50,000 refugees return home

About 50,000 Angolans of a targeted 90,000 returned home this year, either under their own steam or with the help of the refugee agency, UNHCR.

"We were unable go ahead with our plans to repatriate Angolans to the [northern] provinces of Lunda Norte and Uige because of lack of access - landmines, slow reconstruction process [of roads and bridges], lack of essential services and insufficient presence of civil society, which will remain serious challenges for the repatriation programme in 2005," Jose Samaniego, UNHCR's officer-in-charge in Angola, told IRIN.

The number of Angolans to be repatriated this year had been scaled down to 33,593 in September by the UNHCR, partly because of a lack of funds.

Unlike the past two years, when repatriation efforts were focused on the border provinces, Samaniego said, UNHCR had managed to access other interior provinces such as Huambo, Bie and Benguela this year, despite these constraints.

The Angolan authorities are currently visiting UNHCR's head office in Geneva to chart the course of repatriation next year. "We are attempting to involve the state and provincial authorities into the programme," Samaniego said.

Over 279,000 refugees have returned home since the end of Angola's civil war in 2002, 93,594 of them via repatriation programmes run by UNHCR. An estimated 441,000 Angolans fled to neighbouring countries during the three decades of conflict.