Government repatriates asylum seekers from Awr Aoussa camp

The Djiboutian government has started repatriating nearly 4,000 asylum seekers whose applications to stay in the country have been rejected, Interior and Decentralisation Minister Abdoulkader Doualeh Wais said. Those being repatriated were 3,091 Ethiopians and 521 from Somaliland. "These people have been here for 10 years," Abdoulkader Doualeh told reporters on Saturday. "There is no war, no combat, in Ethiopia now. There is democracy," he added, referring to the Ethiopians. The repatriation followed an ultimatum issued by the government in September to about 100,000 illegal immigrants to either leave or apply for asylum. An estimated 80,000 left voluntarily. Over a period of five months, the country's refugee status determination commission has sifted through 8,000 asylum applications to determine who should stay. About half the applications were rejected. These were the immigrants now being repatriated by road and rail from a temporary transit camp at Awr Aousa in an operation due to end on Tuesday, the minister said. Those remaining at Awr Aousa, whose asylum requests had been accepted, were more than 4,000 Somalis and 100 Ethiopians, who would be transferred to other refugee camps in the country. The Awr Aousa camp would be closed, he added. Meanwhile, most of the 16,000 refugees from the self-declared republic of Somaliland who had been living in Djibouti should be able to return home by the end of 2005, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said. The UNHCR representative in Djibouti, William Collins Asare, said his agency had repaired some infrastructure and set up some services in Somaliland to assist the refugees in resettling more easily. Already 1,500 were being repatriated by UNHCR monthly, each of whom was being given some food and cash for resettlement, he added. Most of the Somali refugees fled fighting in their home country that led to the fall of former Somali President Muhammad Siyad Barre in 1991. Other refugees arrived following the 1977 Ogaden war between Somalia and Ethiopia. Djibouti also has 5,000 refugees from central and southern Somalia, 100 Ethiopians and 90 of other nationalities whose resettlement applications were being processed, Asare added.