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The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has closed the second of eight camps for Somali refugees in eastern Ethiopia, a UNHCR official told IRIN. The three camps targeted for closure are Teferi Ber, Dawarnaje, and Daror, Mekonen Tesfaye, a UNHCR programme officer said.
Teferi Ber refugee camp, which housed 12,890 Somali refugees, was closed on 30 June. This followed the closure of the Dawarnaje camp, which housed 8,700 refugees, on 21 June. He said the refugees from were mostly from Borama, northwestern Somalia, and arrived in Ethiopia in 1991, after the collapse of the Siyad Barre regime.
The closure of a third camp, Daror, with 28,000 inhabitants, by the 31 December 2001, will bring the total number of Somalis voluntarily repatriated to over 190,000, Tesfaye told IRIN. By the end of 2001, there would be about 60,000 refugees left in the remaining camps.
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