Government expels 910 former refugees

Tanzanian authorities expelled on Tuesday 910 Rwandans who had been living in the northwestern region of Kagera, humanitarian workers and government officials told IRIN. The government said on Wednesday that the Rwandans had been screened and refused refugee status, and were therefore in the country illegally. The government said 708 of them had been living in the Lukole refugee camp and 202 in Tanzanian villages. "They had been refugees, but their appeal for asylum was rejected and the time came for then to go home," John Chiligati, Tanzania’s deputy home affairs minister, told IRIN. He said Tanzania transported the Rwandans to the border where their own officials received them. "There was no resistance to the operation," he said. The spokeswoman for the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Ivana Unluova, said on Wednesday that the Rwandans were "no longer of concern to UNHCR as they had applied for asylum and were rejected". She added: "Last month, UNHCR had offered these people voluntary repatriation, which would have included transportation and a repatriation package, but none of these people accepted this. "The Tanzanian government had asked UNHCR, in advance, to transport the refugees, but we refused because we do not assist in the forced repatriation of people." Unluova said that since the repatriation of most of the 20,000 Rwandan refugees at the beginning of the year, UNHCR had screened the entire remaining caseload and found that 100 merited international refugee status. The majority of these are in the Mkugwa protection camp, Kigoma Region, awaiting resettlement in a third country. However, Unluova added, those who remained in Lukole were unaffected by Tuesday's repatriation.