Students to move to Kakuma camp

Ethiopian students who fled their country seeking asylum are being moved to Kakuma refugee camp, Kenyan KTN television reported on Wednesday. However, humanitarian sources told IRIN on Thursday afternoon that none of the students had left yet. The first batch was expected to leave for Kakuma on Friday, the source said. Students staged a hunger strike this month in protest over the decision to move them to Kakuma, where they say they fear their lives will be at risk from Ethiopian “hit squads”. The Ethiopian embassy in Nairobi has denied the existence of “hit squads” and have encouraged the students to return home. Meanwhile, the students who fled following student riots in Addis Ababa in April, described to ‘The East African’ weekly how they escaped. A combination of deceit, luck, bribery and prayers helped the roughly 200 students flee to safety in Kenya, the paper said on Monday. Students explained how they had discarded their documents, and moved without luggage - individually and in groups of two or three - to avoid attracting attention of security personnel until they reached the Kenyan border town of Moyale, northern Kenya, said ‘The East African’. A third-year engineering student at Addis Ababa University, Tsehaynesh Mamo, said she had to spend three days alone on the Ethiopian side of Moyale, planning how to cross to Kenya. In Moyale, she paid a truck driver to bring her to Nairobi for Kshs 10,000 (US $ 127). Girma Worke described their flight as desperate, and said “ money was not the issue. What mattered was freedom, nothing else,” the paper quoted him as saying. Students told the East African that their concern was for academic freedom.