Friday, April 01, 2011
Kenya should allow humanitarian agencies to help fleeing Somali civilians instead of sending them back to their war-torn country, urged Human Rights Watch.
The rights group has also asked Kenya not to close makeshift camps without providing alternative sites and offering displaced people the opportunity to seek asylum.
The organisation regretted that on March 17, this year, Kenyan authorities forced the Kenya Red Cross Society employees to stop providing services at a temporary refugee camp in Mandera, which was housing 13,000 people, many of them Somalis who had fled recent fighting across the border in Bula Hawo.
District authorities, who had given the aid workers permission to establish the camp, abruptly changed course, ordering the Red Cross to stop providing services and close the camp, HRW said.
“That evening, according to several organisations working in Mandera, government officials accompanied by armed security forces intimidated camp residents, telling them to leave the camp and return to Somalia by noon the next day,” the agency says.
“Kenya’s positive track record for taking in hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees over 20 years is marred by numerous recent incidents in which authorities have forced Somali asylum seekers to go back to a place where their lives are in grave danger,” said Rona Peligal, deputy Africa director at HRW.
“Kenya needs to work with humanitarian agencies to protect people displaced by conflict, not abandon them.”
The people in the Mandera camp were not given the opportunity to claim asylum, HRW said quoting sources. Some managed to stay with relatives in the town, but the majority returned to Somalia.
A provincial administration official is said to have told HRW that the Somalis had not been deported, but were in police custody at Liboi.
But HRW said any Somalis crossing the border at Liboi should be given the opportunity to claim asylum.
The official also denied that Somalis in Mandera had been forcibly evicted, saying they returned voluntarily when fighting abated across the border.