Chilean President Michelle Bachelet Thursday welcomed 117 Palestinian refugees to the country who arrived from the border of Iraq with Syria.
During a ceremony at the government headquarters, Bachelet recalled of her own exile experience in Germany during the coup d'etat in 1973 led by general Augusto Pinochet.
"I want to tell you that I know exactly how it feels to be a refugee in a strange country. I know it because I lived that, I also was a refugee", Bachelet said.
"One arrives to a place with an unknown language that is in many cases hard to learn. One arrives to a place with different culture and customs. One arrives to a place where we have to reconstruct our life from scratch", she added.
Chile received international solidarity when thousands of men and women had to leave their country, therefore, now "it is our turn to give it back", Bachelet said.
"In the Arab world hospitality is one of the most important values. And it is precisely the value that today we claim: we want to be your second homeland. Welcome, from now on this is your home," Bachelet told the refugees.
President of the Palestinian Federation in Chile Mauricio Abu Gosh thanked on behalf of the refugees the Chilean government's kind gesture.
The last group of Palestinian refugees arrived in Chile on Wednesday, making a total of 117 people, who have been arranged to live in the cities of La Calera, San Felipe and in the suburbs of the municipalities of Recoleta and Luloa.
The arrival of Palestinian refugees to Chile is organized by the Permanent Program of Solidary Transfer which was founded in 1999 in cooperation with the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
Source:Xinhua
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