Ogaden refugees returning home

Press, 9 December 1983, Page 18

Ogaden refugees returning home

By

BERNARD EDINGER,

of Reuter, in Ali Sabieh, Djibouti.

Thousands of ethnic Somalis who fled from Ethiopia to Djibouti during the 1977-1978 Ogaden war are going back to their desert homes in what a United Nations official called a rare happy ending to a refugee drama.

The return of relative normality to the Ogaden, contested by Ethiopia and Somalia, has encouraged the refugees to sign up for a repatriation scheme organised by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (U.N.H.C.R.) and the Ethiopian and Djibouti Governments. About 2500 people have returned home under the scheme which

began in September, 2000 others have signed up for repatriation and a further 2000 went back on their own, according to a local U.N.H.C.R. delegate, Abdou Raouf Issaka.

U.N.H.C.R. estimates that at least 35,000 people fled during the war, some 16,000 of whom came in three separate waves to Ali Sabieh, a mud and wattle town in scorching mountainous desert southwest of Djibouti.

The first group fled their homes as Somali troops rolled into the Ogaden at the start of the war, the second fled fearing reprisals when Soviet and Cuban-backed Ethio-

pians reoccupied the area, and the third headed for refugee camps during a severe post - war drought. The Ali Sabieh refugees are mostly Somalis of the Issa tribe, the majority group in the Ethiopian Ogaden, but Djibouti has also received refugees from the Eritrea and Tigray regions of Ethiopia and Ethiopian political dissidents.

Many Djiboutians are convinced the number of refugees in their country far exceeds the U.N.H.C.R. estimate but exact figures are hard to obtain because of the nomadic habits in the region.

Djibouti's own population of around 370,000 is dominated by the Issa tribe with its roots in Somalia and the Afar ethnic group rooted in Ethiopia.

Thus many refugees were able to move in with relatives when they arrived and failed to register with the authorities for fear of being sent home.

Djibouti is now happy to see them leave. Independent from France only since 1977, it has a fragile economy heavily reliant on its port and services to a large French garrison. Businessmen say unemployment stands at around 80 per cent of the work-force.

Locals also expressed fears that

the refugees would upset the numerical balance between Afars and Issas just as tribal rivalries were being replaced by a sense of national unity. However Somalia takes a dim view of the repatriation scheme because it has already taken in at least 700,000 Ogadeni refugees. Djibouti authorities say proSomali agents sometimes tour the refugee camps telling undecided refugees they are about to be forced back to Ethiopia.

As a result, several hundred apprehensive refugees have fled Djibouti. The U.N.H.C.R. tells of one frightened group of 12 who crossed the gulf of Aden from here to Yemen, travelled on foot to Saudi Arabia, and sailed back across the Red Sea to a refugee camp in eastern Sudan.

Somalia, which has long claimed the Ogaden. says Djibouti police threaten refugees who refuse to sign up for repatriation but the U.N.H.C.R. says it has no evidence of this.

For the refugees themselves, repatriation means an often painful readjustment.

Many have grown used to modern facilities in the camps and are not enthusiastic about returning to the desert life.

This is especially true of women who see in towns that water can be had from a tap while in the desert they must walk long distances in temperatures of 45 degrees centigrade to fetch it. The refugees also have to consider what work they will do back home.

“I am going home but I guess I will have to change jobs now," said one Somali who said he had been working as a smuggler while in exile.

The repatriation scheme is confronting the employment problem by granting small herds to returning refugees in the hope of attracting them back to age-old nomadic ways.