‘South Asia has the fourth largest concentration of refugees in the world’. Thus began the first article of Refugee Watch issued a decade ago. This apparently simple sentence reflects both the clarity of vision and concern of Refugee Watch and of course of South Asia Forum for Human Rights (SAFHR) and Mahanirban Calcutta Research Group (MCRG) – the two organizations, responsible for bringing out Refugee Watch – to the issues of refugees in South Asia.

We have selected portions of Anug Phyro's and Tapan Bose's apparently dated article, ‘Refugees in South Asia: An Overview’ only to show our readers how from the very first issue Refugee Watch relentlessly engaged itself with such a huge human crisis in this part of the world. However, besides the conventional South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC) countries, some articles, included in this section, also narrate the situations in Afghanistan (historically, in case of Afghanistan) and Burma.

Another important piece, ‘Internally Displaced Persons in Sri Lanka’, by Joe Williams, is also a dated one, published in Refugee Watch in its second issue. However, notwithstanding the dated nature of data, it is indeed an extensive article on the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in a country that is, for more than two decades, torn in an almost perpetual ghastly strife. Williams analyses the geographical dimension of the problem and concentrates on north-east Sri Lanka, especially on the Jafna peninsula, mostly populated by the Sri Lankan Tamils.