UNHCR closure will leave at least 2,000 refugees vulnerable

The fate of thousands of refugees in Uzbekistan remained unclear on Tuesday following a decision by Tashkent to close the national office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). “Uzbekistan has said that they want to close our operations because they feel that we’ve finished our work [in the country],” Astrid van Genderen Stort, a spokeswoman for UNHCR, said from the UN agency’s headquarters in Geneva. “Of course UNHCR does not think it has finished its work in Uzbekistan, which includes among many other things, the care of some 2,000 Afghans in the country,” van Genderen Stort added. Uzbekistan is also home to a number of Tajiks who fled the civil war there, but they are not recognised as official refugees. Her comments came after the Uzbek foreign ministry told UNHCR on Friday that it had fully implemented its tasks and there was therefore no reason for it to remain in the Central Asian nation. “In this regard, the ministry requests UNHCR to close its office in Tashkent within one month," the order said. Ceasing operations in Uzbekistan would not be easy or quick, the refugee agency pointed out. “Closing operations is not something that you can do in one day. We have people to take care of – 2,000 Afghans in Uzbekistan that depend on our assistance, education and healthcare,” van Genderen Stort maintained. Uzbekistan is the only former Soviet republic that has neither acceded to the 1951 Refugee Convention nor the 1967 Protocol. “It still has a long way to go in the development of national legislation with regard to refugees. That is something where we normally work with governments on capacity building and help them develop this,” the UNHCR official maintained. 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. “There has been irritation over the past year over the Andijan events,” van Genderen Stort admitted. UNHCR believes that differences of opinion or disagreements with governments should not have a negative affect on relations with these governments. “We do our work according to our mandate. But disagreements do not have to lead to telling an agency to leave,” she said. Tashkent is reported to be unhappy about a decision by UNHCR in Kazakhstan to facilitate Imam Abidkhan Nazarov, an Uzbek national, in obtaining political asylum in an unnamed third country last week. Nazarov had been living secretly in Kazakhstan for the last eight years following moves by Uzbek authorities to arrest him on charges of religious extremism and having connections with the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan (IMU); an organisation labelled as terrorist by the Uzbek government and the US. The UN refugee agency opened its office in Uzbekistan in 1993 to support its operations during the civil war in Tajikistan in the mid-1990s and in northern Afghanistan.