eventual return to a new Myanmar (Burma), maybe half-democratic, but I think it is a beginning."
But David Mathieson says the vote next month is merely a mirage of democracy.
"This is one of the negative sides of the Burmese elections, this kind of phoney optimism that people have that the Burmese elections are a serious process - and they're just not."
Despite the comments from Thailand's Foreign Minister, groups involved with refugee resettlement say they have seen no changes to policy about Burmese asylum seekers.
Kitty McKinsey is the spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Asia.
"The UN refugee agency has no reason to believe that the Thai government intends to force refugees to return to Myanmar," she said.
David Mathieson from Human Rights Watch says that while forced repatriation would be frowned upon by the Western world, Thailand has done it recently.
"It's very unlikely they would force refugees back after the elections. However, Thailand did do that over Christmas with the Hmong refugees in the north. They forced them back and there was very little Western countries could do to stop that."
In addition to the asylum seekers in camps on the border, Thailand is also home to an estimated two million Burmese economic migrants, most of them working without proper visas.
Chris Lom, information officer at the International Organisation for Migration, says many of those migrants need the Burmese economy to strengthen and provide them with the chance of work.
"For the vast majority of those two million irregular migrants here, and also registered migrants working here in Thailand, they are here for economic reasons," he said.
"But there are very large numbers of people from Myanmar (Burma) who would go back if the economic situation allowed them to and they could find jobs there."
Thailand's Foreign Minister, Kasit Piromya, says the elections in Burma next month will be a test, not just of Burma but also of the regional bloc, ASEAN.
"The credibility of the election is not only on the credibility and respectability for Myanmar (Burma) but for ASEAN as a whole. It's our credibility and respectability and also on the notion of ASEAN centrality to the whole Asia Pacific."
Concerns over Thai plans to return Burmese asylum seekers
BURMESE(KAREN) REFUGEES ARRIVED IN JAPAN
ယေန ့(၂၈-၀၉-၂၀၁၀) ေန ့နံနက္ ၇း၂၅ နာရီတြင္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံ တိုက်ိဳျမိဳ ့ နာရီတာေလဆိပ္သို ့ဂ်ပန္ပန္အဲယား-JAL FLIGHT
