SOMALI-POPULATION: Refugees Prepare To Return Home

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Jan 23 1997 (IPS) - Somali refugees will next week begin returning to their homes after six years in exile in Ethiopia, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office here.

The programme will start with some 10,000 Somali refugees next week, and the agency says it is organising a full programme to return some 100,000 Somali refugees in Ethiopia to their home this year. “The refugees are returning home voluntarily,” said Millicent Mutula of the UNHCR.

She told IPS on Wednesday that the UNHCR would repatriate the refugees to northwest Somalia — a territory widely known as the republic of Somaliland, which split from Somalia in 1991.

Somaliland, which the United Nations refers to as northwest Somalia, has not been recognised by other countries. It is a former British protectorate which merged with the Italian colony of southern Somalia to form the Republic of Somalia in 1960.

The proposed repatriation is a result of last year’s visit of a group of 10 Somali refugees to northwest Somalia to promote the voluntary repatriation of some 275,000 Somali refugees in Ethiopia.

The group crossed Ethiopia’s border town of Teferi Ber on Aug. 10 last year and entered Somalia through Togwajale, to look at 10 potential areas, which have enjoyed relative peace and stability over the past 19 months, where the refugees can re-settle.

More than 900,000 Somali refugees fled their country following a civil war that led to the overthrow of President Siad Barre in January 1991 and the subsequent famine.

Somali refugees in large numbers began to return to Somalia spontaneously in 1992, but there are still 275,000 of them in Ethiopia, 131,278 in Kenya, 20,000 in Djibouti and 5,000 in Yemen.

UNHCR says it has spent 13.8 million U.S. dollars on rehabilitation and integration projects in northwest Somalia since 1992, including the construction of schools, repair of water facilities and rehabilitation of hospitals.

A large part of the amount was spent on clearing landmines, particularly around Hargeisa, the country’s second largest city.

UNHCR also has repatriated Somali refugees from Kenya by land, air and sea into relatively peaceful areas of Somalia in the past several years. “Last year 2,000 Somalis returned to their country from Kenya,” said Mutuli.

Kenya, a relatively stable country, hosts 169,813 refugees from Somalia, Sudan, Burundi, Rwanda, Zaire, Eritrea and Angola. The majority of the Somali refugees in Kenya come from the regions near the border with Kenya.

Unable to cope with the large number of refugees, the government of President Daniel Arap Moi has been trying to stem the flow of the refugees towards Kenya.

Early this month (January) “a number of Rwandan refugees”, who were apparently expelled from Tanzania or Zaire, were arrested by Kenyan authorities for entering the country illegally.

A local aid worker here Thursday urged Kenya to adopt the type of decision taken in June 1996 by the UN World Food Programme (WFP) to distribute 60 tonnes of urgently- needed relief food to more than 11,000 villagers at Bu’aale and Sekow districts in the Middle Juba Valey in Somalia, to prevent further population movements towards the Kenyan border due to hunger and insecurity.

“That type of cross-border relief food delivery is the best to prevent refugees from pouring into Kenya,” said the aid worker, who declined to be named.

The Juba Valley, on the border with Kenya, is one of the most vulnerable areas of Somalia. The area is insecure due to banditry and clan fighting, which coupled with floods and drought, has led to major food shortages.

Although there is no sign of mass repatriation from Kenya, Somali refugees here are watching with interest the political development in their country following this week’s historic hand- shake between Somalia’s powerful warlords, Ali Mahdi and Hussein Aideed, in the capital Mogadishu.

The two have agreed to remove the ‘greenline’ barrier that divides the dusty city, placing one section of the population under Mahdi in the south, and the other under Aideed in the north.

“We hope that the truce that followed the handshake will last,” said Farah Dimbil, a Somali businesman in the Kenyan capital.

He told IPS on Thursday that Somalis were tired of the fighting in their country. “We are desperate to go home if only peace will return to our beloved country,” he said.

Somalia began slipping into chaos following the collapse of a loose alliance of a group of rebel army officers that toppled Barre.

Since then, Somalia has been at the mercy of warlords who have split the Horn of African country into fiefdoms.