June 23, 2008

Refugees need more help, says African church leader

The head of the All Africa Conference of Churches has warned that the continent still has 12 million refugees, despite hopeful signs in some countries, and he urged a redoubling of efforts to help those who have fled their homes and countries.

"There are positive signs that some refugees in countries like Sudan, Congo and Liberia are returning to their homes but there is still much to be done," said the Rev. Mvume Dandala in a statement to mark the United Nations' World Refugee Day on June 20. "The church can still help give refugees hope for the future, and new opportunities for their families and communities."

Dandala, a South African Methodist, said of Africa's refugees, "All these people need our prayers, support and protection."

The United Nations' High Commissioner for Refugees, António Guterres, who was in Kenya for activities to mark World Refugee Day, said that protecting refugees was now a "vastly more challenging" task than when his office was founded in 1951 to help Europeans uprooted by the Second World War.

"Old barriers to human mobility have fallen and new patterns of movement have emerged, including forms of forced displacement that were not envisaged by the 1951 UN Refugee Convention," Guterres told journalists in Nairobi.

"We need to better understand what triggers displacement, why states are unable or unwilling to provide citizens with physical, material or legal security," he said in a message for the UN day.

Earlier in his three-day visit to Kenya, Guterres had visited camps for displaced people from Kenya and Somalia in the north of the country.

In Dadaab, Guterres visited one of the world's largest refugee camps, where hundreds of thousands of Somalis, who have fled violence in their homeland, now live.

The UN official described their plight as one of the world's worst humanitarian crises.

"Only peace can solve the problems of the 200,000 people living in Dadaab in such dramatic circumstances," said Guterres, a former Portuguese prime minister.

In the town of Naivasha, he also visited internally displaced Kenyans, who were among the tens of thousands of people uprooted in post-election violence earlier this year.

"Our biggest wish is that you will soon be able to go home in safety and dignity," the UN official told the refugees. The town has two camps holding a total of 4411 internally displaced people, down from about 11,000 earlier this year.

Officials at Naivasha said more than 195,000 of the Kenyans who had been displaced throughout the country had already returned home, while about 43,000 remained in camps around Kenya.