A recent report by the UN refugee body UNHCR estimates that 18,000 Somali refugees from Ethiopia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Kenya continue to return to various locations in Somalia since January 2013.
Analysts contribute these recent developments to a number of factors among them, recent economic developments in Mogadishu and pressure by host government to get rid of refugees.
The UN Secretary General recently said Kenya’s push for resettlement of more than 600,000 refugees who live in camps along Northern part of the country should be supported by the international community. Kenya plays host to millions of Somali refugees since 1991.
Kenya has for many years been shouldering the burden of Somalia’s refugee crisis. As many as 600,000 Somali refugees live in several camps in the North Eastern part of that country. The international community however says that it wants to speed up the relocation of these refugees from the Kenyan camps”.
Analysts warn that the government is not in a position to accommodate the massive number of returning refugees from camps. The government is still struggling to relocate IDPs who fled the famine in mid-2011 and the return of refugees is likely to increase the burden on the government.
Both Mogadishu and Nairobi now want the international community to provide immediate resources to support the repatriation of refugees living in UN designated camps in Kenya.
Despite the formation of a stable government in Mogadishu for the first in two decades, Somalia still remains one of the countries in the world that generates the highest number of refugees.
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