UNHCR wraps up its operations in the north

The UNHCR has ended its repatriation and resettlement programme for people who fled northern Mali after a Tuareg rebellion broke out in 1990, the UNHCR announced on Friday in Bamako. The four-year programme, from which some 305,000 refugees and displaced persons benefited, cost more than 24 billion CFA francs (about US $240 million), according to Arnauld-Antoine Akodjenou, UNHCR’s representative in Mali. It included the establishment of 638 resettlement points in Gao, Kidal, Mopti, Segou and Timbuktu. UNHCR’s operations will now be limited to a liaison office that will cater mainly for the some 2,000 urban refugees in Mali. Most are from Sierra Leone and Liberia, while there are also a number of asylum-seekers from the Great Lakes region.