Last year was one of the worst on record for refugees and the crisis is deepening in 2007 thanks to conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Sudan’s Darfur region. But the accelerating return of refugees to their homes in south Sudan in 2007 — some after more than two decades — is one bright spot in the otherwise bad year.
France is to begin flying humanitarian supplies into eastern Chad on Sunday to help tens of thousands of Sudanese refugees and Chadians displaced by violence in Darfur, an army spokesperson said on Friday. The humanitarian air bridge will likely only function for several weeks.
Insecurity, tension and attacks on aid convoys have this year added another 140Â 000 people to an estimated two million people displaced by civil war in Sudan’s western Darfur region, the United Nations said on Wednesday. Many of the camps set up for the homeless are full, the UN mission in Khartoum added in a report.
About a quarter of nearly 400 000 refugees who deserted Mogadishu during fighting earlier this year have returned to the Somali capital, the United Nations refugee agency said on Friday. But life in the war-scarred city was tough, with shortages of electricity and water, uncollected garbage clogging the streets and many businesses and schools shut, the agency said.
In the middle of the road into the Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon, scene of fierce fighting for the past three days, a woman lay shot, her body convulsing, unreachable by the army and Red Cross as snipers continued to fire over her. Inside the devastated camp, residents waited without water or electricity for a ceasefire to come into effect.
The United Nations agency for refugees began repatriating thousands of Congolese refugees in Zambia to the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) on Friday. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees said more than 400 refugees had been bussed from a refugee camp in northern Zambia to Lake Tanganyika, where they will be transported by ship to the DRC.
Hassan Abdallah stood in front of a group of young girls wearing bright dresses to greet the head of the United Nations refugee agency at Um Shalaya, a camp for Chadian refugees in Sudan’s war-torn Darfur region. Raising his arms high and urging the girls to repeat after him, he chanted: ”This is our land. Long live Chad.”
Johannesburg’s inner-city regeneration programme has led to the eviction recently of more than 100 refugees and asylum seekers, according to a feature posted on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) website. Their belongings are now piled on the pavement surrounding the Coronia Gardens building that had been home to many of them for years.
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/ 27 February 2007
More than half the children in refugee camps in Africa’s troubled Great Lakes region have been victims of some form of sexual abuse, a report by aid agency World Vision said on Monday. Some of them are forced to have sex just to get food because conditions in the camps are so wretched, the charity said.
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/ 31 January 2007
The UNHCR has launched a new policy to ensure that HIV-positive refugees around the world have access to life-prolonging ARV medication.