UN agency: Many Colombians deported from Venezuela are refugees

Many of the Colombians deported from neighboring Venezuela were seekers of the status as refugees or were virtually refugees in the country, the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) said Thursday.

In a report about the situation in the Colombian-Venezuelan border region posted on its official website, the OCHA said, "Some 1,088 Colombians, including 244 minors, have been deported (from Venezuela) since Aug. 22 after the border was closed."

In addition, the OCHA report cited the International Committee of the Red Cross as saying that 4,260 others have voluntarily returned because of the outbreak of a humanitarian crisis in the border area.

The U.N. agency explained that there is still a lack of data on the exact number of the Colombian refugees deported from Venezuela, and urged those who have been deported from Venezuela this time to have themselves identified as soon as they arrive, and to clear their status in case they were seeking refuge in Venezuela.

"Within the returnee population, they have identified some cases of Colombian refugees and refugee seekers in Venezuela. There is no accurate information about how many of these cases there are," says the OCHA report.

The current humanitarian crisis along the border is caused by the unilateral decision of Venezuela's President Nicolas Maduro to close the border crossings and declare a state of emergency that has hit the people of the border region.

Over the past 40 years, Colombia has been torn apart by armed conflicts raging between the government on the one hand and guerilla forces including the FARC and the ELN, paramilitaries and narcotic drug traffickers on the other hand, which have cost the lives of an estimated 50,000-200,000 people, and which have also displaced millions of others.

There are 500,000-750,000 displaced Colombians seeking refuge in neighboring countries, with the number of those seeking shelter in Venezuela alone estimated at 250,000.

Recently, hundreds of Colombian refugees in Venezuela have reportedly waded across a border river with personal belongings back into Colombia, saying that they were forced out from their shelters in Venezuela and that they feared what might happen next if they stayed on.

Most of the Colombian refugees have lived for years in Ernesto Guevara, a poverty-stricken border village, or other nearby settlements in Venezuela, but they were forced to leave after Venezuelan authorities marked their shelters with a "D" sign for "demolition" last week.

Venezuela says the demolition is intended to crack down on paramilitary and smuggling gangs active along the border, but the fleeing Colombian refugees argued that they had nothing to do with the criminal gangs.

According to the OCHA report, thousands have left Venezuela for fear of reprisals and have not registered on the official lists upon arrival. As a result, they are not entitled to receive aid from the central Colombian government. At least 969 of the refugees were lodged in six shelters, while 369 have returned to their home towns.

In the report, the OCHA has also warned about the beginning of "cases of deportation and spontaneous return in the Colombian northeastern departments of Arauca and La Guajira" because of the humanitarian crisis.

Source: XINHUA