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The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has begun repatriating more than 5,000 Rwandans living in Zambia as refugees, the UN agency reported on Thursday. The first 16 of the refugees arrived in the Rwandan capital, Kigali, aboard a Kenya Airways flight.
The repatriation follows a tripartite agreement signed in January in Kigali between the UNHCR and the governments of Zambia and Rwanda.
The UNHCR said more flights were expected to transport the refugees from Zambia to Kigali. According to the agency, arrangements are being made by the International Organisation for Migration, to fly the refugees on commercial airlines from the Zambian capital, Lusaka, through Nairobi, Kenya, on to Kigali.
Thousands of Rwandans fled the country in 1994 during and after the genocide, which claimed the lives of more than 800,000 people.
"It is bad to be called a foreigner all the time. I have wanted to return for a long time," Isaac Ndayisabye, 22, one of the 16 returning refugees, said when he arrived in Kigali.
It was his first time in the capital as he had left his rural Cyangugu home in 1994 without ever having visited Kigali.
This article was produced by IRIN News while it was part of the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs. Please send queries on copyright or liability to the UN. For more information: https://shop.un.org/rights-permissions
