UNHCR to hand over refugee responsibilities to other agencies

IRIN April 3 The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Uzbekistan is seeking alternative arrangements to meet the needs of 1,800 refugees in the country. The move follows a March ultimatum by the Uzbek Ministry of Foreign Affairs for UNHCR to close down its Uzbek office by 17 April. "We are in the process of closing. There will be no office on order from the government, but we have already proposed a request on further activity on behalf of refugees. We want to continue to help the refugees and our alternatives are to arrange the main activities under the umbrella of UNDP [United Nations Development Programme]," Abdul Karim Ghoul, UNHCR representative in Uzbekistan, said from the capital Tashkent, on Monday. Uzbekistan is the only Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) country that is not a party to either the 1951 Refugee Convention or its 1967 Protocol. The former Soviet republic has no national legislation to guide its policy on refugees or any administrative asylum procedure. UNHCR opened its office in the country in 1993 and has focused on the voluntary repatriation and resettlement of refugees mainly from Afghanistan. Uzbekistan is also home to a number of Tajiks who fled the civil war there in the nineties, although they are not recognised as official refugees. "They [the refugees] are scared and disappointed. Some have been accepted to another country but are waiting on formalities, but others will simply remain in the country. It is difficult. Right now we are waiting on a response from the government on the arrangement with UNDP," Ghoul added. Relations between Tashkent and the UN refugee agency have been strained for the past 10 months. Some 440 asylum-seekers - who fled a violent clampdown on protests in the eastern Uzbek city of Andijan and crossed into southern Kyrgyzstan in May 2005 - were given refugee status and evacuated to Romania, while Tashkent wanted them to be extradited to face charges of terrorism. The UN refugee agency was told by the government to leave Uzbekistan on 17 March, because "the UNHCR office has fully implemented its tasks and there were therefore no evident reasons for it to remain in the country".