More than 50,000 refugees repatriated

The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) reported on Tuesday that the number of Eritrean refugees repatriated from Sudan has passed the 50,000 mark.

The operation, which is now a year old, reached this milestone when, on Sunday, its 91st convoy carried 960 Eritreans from the eastern Sudanese town of Kassala to Teseney in western Eritrea, according to the UNHCR spokesman, Kris Janowski.

This brought to 50,479 the total number of returnees to Eritrea since the beginning of the voluntary return operation in May last year, he said.

Janowski said the agency hoped to help 3,000 more Eritreans go home before the heavy rains season begins in late July.

Meanwhile, a tripartite meeting held in Geneva late last week between the governments of Sudan and Eritrea and the UNHCR agreed to begin implementing a plan of action to repatriate hundreds of thousands of other Eritrean refugees - those who fled during the decades-long war of independence, which ended in June 1991, and those who escaped the recent border conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia. Refugee status for both groups will formally end at the end of this year.

UNHCR is currently assisting more than 164,000 Eritrean refugees living in camps in eastern Sudan. Hundreds of thousands more are believed to be living in urban centres across Sudan, according to the agency.