Kenya Extends Deadline to Close Dadaab Camp for Six Months
Kenya will extend the November 30 deadline to close Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee camp, for another six months.
But interior minister Joseph Nkaissery said the government still intends to shut down the camp, and the repatriation of refugees to Somalia will “continue uninterrupted.”
Human rights and humanitarian groups warn that over 250,000 refugees in Dadaab are under extreme pressure to return to Somalia because of threats, harassment and the looming deadline.
Somalia is still battling Al-Shabab militants and struggling to accommodate thousands of returning refugees.
Many refugees who have taken part in the U.N.-facilitated voluntary return program say they were not warned or prepared for the hunger and instability upon return to Somalia.
“Kenya should end its threats [to close Dadaab],” Human Rights Watch researcher Gerry Simpson said in a statement. “The U.N. refugee agency and donors should press Kenya to give Somali refugees secure legal status until it is truly safe for them to return.”
Thousands of Children Displaced by Conflict Are Dying of Hunger in Nigeria
Doctors without Borders (MSF) says thousands of children who fled Boko Haram’s insurgency in northeast Nigeria are dying of hunger and disease in displacement camps.
In two refugee camps in Maiduguri, a quarter of the expected population of children under 5 years old is missing, presumed dead, according to surveys by the medical group.
“We only saw older brothers and sisters. No toddlers are straddling their big sisters’ hips. No babies strapped to their mums’ backs. It’s as if they have just vanished,” Natalie Roberts, MSF emergency program manager for northeast Nigeria, told the Associated Press.
Boko Haram violence has forced some 2.6 million people, including 1 million children, from their homes over the past seven years. The conflict has devastated local agriculture and trade, sparking a hunger crisis that verges on famine.
Mortality rates for children under 5 years old in the two camps surveyed by MSF are more than double the threshold for declaring an emergency, Roberts told the AP.
Hundreds of Rohingya Flee Escalating Violence
At least 500 Rohingya Muslims have fled escalating violence in Myanmar into neighboring Bangladesh in recent weeks, while many others have been forced back at the Bangladeshi border, Reuters reports.
They are fleeing a military crackdown in western Myanmar imposed since a militant attack on three border posts on October 9. Human rights groups accuse the military of razing villages and summary executions since the attack. The military says 130 people have been killed in the operation, and has refused journalists access to the area.
Rohingya community leaders told Reuters that hundreds of people were trying to cross over a river on the border, but Bangladeshi authorities had pushed them back with lethal force. “A lot of dead bodies were floating in the sea,” one man told the news agency.
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