Agartala, Dec. 5: The Union home ministry's special secretary, Mahesh Kumar Singla, will visit the six Reang refugee camps in Kanchanpur subdivision tomorrow and hold discussions with the leaders of the refugees so that the stalled repatriation of the camps' inmates can begin in January.
Sources here said Singla will arrive at Agartala airport tomorrow morning and reach Kanchanpur by noon.
"He will visit the Naisingpara refugee camp to discuss with the camp inmates and their leaders the commencement of repatriation in January. Singhla will hold a review meeting with the district magistrate of North Tripura, Sandip Mahatre, to monitor the preparations being made by the district administration to begin the repatriation process," said Kanchanpur sub-divisional magistrate Santosh Deb, who has also been asked to attend the meeting.
Singla will fly to Guwahati en route to New Delhi on Wednesday. Deb said if all goes well, the repatriation will begin from the mid-January.
The leaders of the Mizoram Bru Displaced People's Forum have refused to speak to the local administration in Kanchanpur as well as the media on the issue.
Sources in the North Tripura district magistrate's office said a meeting had been held at the office of the Union home ministry's joint secretary, Satyendra Kumar Garg, in New Delhi on November 24. During this meeting, attended by representatives of the Tripura and Mizoram governments and refugee leaders, Garg made it clear that unless the refugee leaders cooperated in the repatriation, the Union home ministry would stop all grants for the upkeep of inmates in the six camps in Kanchanpur subdivision.
Upset over the pressure applied by the Union home ministry, the Forum leaders, who had earlier raised several demands as preconditions for letting repatriation commence, have kept quiet since.
The meeting in New Delhi had been preceded by a visit to the six camps by a 26-member delegation of officers and employees from the Mizoram government. After the process of counting and identification, the Mizo team finally declared that 32,759 refugees were qualified to be repatriated.
"The number of refugee heads identified for repatriation by the Mizoram government team belong to altogether 4,113 families. This is more than what we expected and now we are hoping that the repatriation process will start in January," said Deb.
The Forum has protested the omission of 1,050 Reang families from the list of possible repatriates. "We know that the Mizoram government has deliberately omitted these families who are bona fide permanent residents of Mizoram and took shelter in the camps in October 1997. They must be included in the list of identified repatriates," said Bruno Meshka, general secretary of the Forum.
He, however, stopped short of saying whether they would stall the repatriation unless these families are included in the list.