IRIN – Tens of thousands of refugees living in Kenyan cities will continue to suffer police harassment, lack of protection, violation of their human rights and discrimination, as long as the government fails to properly implement recent legislation, says a report by the Humanitarian Policy Group (HPG), International Rescue Committee (IRC) and Refugee Consortium of Kenya (RCK).

“The rights of such refugees to move freely within Kenya and reside in urban areas are currently unclear,” Sara Pavanello, a researcher with HPG at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), said during the launch of Hidden and Exposed: Urban Refugees in Nairobi.

“Urban refugees are often very mobile and are reluctant to come forward, making them a largely hidden population,” she said in Nairobi. “As the world urbanizes, refugees are increasingly moving to cities in the hope of finding a sense of community, safety and economic independence. Yet what many actually find are precarious living conditions and harassment, discrimination and poverty.”

Read more – http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=88562

(IRIN) – Clashes between government troops and Islamist insurgents have displaced more than 55,000 people from Mogadishu since the beginning of February, with many of them heading out of Somalia to neighbouring Kenya, according to the UN Refugee Agency. In the border town of Liboi, people told IRIN by phone that 300 to 400 Somali families were waiting there to be registered as refugees. In all, almost 570,000 Somalis are refugees and most of them live in camps in Kenya. “Staying in Mogadishu now is like a death sentence: you are not safe; your neighbour is not safe,” Hawo Sheiikh Ali, one of the refugees, told IRIN on 22 March.

Read more – http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=88515

(IRIN) – All Pherebonia Nyiramatabaro, 85, wants is land where she and her 15-year-old grandson can grow a few crops. Nyiramatabaro, living in a two-roomed hut in Juru A camp in the Nakivale Refugee Settlement, southwestern Uganda, is one of thousands of Rwandans hit by a Uganda government directive barring refugees from cultivation.

Under a pact between the Rwandan and Ugandan governments, Rwandan refugees were given until August 2009, with a month’s grace, to voluntarily repatriate. Only a few thousand left, however, and many returned to the camps, claiming they had not “been well received at home”. Officials of the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in Uganda say the Ugandan government has agreed to revisit the decision barring Rwandan refugees from land cultivation. However, the directive is still in force.

Nyiramatabaro is one of those who refused to leave for Rwanda. “At my age and after all my children have died, what or who am I going back to Rwanda for? I fled my home in Butare [province] in 2002 when I could no longer stand the hostility; I walked all the way to Tanzania from where we later walked to Uganda; I have no intention of ever going back to Rwanda

Read more – http://www.irinnews.org/Report.aspx?ReportId=88483

For the second time this week, the United Nations refugee agency today warned more than 2,000 Congolese in Burundi not to return to the strife-torn east of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which they fled during ethnic fighting in 2004.

The latest warning from the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) follows an incident yesterday when more than 400 Congolese from the recently closed camp in Gihinga, central Burundi, were stopped from entering their country by DRC immigration officials.

“UNHCR has repeatedly urged the refugees not to go back to their native South Kivu province in DRC for the moment, stressing that that under the prevailing security conditions neither the Government authorities nor UNHCR would be in a position to guarantee their safety on return,” agency spokesperson Andrej Mahecic told a news briefing in Geneva.

DRC immigration services said their actions were based on security concerns for the group. The refugees had boarded 11 trucks provided by Burundian government yesterday morning, leaving behind another group of some 500 refugees waiting for their turn to go home. When they reached the border they found it closed and the Burundian authorities took them back to Gihinga.

Read more – http://www0.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32486&Cr=democratic&Cr1=congo

5 October 2009 – The United Nations refugee agency today warned more than 2,000 Congolese sheltering in Burundi against returning to their homes in conflict-ridden eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).

The Congolese refugees from a region of South Kivu province which borders with Burundi have refused to relocate to a newly established camp further east and decided instead to return west to the Uvira region of South Kivu, their homeland.

For months, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and Burundian authorities have led an intensive information campaign to prepare the refugees for voluntary relocation, part of a consolidation exercise involving the closure of the makeshift camp housing this particular group of Congolese until last week.

Read more – http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=32425&Cr=Democratic&Cr1=congo

Michael Mann has stated in ‘The Dark Side of Democracy’ (2003) that ethnic and religious conflicts continue to simmer around the world and the death toll in the 20th century for them is somewhere over 70 million. Above 80% of people killed in wars during the 90s were civilians in civil wars, mostly ethnic in nature, which have taken over from interstate or conventional ideology based wars. Displacement, bloodshed and a very convoluted conflict are not new to Congo, which continues to reverberate from the violent aftershocks of Rwanda’s genocide in 1994. After Hutu death squads exterminated hundreds of thousands of Tutsi in Rwanda, only to be stopped by the Rwandan Patriotic Front’s take over of the country in July the same year, many killers fled into eastern Congo in what became known as the Great Lakes refugee crisis. The Hutu militias have regrouped, and United Nations officials blame them for terrorizing civilians, especially women, although they claim to have no part in these atrocities (Gettlemen. J, 2007). Read more…