No word from US on Somali Bantu FGM reports - UNHCR

The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, on Wednesday said it had received no official communication regarding reports that the US was reconsidering resettling Somali Bantu refugees who had recently subjected their daughters to female circumcision. The US has agreed to resettle Somali Bantu refugees from camps in Kenya, but media reports said the authorities had threatened to bar some of the families whose daughters had undergone the procedure. The Somali Bantus are an ethnic minority, whose arrival in Somalia is linked to the Arab slave trade of the 18th and 19th centuries, with many of them having strong ancestral links to Malawi, Tanzania and Mozambique. In independent Somalia, they felt they were treated as second class citizens and subjected to persecution. Over 10,000 of them fled to Kenya when civil war broke out in Somalia in the early 1990s. UNHCR spokesman Emmanuel Nyabera told IRIN that female circumcision was a common practice among Somali refugees in Kenya. "This is not an isolated case," he said. "It is normally a trend with Somalis who are waiting to be resettled, not just the Bantus." Nyabera said the refugee agency had no capacity to enforce national laws against the widespread practice of female circumcision in the camps. Female circumcision, technically referred to as female genital mutilation (FGM), has been outlawed in Kenya under a new Children's Act passed in 2001. "We are carrying out programmes to discourage the practice [in the camps]," he said. "But it is the role of the government to enforce the law. Hopefully we will be in a position to work with the government." Meanwhile, the International Organisation of Migration (IOM) announced it had completed a process, started in June, of relocating all the Somali Bantus from Dadaab refugee camp in northeastern Kenya to the Kakuma camp in northwestern Kenya, from where they would go to the United States. The IOM is in charge of the logistical aspects of the operation. In Kakuma, the refugees will be interviewed by American immigration officials and will undergo cultural orientation before their resettlement in the US, it said.