Refugees: Turkmenistan Hosts Meeting on Muslim-World Refugees

This article originally appeared in the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, www.iwpr.net

Turkmenistan Hosts Meeting on Muslim-World Refugees

 By News Briefing Central Asia - News Briefing Central Asia

Foreign ministers from the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, OIC, will gather in Turkmenistan’s capital Ashgabat on May 10-11 to discuss the growing refugee problem affecting member states.

The conference, entitled “Refugees in the Muslim World” and co-organised by the United Nations refugee agency UNHCR, is expected to focus on the Middle East, where unrest in Syria has forced over 20,000 people to flee to Turkey.

The issue is also important to the OIC’s Central Asian members, since there are an estimated 10,000 refugees and asylum seekers across the region, most of them Afghans, Chechens, and Uighurs from China.

Denis Jivaga of the Kazakstan International Bureau for Human Rights and Rule of Law says security and the right to remain are the major issues facing refugees in Central Asia, as there have been cases where one state has sent people back to another despite being fully aware they were at risk of incarceration and torture.

"We’ve witnessed how people escaping from a regime’s persecution were deported back to that country in contravention of all international conventions, thus condemning them to torture and inhumane treatment," Jivaga told NBCentralAsia.

He added that Central Asian governments viewed these issues as political rather than humanitarian matters, which meant refugees could not count on any real guarantees.

This article was produced as part of News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.