EAST AFRICA: A refuge from civil wars

[ This report does not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations]

KAMPALA, UGANDA, 15 Apr 2004 (IRIN) - Thousands of people displaced by wars in neighbouring Sudan, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) have at different times poured into Uganda to seek refuge and rebuild their lives.

According to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), Uganda is currently hosting 18,000 refugees from Rwanda and some 171,000 from Sudan.

It is harder to give exact figures fro refugees from the DRC. UNHCR says that technically the war in eastern DRC has ended, but since migration between western Uganda and eastern DRC has been such a regular part of life in the region for centuries, it is impossible to estimate how many Congolese refugees live in western Uganda.

Most Rwandan refugees arrived after the 1994 civil conflict during which 800,000 Tutsis and politically moderate Hutus were butchered by the Hutu extremist Interahamwe militias and elements of the former Rwandan armed forces.

The refugees from Sudan have been arriving ever since the war between the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Army and the Sudanese government broke out in September 1983.

Improved prospects for continuing repatriations to Rwanda

Dennis Duncan, a spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), believes that ongoing repatriations to Rwanda are going well but that things could take a while. "We’re still repatriating to Rwanda steadily," he told IRIN in late March. "By the end of the week, it will have been about 1,200; that still leaves 18,000. We think it will move more slowly for the next few months."

UNHCR officials say part of the problem is that efforts to ensure self-sufficiency and a decent quality of life for Rwandan refugees in camps in southwestern Uganda were so successful that the refugees have ended up not wanting to go home.

"We’re shooting ourselves in the foot a bit with this self-reliance thing," says Duncan. "We, or the Uganda government working with us, have allowed them to set themselves up so nicely, growing surplus crops on fertile land. The last thing they want to do is go back to Rwanda where they don’t have any land and they’ll have to start all over again."

UNHCR said it was now embarking on an "information campaign". Towards the end of last year, Rwandan officials flew in from the capital, Kigali, in an effort to persuade the refugees in Uganda that they had nothing to fear in going back home: there would be no reprisals, no risk of being jailed or harassed, and they would get land, the refugees were told.

The next phase is to get refugees who have already been repatriated to return to the places where they had been living as refugees to tell their counterparts still remaining there about the joys of homecoming. "We’re going to pay them to come back and tell people things are OK in Rwanda. What it hinges on is people coming back and saying: ‘yes, I got my land back. No, the new government didn’t throw me in jail,'" says Duncan.

Using this strategy, UNHCR officials say they plan to have all the Rwandan refugees in Uganda repatriated within about a year and half.

Little left to go back to in Sudan

"The Sudan is the next big one," Dennis Duncan told IRIN. "We’re in the preliminary stages here. It all depends on the peace process, obviously, on south Sudan settling down."

Should a deal be signed soon between the government of President Umar Hasan al-Bashir and the rebel Sudan People's Liberation Movement/Army of John Garang, much ground will need to be prepared to enable the refugees to go home. But defining a time frame for their return is not yet possible.

However, even when a deal has been signed, say UNHCR officials, it will be months before the agency will be able to start mobilising the refugees. The greatest challenge is that southern Sudan has been all but obliterated by 47 years of war. "There’s nothing in south Sudan for them to go back to as far as infrastructure [is concerned] right now," Duncan observed.

"So we’re doing training schemes for them," he continued. "We give them some training on how to build houses, we train some to be teachers, nurses, people who dig boreholes, bicycle mechanics. The idea of the programme is that when they go home, they have the skills to get to work on rebuilding their own infrastructure."

[ENDS]