Shelter is precious in the refugee camps along the rocky road north of Muzaffarabad, the battered capital of Pakistani Kashmir. Hardly an inch is vacant as tents, rickety shelters and half-destroyed houses jostle for space along a narrow strip of land between the steep mountains and a rushing, slate-blue river.
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/ 26 September 2006
The growing tide of Somalis fleeing conflict at home has raised the number of refugees in Kenya to the highest for a decade and is threatening to exhaust food aid stocks, the United Nations warned on Tuesday. About 24Â 000 people have entered the Dadaab camps in northern Kenya since the start of the year, the UN World Food Programme said.
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/ 17 September 2006
Refugees who fled war-torn Somalia in search of safety and a better life in South Africa now fear becoming the next victims in a string of murders of their compatriots in the Cape peninsula. ”I ran from the bullet to find violence here,” said Malyun Aden, who ran a clothing store at Masiphumelele, near Cape Town, until it was trashed in mob attacks last month.
When the guns went silent in Aitta Shaab, a war-ravaged village close to the Israeli border, three children skipped through the rubble looking for a little fun. Hurdling over lumps of crushed concrete and dodging spikes of twisted metal, Sukna, Hassan and Merwa, aged 10 to 12, paused before a curious object.
Lebanese refugees flooded back to their homes in the war-ravaged south on Tuesday as the truce held for a second day and Israeli forces began a slow withdrawal. People travelled south at a rate of 6Â 000 per hour, cramming into cars stacked with mattresses and bags in defiance of renewed Israeli threats.
Thousands of Liberian refugees in the state of Minnesota will have a chance to share their harrowing stories on Thursday when the United States branch of the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Commission is launched at the state capital. Participants will be able to build a record that will reveal both sides of the Liberian civil war.
The Pretoria High Court on Friday turned down an application by 15 refugees to set aside a refusal by the Private Security Industry Regulatory Authority not to register them as security guards. Their registration was earlier refused on the grounds that they were neither South African citizens nor permanent residents.
The number of international refugees has fallen to its lowest level in a quarter of a century but civil wars have led to a big rise in those forced to flee their homes while staying within the boundaries of their country, according to the United Nations. With millions returning to countries such as Afghanistan, Angola and Sierra Leone, refugee numbers now stand at 9,2-million.
Chad’s President Idriss Déby, heeding international calls to protect refugees from Sudan’s volatile Darfur region, has backed off a threat to expel them, despite blaming Khartoum for last week’s deadly rebel attack on the capital, a United Nations official said.
Before the massive earthquake that laid waste to a swathe of South Asia on October 8 last year, Assia Begum had four children. A few terrifying minutes afterwards, she had nine. Assia instantly took charge of five children born to her husband’s second wife, Shenaz, who lay crushed to death in the ruins of their shared house.