UNHCR preparing to move Somali Bantus to Kakuma

World Vision Kenya has announced that it and the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) are constructing 2,200 shelters for 11,000 Somali Bantus who will be relocated from Dadaab Refugee Camp in northeastern Kenya to Kakuma Refugee Camp in the northwest.

The office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) told IRIN this week that it could not yet state when exactly the relocation would start, but World Vision said the work on the shelters for them was expected to be completed in Kakuma within three months. The construction area has already been set aside and survey work started, according to the NGO.

The US decided last year that it would resettle over 8,000 Somali Bantus in 2002, probably because UNHCR feared tension in Dadaab, arising from the fact that Dadaab has a predominantly non-Bantu Somali population, if the Bantus were resettled there, according to humanitarian sources. This was the likely reason for the decision to move the Bantus to Kakuma, which also has a substantial Somali population, but is predominantly Sudanese, they told IRIN.

Early in January there were some 132,000 refugees in Dadaab (over 129,000 of them Somalis) and just over 83,000 in Kakuma, of whom about 67,000 were Sudanese and about 12,000 Somalis, according to UNHCR figures.

There is currently a gradual influx of new arrivals into Kakuma - a semiarid area in Turkana District, which experiences average temperatures of between 24 and 38 degrees centigrade - and this has brought a great deal of pressure to bear on the existing accommodation at the camp, according to World Vision.

Screening of the Somali Bantus, a minority group from southern Somalia, was under way in November 2001, a UNHCR spokesman, Newton Kanhema, told IRIN at the time.

The US is planning to admit up to 70,000 refugees to the country this year, and some of the Somali Bantus could be among that number, depending on the ability of the State Department's Bureau for Population, Refugees and Migration (PRM) to process applications, according to the US Committee for Refugees.

Originally accepted by the government of Mozambique - a country with which the Somali Bantus have historical links - the US stepped in after Mozambique, devastated by last year's floods, decided it could not cope with the resettlement programme.

The US resettlement programme has specifically targeted the Somali Bantus - known as Mushunguli and Gosha, resident in Dadaab and Kakuma camps, who arrived in Kenya and registered with UNHCR prior to 1 January 1998, because they were an identifiable group, particularly impoverished and a persecuted minority unlikely ever to return to Somalia, according to humanitarian sources.

"Due to the Bantus' history and physical features, which are more Negroid than the indigenous Somali, they are one of the most discriminated-against groups in Somali society," according to the Washington-based Cultural Orientation Network, which provides training for refugees arriving in the US.
[http://www.culturalorientation.net/]

"Discrimination manifests itself in many ways, including extremely little intermarriage between Somali Bantus and other Somali clans; and being relegated to jobs and tasks that other Somalis will not perform," it added.

Mushunguli describes a social group descended from slaves, while Gosha literally translates as "forest" and refers to this group's villages located in formerly forested regions of the Juba River valley. The term "Somali Bantu" came into use during consideration of this group for resettlement, as a general term to distinguish them from indigenous Somalis.

Indigenous Somalis sometimes refer to the Bantu people as "aduns," which means slaves and is considered a pejorative term. The minority Somali Bantu were "treated like second class citizens" by Somalis, a humanitarian source told IRIN. Insecurity and the civil war in Somalia over the last decade rendered the group even more vulnerable, the source said.

The first Bantus arrived in Somalia during the slave trade in 1800s and settled on the southern Somali coast. Somali political sources told IRIN that most of the current Bantu population in the Juba valley were originally from Tanzania, Malawi, and Mozambique. Some of the Bantus in southern Somalia had kept their traditions and spoke the languages of their ancestors, the source said.

Those who have assimilated themselves with indigenous Somali clans are known as "sheegato", which means they are not blood-line clan members, but adopted. Somali Bantus were almost exclusively found in the south, but many scattered during the civil war to parts of the north, where they worked on buildings and took on odd jobs, the source said.

Upon the resettlement of those Somali Bantus accepted by the US, the 2,200 new shelters being built by World Vision will be handed over to UNHCR and reallocated to vulnerable families who continue to arrive at Kakuma camp, according to the NGO.

World Vision Kenya and Japan have been involved in shelter provision and infrastructure development at Kakuma refugee camp since July 2001, and "success in this venture has been both immediate and measurable", according to the former.

Since moving into Kakuma in July 2000, World Vision said, it had constructed a total of 2,345 shelters and repaired over 1,000 others. The organisation also constructed over 1,400 emergency shelters for refugee families displaced due to unexpected heavy rains in October last year.