Zanzibari refugees dwindling in Dadaab

The UN refugee agency said on Wednesday that most of the Zanzibari refugees remaining in Dadaab, northeastern Kenya, could be voluntarily repatriated within not much more than a week.

The refugees were among more than 2,000 Zanzibaris who sought sanctuary in the fishing village of Shimoni, south of Mombasa on the Kenyan coast, when political demonstrations on the Tanzanian island chain turned violent in January.

A spokesman for the refugee agency, Paul Stromberg, told IRIN that, of the 83 Zanzibari refugees remaining in Dadaab refugee camp, some 54 had already registered for repatriation to Tanzania, and plans were being made to fly them home as soon as possible.

Most of the 2,000 refugees who fled Zanzibar after the January clashes had returned to Tanzania by the end of May, but several hundred refused to go, and 506 Zanzibaris were transferred to Dadaab in May.

The clashes that caused them to flee Zanzibar arose when police broke up opposition Civic United Front (CUF) protests against what it considered to have been unfair elections, won by the ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party in October 2000.

Stromberg said that 148 of the Dadaab group of refugees had already been successfully repatriated, and another 275 had left Dadaab voluntarily, without the knowledge of camp officials.

The camp is home to some 130,000 refugees, most of whom originate from southern Somalia and have been in Dadaab for more than 10 years.

Medecins Sans Frontieres in June reported an "alarming increase" in malnutrition in Dadaab, stating that, in a six month period, general food distribution in the camp had fallen by some 35 percent.

A group of 103 of the Zanzibari refugees reportedly arrived in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, from Dadaab on 6 October and requested assistance from the office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). UNHCR did not have the resources to assist the group while they remained in Somalia, according to Stromberg.

Furthermore, the principle of first country of asylum - which says that if a person has already been given refugee status in one country is not subsequently permitted to move to a second country to seek asylum there for the same reasons - meant that Kenya was still the appropriate country of refuge for the "Mogadishu group", he said.

As a result, Somalia's Transitional National Government (TNG) would be entitled to return the Zanzibari refugees to Kenya if it wished to do so, he added.

The refugees in Mogadishu are reportedly being accommodated in a school compound in the south of the city, and provided with food and water by the TNG and some Somali individuals.

Kassim Abubakar, a spokesman for the Mogadishu refugees, told IRIN on 18 October they had not yet made plans to return to Zanzibar, because they believed their lives would be in danger if they did so now.

The government of Tanzania has given assurances that, on their return to Zanzibar, refugees will not be prosecuted as a group for their involvement in the January unrest.

Hopes for a lasting solution to the Zanzibar crisis improved on 10 October when the CCM and the CUF signed an agreement to end a year of political turmoil on the islands, and a spell of unrest that dates back to what CUF terms "the stolen elections" of 1995.

After the signing of that agreement, 109 criminal cases related to January's unrest were dropped by the state, including murder charges against CUF Deputy Secretary-General Juma Duni Haji and the party's security director, Machano Khamis.

"I have no ill feelings towards the ruling CCM government," AFP quoted Haji as saying at a press conference on 16 October. "I believe the reconciliation will be fully implemented."