Somalia: Concern Over Planned Relocation of Refugees From Kenya to Somalia

All Africa
Mogadishu — As plans to facilitate the return of hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees from neighbouring Kenya gather steam, serious doubts persist about whether conditions in Somalia are conducive to such a large-scale repatriation operation.

There are some 600,000 Somali refugees in Kenya, according to government figures, more than two thirds of whom live in the sprawling, 20-year-old Dadaab complex in the east of the country.

In recent years Kenya has repeatedly expressed a desire to ease its "refugee burden" and on 5 June President Uhuru Kenyatta and his Somali counterpart Hassan Sheikh Mohammed met in Nairobi to move the process forward. They agreed that a conference would be held in August to work out the modalities of repatriation and also to set up a tripartite committee with the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).

"This is part of Somali government policies... Somalia is now on the path to economic recovery as well as security improvement," said Abdirahman Omar Osman, an adviser to the Somali president, told IRIN.

Mohamed Omar Dalha, the deputy chairman of Somalia's Parliamentary Commission for Foreign Affairs, was more cautious. "It does not matter if they [the refugees] are sent to relatively peaceful areas like Mogadishu and Baidoa... [But] large swathes of the country are still controlled by militants. We have to be careful about the security of these people," he said.

Abdullahi Mohamed Shirwa, the chairman of a network of civil society organizations in central and southern Somalia, said of the planned relocations: "There are blasts - suicide attacks - and people are fleeing in the southern town of Kismayo as conflicts [are] renewed. The very reasons that forced these people to flee still exist, so there is no point why they should be returned. They will not have access to health [or] education services in these areas."

Dangerous narrativeMark Yarnell, Africa refugee advocate at Refugees International, told IRIN that while the international community should support those refugees who do want to repatriate voluntarily, "the narrative that Somalia is safe and ready for large-scale returns - when the federal government only controls a fraction of the country - is dangerous...