UNHCR asked to start refugee repatriation

The UNHCR said on Friday that it had received a request from the Eritrean ambassador in Khartoum to begin the repatriation of the 72,993 refugees registered in Sudan since fighting between Ethiopia and Eritrea broke out on 12 May. UNHCR spokesperson Ron Redmond told a press briefing in Geneva that the agency's position was that it could not organise repatriation
until it was satisfied that conditions inside Eritrea permitted such a move. However, a few Eritreans appeared to be moving back across the border, while the flow into Sudan had dwindled to a trickle. UNHCR staff who went into western Eritrea on Thursday, as far as Talatashar, 13 km from the border, reported that life was beginning to return to normal there, with some shops reopening. Some returnees were heading further east, towards Tesseney.

The UNHCR was planning to repatriate over 100,000 Eritrean refugees from Sudan in May, mainly to western Eritrea, but was forced by the outbreak of conflict to put the exercise on hold. Hundreds of thousands of Eriteans spent decades in Sudan as refugees during the thirty year struggle for independence, which ended in 1991.