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UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 10 October 2006

KENYA-SOMALIA: Refugee camps expanded as more Somalis arrive

NAIROBI, 10 Oct 2006 (IRIN) - The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, is expanding camps for Somali refugees in eastern Kenya to accommodate an increasing number of people fleeing the troubled Horn of Africa country.

"We are really concerned about the large number of refugees who continue to arrive every day," said Emmanuel Nyabera, spokesman for the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) in Nairobi.

An estimated 2,000 have arrived in Kenya from Somalia via the Liboi border post since Friday, Nyabera said.

"As it is now we are expanding the existing camps, but if the numbers continue to rise we will have to discuss with the government the possibility of opening new camps," he added.

On Monday, about 1,300 refugees jammed temporary reception centres set up by UNHCR on Kenya's border with Somalia, according to the agency. The agency also said operations to screen and transfer newcomers at border areas to the three existing camps were disrupted briefly on Saturday when the Kenyan police at Liboi, some 184 km northeast of Garissa, stopped refugees from entering the reception facility. Kenyan authorities have since assured UNHCR of continued cooperation.

An estimated 30,000 Somali refugees have arrived in Kenya since the beginning of 2006, with a dramatic rise in the number of newcommers recorded in the past two months. Those who came earlier in the year said they moved because of food insecurity that gripped much of the Horn of Africa during a severe drought, according to Nyabera.

The latest arrivals have told aid workers they left their country because of rising tensions between armed groups there, including rivalry between the Transitional Federal Government and the Union of Islamic Courts, which has extended its authority to much of southern Somalia since it seized control of Mogadishu, the capital, from an alliance of armed faction leaders.

Some 130,000 Somali refugees had already been living in three sprawling refugee camps in the remote, arid Dadaab area in the country's Northeastern Province since 1991. Expanding the camps has entailed demarcating additional areas for setting up new shelters and ensuring adequate water and sanitation facilities for the rising number of refugees, Nyabera said.

UNHCR has also been distributing shelter materials and other non-food survival kits to the new arrivals, he added.

On Monday, Somali elders from Dobley, a Somali town near the border with Kenya, told a visiting team of UN officials that people were fleeing because of increased military activity in Somalia's Middle Juba region and hunger following crop failure in many parts of the Juba Valley. The elders told the UN team that the current influx of refugees was not expected to end soon. The elders knew of at least 3,000 to 4,000 Somalis en route to Kenya via Dobley, according to a UNHCR update.

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This material comes to you via IRIN, a UN humanitarian information unit, but may not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations or its agencies. If you re-print, copy, archive or re-post this item, please retain this credit and disclaimer. Quotations or extracts should include attribution to the original sources. All materials copyright © UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs 2006