Prospects improve for Kikagati returnees

The Ugandan government is planning for a February start on the resettlement of a group of Ugandan returnees from Tanzania, currently camped in Kikagati in the southwest, where some of them have been camped under deplorable conditions for over a year, a senior official told IRIN on Thursday. Martin Owuor, Assistant Commissioner for Disaster Management at the Office of the Prime Minister, said the government had been planning to relocate the returnees, expelled from Tanzania, from Kikagati [1.02 S 30.40 E] in Mbarara District to Kagadi [0.57 S 30.48 E] in Kabale District, also in the southwest. The government had gazetted land in November last year, but the resettlement plans hit a snag when the Kabale District authorities and the local Banyoro community objected, he said. "I believe that by February we should have begun the exercise," Owuor told IRIN. "We are trying really hard to move them. There is goodwill on the government side, the problem now is getting land where we can resettle them." The returnees are part of a group of 3,027 Ugandans, mainly ethnic Bakiga cattle herders, expelled from Tanzania, allegedly for voting against Tanzania's ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi (CCM) party in elections in October 2000, according to media reports. The expulsions happened after the CCM lost the elections in the northern Tanzanian area of Karagwe (Kagera District), where the long-time Ugandan settlers were living, reports added. However, the returnees have said they were precluded from political participation and had never voted in Tanzanian elections, the independent Monitor newspaper reported in Uganda on 27 December. The Ugandan returnees, most of whom had been living in Tanzania for decades, have been crossing back to Uganda since December 2000 through the border areas of Kikagati and Mutukura in Mbarara District - though the numbers have increased in the last three months, according to Owuor. The Ugandans had been in Tanzania since the 1950s, when they left in search of land, but were not allowed to leave with any of their belongings, which were reportedly taken over by members of the Bahaya tribe in Karagwe, according to the Monitor. Most of the returnees have no documents, and a few have Tanzanian tax receipts, according to humanitarian sources. The situation in the camp was deteriorating, with youths becoming desperate and even dangerous as a result of being exploited by some local employers, who got them to work, but sometimes refused to pay them their dues, the Monitor quoted the camp chairman, Yussif Tumwebaze, as saying. When the returnees first arrived in Kikagati, well-wishers provided food or allowed them to work for food nearby, but as they have remained and their numbers increased, this welcome is no more, Tumwebaze said. "We invaded like locusts, eating everything before us, and now we work for food as far as 15 miles from here," he added. Owuor said on Thursday that his department had been prompted to draft a cabinet paper, which was expected to be passed later this month, to force the Kabale authorities - considered the main obstacle to the resettlement plan - to accept the returnees on the basis of a law which allows Ugandans to settle in any part of the country. "The local authorities should be reminded of the law. Once the cabinet decides, we shall be able to resettle the people with or without the consent of local authorities," he added. Humanitarian assessments of the camp in Kikagati describe conditions under which the returnees are living as "critical". The camp is on swampy land and, with the ongoing rains, latrines are literally overflowing, according to the United Nations' Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA). On 29 November, it sent a "flash appeal" to UN agencies, several nongovernmental organisations and donor missions in an effort to secure the most urgently needed relief items. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) and African Humanitarian Action have so far responded to the appeal and distributed some food and medicines, OCHA reported in its November/December humanitarian update for Uganda. A spokeswoman for OCHA Uganda, Jane Namulindwa, told IRIN that the sanitation situation in the camp was critical, and there were fears of an outbreak of dysentery or cholera at any moment, so that the need to move the internally displaced persons (IDPs) was urgent. Although the Ugandan government had provided some food relief, and various aid organisations had provided some blankets, jerry cans and clothing, there was still a need for more food and non-food items, she said. UNICEF, which recently sent a team to distribute food and medicines to the camp residents, said the risk of waterborne diseases was "extremely high", and that nearly all the children in the camp were suffering from malnutrition. Officials in the border district of Rakai have suggested that the authorities in Tanzania plan to expel more foreigners, especially Ugandans and Rwandans who have been living there for many years, according to the Monitor. "There are not that many [in Kikagati], but nearly every day there is someone coming in," a UNICEF official, Mads Oyen, told Irin. "In this particular case, there is fear that more would be coming in," he added. Oyen said the humanitarian situation could deteriorate further if more returnees continued to arrive in the camp. "The problem is that the area is waterlogged and is close to the river. It rains a lot and the land is flat. The water doesn't go anywhere," he said. "What is interesting is that they fall between different mandates: they are not refugees and they are not IDPs, because they have crossed the Tanzanian border into Uganda, so no one has responsibility over them," he added. The Ugandan government is currently holding talks with the Tanzanian authorities, urging them to carry out any additional expulsions in a more coordinated manner in order to prevent humanitarian crises developing, according to Owuor. "We have good relations with the Tanzanian government, and I think we shall be prior informed in future expulsions, so we are not caught unawares," he added.