IDPs, returnees desperate for assistance in Somaliland - UN

A senior UN official called on Friday for more international and local assistance for thousands of internally displaced persons (IDPs) and returnees in the self-declared autonomous republic of Somaliland.

“These IDPs and returnees are among the poorest of the poor,” Dennis McNamara, head of the UN Inter-Agency Internal Displacement Division, said during a visit to returnee camps in Burao, 340 km east of the Somaliland capital, Hargeysa. “They desperately need assistance.”

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) and the Norwegian Refugee Council, returnees, IDPs and refugees constitute about a fifth of the population of Somaliland’s major towns - Hargeysa, Burao, Berbera and Borama.

In Hargeysa alone, Gashan, a local NGO that trains displaced persons in income-generating skills, estimated that 7,200 displaced families lived within the municipality. Zainab Mohammed, head of Gashan, told IRIN that the majority were unemployed, “living a destitute life and facing daily discrimination”.

McNamara said there was an “urgent need to increase the response to the needs of these most vulnerable people”. He added: “The UN will increase its support, but the local authorities, too, need to make an input. For example, they need to provide land for the displaced to settle in.”

According to relief workers in Somaliland, the displaced include people who were forced out of their homes by war, those displaced by drought, people who fled southern Somalia following the overthrow of Siyad Barre in 1991, refugees from neighbouring nations such as Ethiopia, and returnees who went back home after living as refugees in various countries.

In Burao, McNamara visited Koosar returnee settlement, where 7,000 people live. They had originally fled war and inter-clan fighting between 1988 and 1996 and went to live in eastern Ethiopia. They returned to their areas of origin after a recent calm, but 80 percent were illiterate and 90 percent unemployed.

In nearby Al-Hussein camp with over 2,100 returnees, 80 percent were unemployed, 75 percent illiterate and 10 percent destitute, while 30 percent of the population of Aden-Sulaiman IDP settlement were destitute, according to relief agencies working in the camps.

In meetings with the mayors of Hargeysa, Berbera and Burao, and the governor of Togdheer, McNamara urged the local leaders to work closely with UN agencies and international NGOs operating in the region.

Hussein Mohammed Jiir, mayor of Hargeysa, said his municipality had decided not to make any distinction between IDPs from the south and those from Somaliland, which is in the north. “They all need water, food, education, health facilities, sanitation and other basics,” he said. “For purposes of assisting them we do not discriminate them.”

Somaliland declared itself independent after Siyad Barre’s overthrow in 1991 plunged Somalia into more than a decade of turmoil. Continuous war and clashes have since forced hundreds of thousands of Somalis to flee to other countries or to other parts of Somalia.

In October, a new Somali president was elected in Nairobi, Kenya, following more than two years of peace talks sponsored by the regional Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD). However, Somaliland refused to take part in the talks, does not recognise the new leaders of Somalia and insists it is an independent state.

McNamara was accompanied by representatives of several UN agencies, and local and international NGOs operating in the Horn of Africa region.