Another 800 refugees to return home today

Another 800 Burundian refugees are due to go home from Tanzania on Thursday under a repatriation programme sponsored by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the agency said.

This will bring to 11,700, the number of refugees the agency has helped to return from Tanzania two months after the start of the programme. It said 71,000 more had registered for repatriation.

So far, the agency said, most of the refugees had come from Ngara camp, but that since 30 April, refugees from the Kibondo and Kasulu camps had also been going home. UNHCR is only helping refugees returning to provinces in the northern and central parts of Burundi, as well as Bujumbura, the capital.

"However, some Burundians decide, themselves, to go back to other areas of the country," UNHCR reported on Wednesday.

An estimated 9,300 had already done so spontaneously, it added. Those returning with UNHCR-facilitated convoys are taken to transit centres where they receive a package of three months' supply of food and relief items from the World Food Programme. "They are then transported on to their communes of origin," UNHCR said.

Since April 2001, it said, returnees going home outside the agency's facilitated programme, and who had returned their ration cards, had also been given the three-month returnee packages. "Vulnerable persons and unaccompanied children receive special assistance," it added.

"Returnees are doing well, so far," UNHCR said. This assessment stemmed from interviews with 53 families who had returned to the communes that received the largest number of returnees: Muyinga, in Muyinga Province; and Giteranyi, in Kirundo Province. UNHCR said 98 percent of these returnees had found the security situation good, 96 percent had gained access to their land, and 87 percent said they had good relations with their neighbours and the authorities.

UNHCR said there were 750,000 Burundian refugees in Africa, many of whom had fled because of ethnic violence since 1993. Some told IRIN early in May that they were returning despite uncertainty about the security situation because they were tired of being refugees, or because they had relatives at home, while others had said they were being "encouraged" by Tanzania to go home. An estimated 400,000 of the refugees are in Tanzania.

In another development, Radio Kwizera, a humanitarian radio station supported by the Jesuit Refugee Service, reported that Tanzanian police arrested some 400 Burundi refugees from Lukole camp in the north of the country. It said the refugees were arrested at Gakongo and taken to Mwissa prison, without the knowledge of the Karagwe district commissioner or the head o the Kibondo refugee camp.

The radio reported that the refugees had left Lukole for Kibondo, another camp for Burundi refugees, without permission. Earlier in May, Tanzania clamped down on the movement of refugees across the border and in the surrounding countryside. Previously, many had taken the opportunity of free movement to visit their Burundi homes to check on conditions.