718 ျဖင့္ ထိုင္းနိုင္ငံမွ ကရင္ ဒုကၡသည္(၁၈) ဦးဆိုက္ေရာက္လာခဲ့ျပီး ေလဆိပ္အတြင္း ဂ်ပန္ လဝက ျဖတ္ျခင္း ေခတၱအနား
ယူျခင္းနွင့္ ကေလးငယ္မ်ားေနမေကာင္းျဖစ္ေန၍ ေလဆိပ္ေဆးခန္းတြင္ ကေလးငယ္မ်ားအားေဆးကုသမႈမ်ားခံယူျပီး
ေနာက္ မနက္(၉) နာရီတြင္ ေလဆိပ္အျပင္သို ့ထြက္လာခဲ့ႀကရာ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံေရာက္ ကရင္တိုင္းရင္းသားဒုကၡသည္(၃၀)
ခန္ ့နွင့္္ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံေရာက္ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသားဒီမိုကေရစီေရးလႈပ္ရွားသူ(၁၀) ဦးခန္ ့စုစုေပါင္း(၄၀) ေက်ာ္မွ ကရင္ဘာသာ
ဆိုင္းဘုတ္မ်ား ျမန္မာ အဂၤလိပ္ နွစ္ဘာသာပါ -
ျမန္မာစစ္အစိုးရ၏ ရက္စက္မႈေၾကာင့္ ထြက္ေျပးလာရေသာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအား ဂ်ပန္ႏိုင္ငံမွ ေႏြးေထြးစြာ ႀကိဳဆိုပါသည္။
Refugees from Burma (Myanmar) under the junta are warmly welcome to Japan.ဟူေသာဆိုင္းဘုတ္မ်ားကိုင္ေဆာင္၍ ႀကိဳဆိုခဲ့ႀကပါသည္။ ယေန ့ဆိုက္ေရာက္ရန္ရည္ရြယ္ထားသည္မွာ (၂၇) ဦးျဖစ္ေသာ္လည္း
ကေလးငယ္မ်ားေနမေကာင္းျဖစ္ေနေသာေႀကာင့္ မဲေဆာက္တြင္ မိသားစုတစ္စု နွင့္ ဘန္ေကာက္တြင္ မိသားစုတစ္စု က်န္ရစ္
ေနခဲ့ျပီး People forum of Burma မွ Yamamoto San က ေျပာျပသည္မွာ အဆိုပါက်န္ေနခဲ့ေသာ မိသားစုနွစ္စုမွာ မိမိ ထိုင္း
နိုင္ငံသို ့သြားေရာက္ခဲ့စဥ္ ကသိရိွမိတ္ေဆြျဖစ္ခဲ့သူမ်ားျဖစ္ေႀကာင္းနွင့္ မိမိအေနျဖင့္ ယေန ့အဆိုပါမိသားစုမ်ားနွင့္ ျပန္လည္
ေတြ ့ဆုံရန္အားခဲျပီးႀကိဳးစားလာခဲ့ေသာ္လဲ ပါမလာ၍ အလြန္စိတ္မေကာင္းျဖစ္မိပါေႀကာင္းေျပာႀကားခဲ့ပါသည္။
ေလဆိပ္အျပင္ဘက္ ဘတ္စ္ ကားေပၚမတက္ခင္တြင္ သတင္းစာရွင္းလင္းပဲြျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ရာ ပထမဦးစြာ
ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံျခားေရးဝန္ႀကီးဌာနမွ အရာရိွတစ္ဦး က ရွင္းလင္းေျပာႀကားခဲ့ျပီး ျပန္လွန္ေမးခြန္းထုတ္ျခင္းမ်ားျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ျပီး
ယေန ့ေရာက္ရိွလာေသာဒုကၡသည္မ်ားထဲမွ ကရင္လူငယ္တစ္ဦးနွင့္ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသမီးငယ္တစ္ဦး တို ့နွင့္လည္းမိတ္ဆက္
ေပးျခင္းကိုျပဳလုပ္ခဲ့ပါသည္။
ယေန ့ေန ့လည္ (၃)နာရီခန္ ့မွစတင္၍ TBS News Birds တြင္ UNHCR ညႊန္ႀကားေရးမႉးခ်ဳပ္ ဂ်ပန္လူမ်ိဳး
မစၥတာတာကီဂါဝါ မွရွင္းလင္းတင္ျပရာတြင္လည္း ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံသည္ UNHCR မွတဆင့္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအတြက္ ေဒၚလာသန္း
ေပါင္းမ်ားစြာနွစ္စဥ္ ေပးအပ္ခဲ့ေသာ္လည္း ကမၻာ့နိုင္ငံအမ်ားစု က ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံသည္ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကိုလက္ခံလိုစိတ္မရိွ၍
၄င္းအစားေငြမ်ားစြာေပးအပ္ေနျခင္းျဖစ္ေႀကာင္းရႈျမင္ျပီး မိမိ နိုင္ငံျခားတြင္ UNHCR ဝန္ထမ္းအျဖစ္သြားေရာက္လုပ္ကိုင္စဥ္
