'Origin countries must help resettle migrants'

Tertiani ZB Simanjuntak, The Jakarta Post, Jakarta

Complicated problems concerning the vast number of illegal migrants passing through transitory countries would be easier to solve if the countries of origin accepted their stranded nationals back, an executive of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said here on Monday.

Jakarta-based UNHCR regional representative Raymond Hall told a discussion that a two-way solution was badly needed to overcome the problems of the abundant applications for refugee status at a time when more people, mostly from the Middle East, kept entering Indonesia as one of their transitory points.

Hall said that besides the effort to gain more support from the resettlement countries to respond faster to requests to accept people given refugee status, the high commissioner also needed support from the migrants' states of origin to take back those whose requests were turned down.

"Those people cannot simply end up in Indonesia ... Indonesia's role is just to allow the migrants to stay temporarily ... We need support from both the resettlement countries and the countries of origin to take back their nationals who fail to get refugee status," he said.

Hall said many migrants were considered stateless since they no longer possessed documents, while the embassies of their claimed countries of origin did not recognize them. Hall pointed out that a more collaborated approach was needed to persuade the countries of origin to accept the migrants.

"If the countries of origin really make a genuine effort to decide even if a person doesn't have any documents, they can decide whether this person is their citizen ... in some cases it's the lack of political will to decide and not the lack of ability. We need more commitment," he added.

Monday's discussion was made in conjunction with the plan to hold a regional ministerial conference in Bali next month on illegal migration and asylum-seeking issues which will produce action plans that also involve the states of origin, transitory countries, the destination and the resettlement countries.

As of Dec. 31, 2001, at least 2,835 migrants have been stranded in several regions of Indonesia en route to Australia or New Zealand. Only 541 of them have been recognized as refugees and are awaiting departure to resettlement countries, such as Sweden, Canada and the United States.