WEB DESK
The UN refugee affairs head said that granting citizenship to members of Myanmar’s Muslim Rohingya minority is crucial for achieving peace in the country’s western state of Rakhine, but economic development is also necessary.
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi was speaking in Bangkok today after an official visit to Myanmar.
Grandi said he received assurances from Myanmar’s top leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, that refugees from her country who have been sheltering in Thailand erom decades will be welcome back home.
More than 100,000 refugees from Myanmar, virtually all from ethnic minorities, live in camps in Thailand near the border. Grandi next visits Bangladesh, which hosts hundreds of thousands of Rohingya from Myanmar who have entered since the 1970s.
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 meager 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.