အထင္ေသးေသာမ်က္လုံးျဖင့္အႀကည့္ခံခဲ့ရ၍ မိမိအေနျဖင့္ အလြန္စိတ္မေကာင္းျဖစ္မိပါေႀကာင္း။ ယခုအခါ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံမွ ဒုကၡ
သည္မ်ားကို မိမိတို ့ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံမွ စတင္လက္ခံခဲ့ရာ အာရွတိုက္မွ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကို အာရွတိုက္နိုင္ငံတစ္နိုင္ငံက ပထမဦးဆုံး
စတင္လက္ခံခဲ့ျခင္းျဖစ္ျပီး မိမိအေနျဖင့္အလြန္ဝမ္းေျမာက္ဝမ္းသာျဖစ္မိပါေႀကာင္းနွင့္ အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စု အေနနွင့္
နွစ္စဥ္ ဒုကၡသည္ေသာင္းနွင့္ခ်ီ၍ လက္ခံေနရာ အဆိုပါအေရအတြက္နွင့္နိႈင္းယွဥ္ ပါက ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံက လက္ခံေသာ ဒုကၡသည္
အေရအတြက္မွာ အလြန္နဲေနေသးေႀကာင္းေျပာႀကားခဲ့ပါသည္။ ယခုမွစ၍နိုင္ငံျခားရိွ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကိုလက္ခံျခင္းနွင့္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္
ငံအတြင္းဒုကၡသည္ေလွ်ာက္ထားသူမ်ားကို ဒုကၡသည္အျဖစ္ လက္ခံျခင္းနွစ္မ်ိဳးစလုံးကို အတူယွဥ္တဲြ၍ တိုးခ်ဲ ့ျမွင့္တင္သြားျခင္း
ကိုျပဳလုပ္ရမည္ျဖစ္ေႀကာင္းေျပာႀကားသြားခဲ့ပါသည္။ ထို ့အျပင္ ယေန ့ေရာက္ရိွလာေသာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ား အမ်ားဆုံးစိုးရိမ္ပူပန္
ႀကေသာ အရာမ်ားမွာ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံတြင္ မည္ကဲ့သို ့အသက္ေမြးဝမ္းေႀကာင္းျပဳလုပ္ရမည္နည္းဆိုသည္နွင့္ ဂ်ပန္လူ ့အဖဲြ ့အစည္း
အတြင္းမည္ကဲ့သို ့ဝင္ဆန္ ့ေအာင္လုပ္ရမည္နည္း စသည္တို ့ျဖစ္ေႀကာင္းေျပာႀကားသြားပါသည္။ ထို ့အျပင္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံသို ့
ေရာက္ရိွလာေသာ ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကို မည္ကဲ့သို ့ကူညီေထာက္ပန္ ့မည္လဲဟူေသာေမးခြန္းကိုျပန္လည္ေျဖႀကားရာတြင္ ဂ်ပန္
နိုင္ငံသည္ ကမၻာ ့ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအတြက္ ေငြေႀကးေျမာက္ျမားစြာေထာက္ပန္ ့လွ်က္ရိွရာ အဆိုပါေထာက္ပန္ ့ေငြ၏ (၀.၁)ရာခိုင္နႈန္း
ကိုအသုံးျပဳလွ်င္ ပင္ လုံေလာက္သည္ဟု မိမိထင္ျမင္ေႀကာင္းနွင့္ ဂ်ပန္အစိုးရက အမွန္တကယ္ပန္ ့ပိုးသင့္ေႀကာင္းေျပာႀကားသြား
ပါသည္။
ယေန ့ေရာက္ရိွလာေသာ ကရင္ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားအတြက္ ကရင္ဘာသာစကားျပန္အျဖစ္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံေရာက္ကရင္ဒုကၡသည္
တစ္ဦးျဖစ္ျပီး ျမန္မာ့ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးကိုလုပ္ေဆာင္လွ်က္ရိွေသာ ကရင္အမ်ိဳးသားနိုင္ငံေရးအဖဲြ ့အစည္းတစ္ခုျဖစ္ေသာKNL-JAPAN
ေခါင္းေဆာင္ ကိုေစာဘလွသိန္းမွေဆာင္ရြက္ေပးခဲ့ျပီး ယေန ့ေရာက္ရိွလာေသာကရင္ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားကို (၆)လ ႀကာသင္တန္းအမ်ိဳး
ေပးမည္ျဖစ္ျပီး အဆိုပါကာလအတြင္း ျပင္ပသို ့အဆက္အသြယ္လုပ္ခြင့္ကိုကန္ ့သတ္ထားမည္ျဖစ္ျပီး သင္တန္းကာလ(၆) လအျပီး
တြင္ မိမိတို ့ႀကိဳက္နွစ္သက္သလို ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံတြင္ေနထိုင္လုပ္ကိုင္စားေသာက္နိုင္မည္ျဖစ္ေႀကာင္း ကိုေစာဘလွသိန္းမွတဆင့္သိရိွ
