POPULATION-EAST AFRICA: Somali Refugees Return Home

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

NAIROBI, Mar 30 1998 (IPS) - More than 700 Somali refugees are expected to return home this week, after spending seven years in exile in neighbouring Kenya.

The first group of the refugees, numbering 121, flew on Saturday to Somalia’s north-eastern port city of Bossasso on board a Hercules C-130 aircraft chartered by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).

The UNHCR says it expects to finalise the repatriation of the more than 700 returnees from the Daadab refugee camps in Kenya, on the border with Somalia, to Bossasso on Apr 2.

“I’m so happy this operation has taken off,” said UNHCR Field Officer Hafeeza Bokhari, after the first group of the refugees had returned home on Mar. 28. “The refugees were so happy, they were kissing us good-bye.”

UNHCR says its staff in Bossasso have been working with local and international aid agencies to implement quick impact projects across Somalia’s Northeast region, including providing funding for wells, hospitals and health care centres and income generation projects to help stabilise the local economy.

Each returnee receives six months of food aid or a cash equivalent, plus 30 U.S. Dollars for onward transportation to their home areas. UNHCR says its staff in Bossasso will distribute plastic sheeting, blankets and jerrycans to each family.

Since 1992, more than 115,000 Somali refugees have been repatriated from Kenyan refugee camps, according to the latest figure provided by the UNHCR. Kenya currently shelters some 178,000 refugees — down from a total of 420,000 in 1992.

Ten refugee camps across Kenya have been closed, with only three camps remaining near Dadaab in the Northeastern province, one camp at Kakuma, south of the Sudanese border. The last remaining camp near the Indian Ocean port of Mombasa, some 500 kilometres southeast of Nairobi, the capital city, will be closed in April following the repatriation of its 1,400 refugees to Somalia’s Bajunis Island, UNHCR says.

In addition to repatriation operations from Kenya, during February, UNHCR says it returned 10,000 Somalis from refugee camps in Ethiopia to Hargeisa in Northwest Somalia.

UNHCR says its staff in Ethiopia plans to repatriate some 7,000 Somalis to Boroma in early April before that country’s long rains begin.

More than one million Somalis fled to Kenya, Ethiopia, D’jibouti and Yemen when their country fell apart with the overthrow of President Mohamed Siad Barre in January 1991. Barre’s defeat by clan-based rebels left a power vacuum which his rivals, made up of over 20 warlords, have been fighting to fill ever since.

The refugees are returning home at a time when the unusually heavy rains, attributed to the El Nino effect, which began in mid- October, is tapering off.

But the Nairobi-based “Somalia Inter-Agency Flood Response” has warned that the situation in the flood-affected areas of southern Somalia has reached a critical stage.

“The upcoming rainy season — late March to May — could not only destroy the little recovery that has been achieved (in the sectors of agriculture and infrastructure), but it could also put people’s lives again at risk,” it says in its latest update on the situation in Somalia.

According to the agency, a build-up of clouds has been reported from many locations.

“Light showers were recorded in various areas. In Bardera (southern Somalia) rains were more heavy and they affected many sections of the roads in the area. With rivers full and embarkments broken in numerous places, renewed rainfall would be devastating at this stage for many critically flood-affected areas. A second flood-emergency cannot be excluded,” it says.

In fact, some 2,409 people were reported killed since the begining of the flood emergency which began at the end of October. More than 35,000 heads of livestocks were also killed and more than 60,000 hectares of crops and farmland destroyed, according to the agency.

The Famine Early Warning System (FEWA)/Somalia, which is also based here, estimates losses of crops in traditional underground granaries due to the floods and rain water seepage at 42,300 tonnes.

“The upcoming harvest is estimated to be reduced by at least 50,500 tonnes from the initial projection of 95,000 tonnes to 44,500 tonnes,” says FEWA.