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About 2,000 Malian refugees who remained in Burkina Faso after others were repatriated are now complaining that they have been “completely abandoned” by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The Malians, who live in a camp in Djibo Mentao, some 200 km north of Ouagadougou, claim they have received no help from UNHCR since June 1997. “Today we are all starving, including the children and elderly people,” the head of the camp, Alassane Ould Mohamed, said. “We are demanding reparations and we are ready to die for that. We’ll never give up our claims”.
Thousands of people fled Mali in the 1990’s during a rebellion in the north of the country. The bulk of the rebels and the refugees were Tuareg, nomads who live mainly in the Sahara.
Following a peace agreement in 1994, about 20,000 of the 25,000 Tuareg who had sought refuge in Burkina Faso were repatriated under a UNHCR-sponsored programme that ended in 1997.
Marguerite Camara, deputy coordinator of the UNHCR office in Ouagadougou, said those who chose to remain after the repatriation were no longer refugees. “They were asked to report to the Foreign Ministry to regularise their status but never showed up,” she said.
Mohamed said that even if the remaining Tuareg were now ready to go home they were not prepared to become “beggars in their own country”. He said they needed US $3 million to return to Mali. “Mali and the UNHCR will be held responsible for any trouble we are going to cause if they do not look at our demands,” he said. He added that the refugees would “start actions (in) a few months” if their demands were not met.
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
