Somali refugees wary on return despite peace pact

Somali refugees wary on return despite peace pact

By Helen Palmer

DADAAB, Kenya (Reuter): More than 100,000 Somali refugees are stranded in camps in the dusty wastelands of northeast Kenya, deeply wary about heading home despite a Somali peace pact.

Even in this semi-desert dotted with thorn bushes around the village of Dadaab, 50 km (30 miles) from the Somali border, the refugees remain in close contact with events in their shattered homeland.

And most are unimpressed by a peace agreement reached in the Kenyan capital of Nairobi last month by the two most powerful Somali warlords -- General Mohamed Farah Aideed and Ali Mahdi Mohamed.

"I am really against these generals. All they want is power. They don't care about ordinary people," says Mohamed Ibrahim Salat, who fled his home in Mogadishu during the civil war that followed the overthrow of dictator Mohamed Siad Barre in 1991.

Garry Maclean, regional manager for the U.S.-based charity CARE which has run the four tent camps around Dadaab since the war started, says lessons of the past hold back the refugees.

"These people know what's been happening on the ground in Somalia," says Maclean, noting that the clan warfare which wrecked Somalia never broke out in the Kenyan refugee camps. "I don't think they will be in any great hurry to go back."

A group of 10,000 "Bantu" Somalis are particularly reluctant to return across the border. Viewed as second class citizens, they say many of their farms in the Lower Juba Valley have been seized.

Many refugees say life in the camps of Liboi, Ifo, Dagahaley and Hagadera is preferable to an uncertain return to their lawless and violence-plagued country, which most fled with only a few possessions.

In the early months conditions in the camps in Kenya were desperate. The problem of bandits preying on the helpless refugees and raping women remained a major problem until late last year.

But security has been stepped up with heavily-armed patrols of Kenyan police and refugees have built their own defenses against bandits and rapists with thick barricades of prickly acacia. They have also handed in weapons to camp authorities.

This widespread thirst for peace is reflected in the calm in the camps and a budding community feeling between various clans.

"These people have to line up for food with clan members they'd be slaughtering back in Somalia. We hope they can take these ideas back with them," says Maclean.

Food is now plentiful in the Kenyan camps, where laughing children play among the thorn bushes. Each camp boasts primary schools and some secondary schools teaching a Somali curriculum.

Disabled children receive physiotherapy and the deaf tuition in sign language. Adult literacy is booming, aid workers say.

Much of the initiative for these improvements came from the refugees themselves. Many receive small salaries as teachers and social workers. The Somalis have next requested a newsletter and library.

"Yes, people are homesick," says Salat. "But here at least they have an education for their children."

The greatest sign of the relative stability of the camps was a cultural festival which thrived last month throughout the remote camps to celebrate the United Nations International Year of the Family.

"Bullets kill a person but they don't make a life," sang a group of primary school pupils, reinforcing a message of peace running through every performance, which were organized on a competitive basis.

Refugees displayed crafts produced as part of an Economic Skills Development program run by CARE including brightly colored baskets, furniture, cement building blocks and clothes.

The crafts are sold in the camps to make a little money and stave off boredom but CARE aid workers hope such skills will come in use whenever the refugees return to a Somalia at peace.

"It's impossible to predict when they will be able to go back," says Guenther Scheske, UN High Commissioner for Refugees representative in Dadaab. "It totally depends on the situation in Somalia."

But UN officials said the huge tented cities might have to remain for up to five years.

- 30 -