KENYA. Nairobi: The Kenyan government has urged the United Nations High Commissioner For Refugees (UNHCR) to close down Dabaab and Kakuna refugee camps on March 24.
The Kenyan Minister for the Interior Fred Matiang’i issued a statement addressed to the UNHCR local head Fatima Abdalla.
“There will be no room for further negotiations,” warned the statement.
Located in Garissa county, Kenya’s semi-arid region Dabaab is probably the largest refugee camp in the world according to the Kenyan media.
The UN says in 2019, 210,556 refugees were hosted at the camp. Among the refugees around 56 percent were children and 55,000 of them came from South Sudan.
The Kenyan government has been complaining about overcrowding at the camp which makes refugees to spill over into the neighborhood.
Also Read: East African Refugees Suffer Escalated Impact From COVID-19
Issues of refugee camps closing down or relocating have tormented the UNHCR. In Malawi, the UN body has come under fire from residents of Karonga, a northern district of Malawi.
UNHCR had expressed intention to relocate Dzaleka, a refugee camp in the central region of the country, few kilometers from the capital, Lilongwe. It had planned to move it to Karonga. This has sparked anger among local residents of the district, which shares the border with Tanzania’s south.
The camp hosts refugees from Africa’s great lakes region of Rwanda, Burundi, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Also Read: Two Days Of Clashes In Rohingya Camps
Comments are closed.