COLOMBO, Sri Lanka — A bunch of Rohingya refugees residing in Sri Lanka staged a protest outdoors the workplace of the U.N. refugee company Tuesday, saying they concern dropping their residing allowance as soon as the company’s workplace within the island nation closes on the finish of this 12 months.
The protesters additionally need to be resettled in a foreign country as a result of Sri Lanka doesn’t enable them to stay there completely.
About 100 Rohingya refugees stay in Sri Lanka, most of them rescued at sea by the navy whereas they have been making an attempt to succeed in Indonesia after fleeing Myanmar for Bangladesh.
About 740,000 Rohingya have been resettled in Bangladesh after fleeing their houses in Myanmar to flee a brutal counterinsurgency marketing campaign by safety forces. However the camps in Bangladesh are squalid, with surging gang violence and rampant starvation, main many to flee once more.
Ruki Fernando, a rights activist in Sri Lanka, stated the refugees obtain primary allowance from the U.N. company and are supplied with restricted well being care by the Sri Lankan authorities. Nonetheless, the refugee youngsters do not obtain schooling and adults aren’t allowed to work.
“We didn’t intend to come back to Sri Lanka, however have been rescued off the seas in Sri Lanka and dropped at Sri Lanka by the navy. We additionally needed to endure a tough time in detention in Sri Lanka and nonetheless stay a really arduous life in a brand new nation the place we will’t communicate our language, and lots of don’t have members of the family, family members and mates,” the refugees stated in a petition to the U.N. company’s consultant.
The petition stated the refugees have been upset to study of the workplace’s upcoming closure and pleaded for it to “assist us discover a everlasting answer in a foreign country that can assist us overcome uncertainty and never make us and our youngsters completely stateless.”
The U.N. refugee company couldn’t instantly be reached Tuesday.
The workplace in Sri Lanka was particularly energetic in the course of the nation’s quarter-century civil warfare which resulted in 2009.