Mizzima: Conference on Refugees in

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Conference on Refugees in South Asia being held in India

Calcutta, April 20, 2000
Mizzima News Group

?The trauma of uprooting, an ineffaceable nostalgia for a paradise lost
and millenarianism are the basic ingredients of the mental making of a
refugee?.

Speaking at an international conference on refugees in South Asia, Dr.
Prafulla Chakraborty, eminent historian from West Bengal said that
?rootlessness and a precarious hold on life made the refugees
emotionally unstable and gave them a fitful nervous energy and an
inferiority complex, which found expression in aggressive self-assertion
and in a sense of invulnerability?.

Emphasizing the needs of international and national humanitarian
organizations to attend the ?refugee mind?, Dr. Chakraborty, who himself
was a refugee from the then East Pakistan said that a refugee mind is a
sick mind and it suffers from a deep-seated malaise and thus the NGOs
need to take care of this tormented psyche.

The three-day International Conference on Forced Migration in South
Asian Region is being held in Calcutta, West Bengal of India and
participated by more than 40 participants from 14 countries, ranging
from scholars, policy makers, jurists, journalists to representatives of
national and international NGOs. The conference, which commenced today,
is organized by Centre for Refugee Studies, Jadavpur University in
Calcutta in collaboration with Refugee Studies Centre, University of
Oxford, Law Research Institute, Calcutta and International Law
Association, Calcutta Centre.

Speaking at the inaugural session today, Mr. J.M. Castro-Magluff, Deputy
Chief of Mission, UNHCR in New Delhi said that between 30 to 40 million
people have crossed the international boundaries since 1947 and 20 per
cent of them are found in South Asia. However, none of the government in
South Asia is a signatory to international refugee conventions like 1951
Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees.

Highlighting the lack of uniform laws dealing with refugees in India,
Justice Mukul Gopal Mukhopadhyay, Chairman of West Bengal Human Rights
Commission said that due to the lack of specific refugee law, the
treatment given to the Tibetan refugees in India by the Government of
India is quite different to thousands of Burma refugees in Mizoram State
of India. ?Even though they are ethnically same with the people in
Mizoram, the attitude towards these Burma refugees is stern?, said
Justice Mukul Gopal Mukhopadhyay.

In 1999, India hosted more than 2,92,000 refugees. This includes 16,000
persons from Afghanistan, 65,000 Chakmas from Bangladesh, 30,000
Bhutanese of Nepali origin, 50,000 Chin indigenous people from Burma and
nearly 600 pro-democracy activists from Burma, 1,10,000 Sri Lankan
Tamils, 1,10,000 Tibetans and some 700 refugees from other countries
such as Sudan, Somalia and Iran.