Costa Rica Sanctuary for Colombian Refugees
Colombians fleeing their country receive protection and assistance in Costa Rica. But integration is difficult, and the refugees continue to face threats from paid killers sent from the war-torn country they fled.

Costa Rica has taken in around 10,000 of Colombia's 500,000 refugees, said Philippe Lavanchy, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Americas bureau director.

Nearly all of the 10,636 refugees under UNHCR protection in this Central American country are from Colombia.

"My main objective is to stress the importance of the role Costa Rica has played in granting refuge to people" displaced by internal armed conflicts, said Lavanchy last week on a visit to Costa Rica in preparation for the activities surrounding World Refugee Day, which is celebrated today, June 20.

Costa Rica has a strong tradition of providing asylum. "Over 20 years ago, they took in a good number of Salvadoran and Nicaraguan refugees, and that tradition is still alive today," said Lavanchy.

One-third of the 30,000 Colombians living in Costa Rica are refugees. The producer of the "Tierra compartida" radio programme, Henry Rodríguez, is one of them.

The Colombian journalist has been living in Costa Rica since 2000, when he was forced to leave his country after covering the peace talks between the government and guerrillas in the "demilitarized zone" in San Vicente del Cagüán in the southern Colombian province of Caquetá.

"I did not receive direct death threats like three of my colleagues, but we received a string of very strange telephone calls at my house, and we decided to come to Costa Rica," he told IPS.

"Being a refugee generates problems of rejection from the business community. It carries a stigma," added Rodríguez.

Another difficulty, said Lavanchy, is that "every time a violent incident occurs, refugees or people of certain nationalities are blamed."

Four Decades of Armed Conflict
Colombia's four-decade armed conflict, in which the army and far-right paramilitaries - which have partially demobilized through negotiations with the government - face off with leftwing guerrillas, has led to the forced displacement of millions of people, while hundreds of thousands have fled to neighbouring countries.

That situation has given rise to the UNHCR's biggest operation in the Americas.

Colombia has the third largest population of internally displaced persons (IDPs) in the world, after Sudan and Angola. The UNHCR estimates that there are three million IDPs in Colombia, out of a total population of 44 million.

More than 130 Colombian and international organizations, including the UNHCR, decided to declare 2007 the Year of the Rights of Internally Displaced Persons in Colombia.