ခဲ့ရပါသည္။
သို ့ျဖစ္ရာကရင္ဒုကၡသည္မ်ားမိမိတို ့ေျခေထာက္ေပၚမိမိတို ့ရပ္တည္နိုင္ရန္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံရိွျမန္မာနိုင္ငံသား
ဒီမိုကေရစီေရးအင္အားစုမ်ားအေနျဖင့္ မိမိတို ့တတ္အားသေရြ ့အကူအညီေပးရန္တာဝန္ရိွေပသည္။
ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံ၏ဒုကၡသည္ျပႆနာမွာ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအတြင္းယေန ့အုပ္ခ်ဳပ္ေနေသာ စစ္အာဏာရွင္
စနစ္၏ ေနာက္ဆက္တဲြ ဆိုးက်ိဳးမ်ားျဖစ္ရာ အဆိုပါျမန္မာျပည္တြင္းရိွ နိုင္ငံေရးျပႆနာကိုေျဖရွင္းေရးမွာ အဓိကနွင့္အေျခခံ
အေႀကာင္းအရင္းျဖစ္ရာ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံအတြင္း စစ္မွန္ေသာနိုင္ငံေရးျပဳျပင္ေျပာင္းလဲမႈမ်ားျဖစ္ရန္အတြက္ ဂ်ပန္နိုင္ငံအစိုးရအေနျဖင့္
အေမရိကန္ျပည္ေထာင္စုအပါအဝင္ ကမၻာ ့ဒီမိုကေရစီနိုင္ငံမ်ားနွင့္အတူလက္တဲြ၍ ျမန္မာစစ္အာဏာရွင္မ်ားအေပၚပိုမိုဖိအားေပး
လုပ္ေဆာင္သြားမွသာလွ်င္ ျမန္မာနိုင္ငံျပည္သူမ်ားအေပၚအမွန္တကယ္ကူညီရာေရာက္မည္ျဖစ္ေပသည္။
သတင္းမွတ္တမ္းနွင့္ေဝဖန္ခ်က္။ ။ ဘုန္းလိႈင္-FWUBC
ဗီြဒီယို-日テレNEWS24
ဓါတ္ပုံ-FWUBC
The Jakarta Post - Malaysia plans IDs for refugees to prevent arrest
The Jakarta Post - Malaysia plans IDs for refugees to prevent arrest
The Associated Press , Kuala Lumpur | Mon, 02/01/2010 1:14 PM | World
Malaysia plans to issue identification cards to refugees who are recognized by the United Nations, allowing them to stay in the country temporarily and avoid arrest as illegal immigrants.
Malaysia, which has declined to join the U.N. convention on refugees for fear of attracting a flood of migrants, previously has arrested refugees frequently as illegal aliens.
Mostly from Myanmar, the refugees often have spent months in overcrowded detention center and faced caning and deportation.
The plans announced Monday reflect a softening of Malaysia's position toward the refugees, although it continues to refuse them official recognition.
Home Ministry Secretary General Mahmood Adam said the government would work with the U.N. refugee agency to issue the cards so immigration enfocement personnel would recognize and spare U.N.-designated refugees.
"As long as they are recognized as refugees by the U.N., they can stay here temporarily, " he told The Associate Press. "They cannot work here, but they can do odd jobs."
He could not give an exact timeline but said the initiative was in the "final stage."
According to the U.N. agency, about 75,600 refugees and asylum-seekers were in Malaysia as of November. Most fled persecution in Myanmar.
