Iran to Improve Healthcare for Refugees
TEHRAN (Tasnim) – Iran is determined to address health problems of the foreigners that have taken refuge in the country, an official announced.
Managing director of department of foreign nationals affairs at Iran’s Interior Ministry, Aziz Kazemi, said on Sunday that the country is planning to “institutionalize health care” for the foreign refugees.
He made the comments in a ceremony held to inaugurate a medical center in the country’s northeastern city of Mashhad, which hosts a large number of Afghan refugees.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran bears heavy burdens in managing (affairs of) the expatriates,” Kazemi added.
Back in June, Interior Minister Abdolreza Rahmani Fazli underscored that Iran is committed to finding a lasting solution to the problems of Afghan refugees.
“The Islamic Republic of Iran not only tried to meet the primary needs of the Afghan refugees, but also has provided equal opportunities for them to study and acquire vocational skills,” the minister said in the international annual meeting of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees in the Swiss city of Geneva.
And earlier in May, UN resident coordinator in Iran Garry Lewis appreciated the measures adopted by the Islamic Republic in hosting foreign nationals, saying Iran is the world’s second biggest country accepting foreign refugees.
“Iran has very well hosted the refugees over the past three decades,” he said, adding that preceded by Pakistan, Iran is the second country in the world that accepts the highest number of refugees.
Out of the total 880,000 registered refugees in Iran, Lewis explained, 840,000 are Afghans and the rest come from Iraq.
He also pointed to the living conditions of the foreign nationals in Iran, saying 97 percent of the refugees reside in the cities, while only 3 percent are located in the refugee camps.
The high rate of Afghans living in cities is a sign that Iran has taken valuable measures for the refugees’ health and occupation, Lewis noted.
The UN representative said some 10,000 Afghan refugees return to their country from Iran each year, stressing that stability should prevail in Afghanistan so that more Afghans would return home of their own volition.
Iran has hosted Afghan refugees since the late 1970s following the occupation of their country by the Soviet Union troops. Although many of those refugees have returned to their country voluntarily, there are still hundreds of thousands of documented and undocumented Afghans in Iran.
