ISLAMABAD, 14 October 2006 — The UN refugee agency will urge Muslim nations to boost multilateral cooperation to support the Islamic world’s nine million refugees at a meeting in Pakistan next month, a senior official said.
Wider collaboration would help the UNHCR deal with crises such as the Lebanon war, the Pakistan earthquake and the Asian tsunami, Indrika Ratwatte, UNHCR assistant representative in Pakistan, told AFP in an interview.
The conference of ministers from the 57-state Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the world’s largest grouping of Muslim countries, is being jointly convened by the UNHCR from Nov. 27-29 in Islamabad.
“Refugees and displacement issues in the OIC region are not going to go away. It is going to require a strategy,” Ratwatte said.
“I think all the participants would like to see a platform to foster some multilateral cooperation.” The conference is the first held by the OIC to focus exclusively on the problem of refugees in the Muslim world.
Ministers will deliberate on a so-called “Islamabad Declaration” documenting the group’s position on refugees and work out an action plan to find lasting solutions for displaced people.
Because the 9.4 million refugees hosted by OIC countries were unevenly distributed, it would help if the organization fostered more coordinated ways of sharing the resources of its member states to help them, Ratwatte said.
There are 20.8 million refugees worldwide, excluding Palestinian refugees.
Ratwatte said the OIC could help the UNHCR create a better mechanism to deal with sudden crises such as this summer’s Lebanon conflict as “usually it was down to the institutions and direct bilateral aid trickling down and not necessarily a coordinated framework.” This would include mobilizing political support within the Muslim world for refugee populations, Ratwatte said. The UN agency would also call at the conference for a more centralized system of funding for refugee agencies, Ratwatte added.
“The OIC is the second-largest international organization and many in the OIC are wealthy donors bilaterally. We are saying ‘look at earmarking some of these resources for the UNHCR,’” he said.