Yante Ismal, a spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, welcomed the development and further discussions to form a documentation system.
"Proper documentation for refugees is essential to their protection," she said.
All of the refugees in Malaysia are waiting to be resettled to a third countr that officially accepts refugees, which grants them legal status and the right to work.
Refugee treatment under spotlight
http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20090618f1.html
Thursday, June 18, 2009
Asia-Pacific region watching how Japan handles new program for people fleeing Myanmar
By SETSUKO KAMIYA
Staff writer
Nongovernmental organizations in the Asia-Pacific region supporting asylum seekers say they are watching with great interest how Japan will handle the resettlement of people from Myanmar starting next year, because it will influence their nations.
Helping hands: Panelists from the U.S., Myanmar, Hong Kong, Thailand and Malaysia discuss refugee support at an international symposium Saturday in Minato Ward, Tokyo. SETSUKO KAMIYA
Panelists at an international symposium titled "Refugee Protection in the New Era and Civil Society" in Minato Ward, Tokyo, on Saturday also said getting the word out on the need for humanitarian assistance is growing increasingly necessary in these dire economic times when people are losing their jobs and feel supporting refugees should not be a priority.
Organized by the Japan Association for Refugees, the symposium drew participants from NGOs in Australia, the United States, South Korea, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Thailand and Japan.
In December, Japan announced it will accept 30 Myanmar people a year from refugee camps in Thailand for the next three years, with the support of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.
Japan will be the first Asian country to take in refugees living in foreign camps. The U.S. and Australia have taken in thousands of such refugees, but a majority of people seeking asylum in Japan came directly from their homeland. A total of 1,599 people applied for political refuge in Japan last year.
"Resettling the 30 refugees each year for the next three years, this may not be a significant number but is a significant milestone for your country," said Christine Petrie, deputy director of the International Rescue Committee in the U.S., a group that helped about 10,000 refugees settle in America last year. The country as a whole took in more than 60,000.
"It's an initiative that cannot afford to fail, because this small number will then set the tone as we move forward in further developing refugee programs," she said.
Eri Ishikawa, secretary general of JAR, said that if the three-year pilot program is successful, she hopes to see Japan expand the number of nationalities that will be accepted, like Australia, which uses an allotment system.
Malaysia and Thailand have yet to sign the U.N. Convention Related to the Status of Refugees but have the most seekers registered with their local UNHCR offices. NGOs in these countries said they work to protect and empower the refugees, who do not hold legal status and face severe discrimination.
Although China has signed the convention, it does not apply to Hong Kong because of the two-government system, but legal professionals there are providing assistance to refugees.
Asked how NGOs are dealing with prejudice against refugees as well as the overall lack of understanding by society toward humanitarian aid, Tamara Domicelj of the Refugee Council of Australia said demonstrating how refugees are making significant contributions to their new country is important.
This was echoed by Lee Ho Taeg, president of South Korean NGO Pnan, who said he tells opponents that "South Korea is the 10th major economically developed country in the world but only a small portion of refugees are being accepted, which is much smaller than other developed countries," he said. "The refugees devote themselves to Korean society. . . . They are not burdens. They are blessings."
Tin Win, a refugee from Myanmar who was granted political asylum by Japan in 1999 and is now president of the Federation of Workers' Union of Burmese Citizens in Japan, said that while he welcomes the resettlement program, there are still problems regarding local integration of the refugees.
He criticized the Japanese government for giving much more support to the Brazilian community than to refugees.
"I sympathize with many Brazilians who lost their jobs, but they can go back to their country. We refugees can't," he said.
Tin Win said the Myanmar community in Japan has focused on political activities in the hope that the situation in their home country will improve and they will be able to return. But as the number of refugees increases, they are facing integration issues as their children grow up and start attending school.
"We have been expecting that the situation in our country will change quickly and we will be able to get back. But the reality is not like that. So now I think we have to think about long-term settlement and about our children's future," he said.
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