Battle-weary refugees fleeing 'the worst place in the world'

Ethan Baron, Canwest News Service

DADAAB, Kenya -- Refugees streaming from war-ravaged Somalia have driven the population of squalid, Canadian-funded camps in northern Kenya past 200,000 for the first time, overwhelming strained resources, aid officials say.

"Somalis, the ones who are in the camps, are probably in the most difficult and harsh conditions that a human being could imagine," said Karin Michnick of Toronto, a resettlement officer in Kenya for the UN High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR).

Fleeing fierce battles between Islamic militias and government and Ethiopian troops, more than 3,000 Somalis crossed the border to the three sprawling camps in Dadaab, Kenya, in June alone, pushing camp numbers to more than 202,000, the UN said.

In the camps, CARE Canada operates education, water and sanitation with funding from the Canadian International Development Agency and other donors.

Many of the refugees bear grievous wounds suffered in the crossfire before fleeing their Horn of Africa country.

"It is the worst place in the world," said Hawo Amin Mohamed, 51, her lower leg badly twisted and scarred from an artillery blast last year that killed her husband and three of their four children in Mogadishu, Somalia's capital. Mohamed lifts a sheet off her neighbour, revealing recent, untreated third-degree burns covering the woman from face to feet.

Medical clinics at the camps are "very, very substandard," said Erin Ajygin, a resettlement worker with the UN agency whose eyes are still sensitive to dust and sun after she was nearly blinded by a spitting cobra in April.

"You walk into them and you can't imagine that they perform surgery there."

Half the camp population is under 18, and twice-monthly rations of oil, corn meal and beans are "not enough to sustain a growing child," said Michnick, a former decision-maker for the Immigration and Refugee Board in Toronto and Montreal.

"There are critical levels of malnutrition," she said.

Skyrocketing fuel prices threaten to bring more misery to Dadaab. The cost of diesel, used to pump drinking water, and bring in food and supplies, has risen nearly 40 per cent since the UNHCR's yearly Dadaab budget was set.

"It is affecting us in a massive way," said Anne Campbell, head of camp operations for the UNHCR. "We may have to reduce the number of shelters. We'll take a look and see where we can cut."

Arriving refugees are allotted sticks, and sometimes tarps, to build shelters, and tens of thousands of crude, dome-shaped homes sit on dusty red sand beneath thorn trees. In some areas, tin-roofed mud huts have been built, but in others, new arrivals must erect their shelters on a treeless plain of flat sand, because refugees are overflowing the existing space.

Hagadera camp, with its 82,000 residents, and Ifo camp, with 72,000, are packed, and Campbell figures about 20,000 more refugees can be squeezed among the 49,000 in Dagahaley camp. Others take a bleaker outlook.

"We're full now," Ajygin said.

With the increasing density comes rising tension among the refugees.

"Many of them are traumatized, and in overcrowded situations, and so they react against each other," Michnick said.

Kenyans living in the area complain angrily to the government that refugees are encroaching on their land, Michnick added.

The vast majority of the Somali refugees in Dadaab have no intention of returning to Somalia unless an unlikely peace arrives in their country. But nearly every family has a member who has gone back, to look for loved ones, or check on their land, or look for lost livestock, Ajygin said. About half the time, the outcome is fatal, she said.

"You'll say, 'Where's your brother?' and they'll say, 'He went back to Somalia. We heard on the radio that he'd been killed,'" Ajygin said.

Each camp has schools, but elementary instructors are not trained teachers, and even in the secondary schools, there is only one book for every 10 children, and classes can reach 90 pupils in size.

"There is so little future here," said Agnieszka Korus, a senior program manager for CARE Kenya.

Although murder is rare, women constantly face the threat of sexual violence.

"There is a certain amount of rape that happens," Campbell said. "Women, when they go out to collect firewood, they can be attacked."

Many rapes go unreported, and women who do report attacks usually won't identify the perpetrator, Campbell said.

Some of the women who have come by foot from Somalia were raped along the way, and some of the walking refugees have been attacked by hyenas, Ajygin said.

Most of the recent arrivals are former urban dwellers from the Mogadishu area, and possessed the $70 necessary for truck transport.

Refugees have lived in Dadaab since 1991.

"It's still operating as if it's an emergency, and it shouldn't be," Michnick said. "Part of the problem is the influx is so high."

Slowly, refugees are being approved for emigration, many to the U.S., some to Canada. The U.S. has committed to taking 6,000 Somali refugees this year, and has brought in about 2,500 so far. The UNHCR administers the application process for emigration, putting those refugees first who have been in Dadaab the longest, or have pressing medical needs.

© The Vancouver Sun 2008