MALI-POPULATION: Tuareg Repatriation Dubbed Success Story

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Feb 6 1997 (IPS) - The voluntary repatriation of thousands of Tuareg refugees to Mali from neighbouring countries is a rare success story out of Africa, according a top UNHCR official.

“It is something which we have to recognise and acknowledge because Africa happens to be labelled as a continent of crisis, a continent of refugees, with the largest number ever of refugees in the world,” says Albert-Alain Peters of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

Peters, who is based in the UNHCR headquarters in Geneva, told journalists here this week that not much had been heard about the Taureg — a light-skinned nomadic people — returning from exile.

The UNHCR official, who is in charge of West Africa, said he had just returned from Timbuktu, Mali, where he had found 7,000 Taureg returnees farming in the sun-scorched Sahara desert.

“The desert is extremely arid, and the environment extremely hostile. I saw them tilling it … to be able to reap the first harvest of rice, which is really something worth mentioning,” he said.

Since November last, the UN agency has been organising convoys on a weekly basis to take the refugees back home to the country they fled at the height of a rebellion by dissatisfied Tuareg groups.

It estimates that 62,000 more refugees will ask to return to Mali in the course of 1997 — 14,000 from Algeria, 15,000 from Burkina Faso, 15,000 from Mauritania and 18,000 from Niger.

“I think by the end of 1998 the Tuareg problem will just be a matter of the past,” said Peters.

The Tuareg are a Saharan people who live in Algeria, Mauritania, Libya, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger. They number about 500,000 in Mali, amounting to less than seven percent of the West African country’s population, while another 750,000 are in Niger.

The roots of the Tuareg rebellion date back to severe droughts in 1994 and in the early 1980s, which killed much of their livestock and led many of the nomads to migrate to Algeria and Libya, where some joined the Islamic Legion.

Many returned around 1990 and, in July of that year, Tuareg bands attacked locations in the north of Mali, whose government accused them of attempting to set up a secessionist state. This led to a repressive campaign by the armed forces and attacks by the rebels against military outposts and civilian targets.

The insecurity forced more Tuareg into exile.

A January 1991 peace agreement failed to end the conflict and, after inadequate funding delayed the implementation of a National Covenant signed in April 1992 by the government and Tuareg representatives, fighting broke out again in 1993.

The implementation of the covenant, which provides for the ex- rebels to join the army or the civil service, and for development projects to be launched in the northern provinces under broadly independent management, did not really begin until 1994.

Since then, northern Mali has been returning to normalcy, but the repatriation of refugees has been slowed down by a number of factors, including insufficient international aid, delays in site rehabilitation projects and problems in incoporating some of the ex-rebels into the army and providing civilian jobs for others.

This has been compounded by the fact that statistics of Malian refugees have proved difficult to compile, mainly because most are nomads.

According to the latest UNHCR report, made available to IPS on Thursday, there were some 82,000 Malian refugees in Mauritania (22,000), Burkina Faso (25,000), Niger (24,000) and Algeria (12,000) in November 1996.

According to the report, 35 percent of the Malian refugees in Mauritania were Tuareg and 65 percent were Moors (a related Saharan people). In Burkina Faso, most were Taureg.

Since 1995, UNHCR has been running a programme to repatriate them. “In a single year, between November 1995 and November 1996, some 77,000 Malian refugees returned to their homes,” said Peters.

Under a new repatriation programme drawn up in September in Bamako by UNHCR and its partners, including Mali’s government and Tuareg representatives, the refugees are given a repatriation grant before leaving their host countries and a settlement grant three months after their return home.

Each of the grants comes in the form of three months’ supply of food and other essentials.

In order to provide reception facilities for the returnees and help them resettle, the UNHCR has established two sub-offices, in the northern towns of Timbuktu and Gao, as well as two secondary offices in other locations. By the end of November, five transit centres were operational in Mali.

“This to me is a success story out of Africa,” said Peters.