The United Nations’ refugee agency UNHCR said on Friday it wants to carry out voluntary repatriations of about 100,000 Burundi refugees living in Tanzania, but does not have enough funding to do so.
With 400,000 asylum seekers, Tanzania hosts the largest refugee population in Africa and the UNHCR caters for 348,000 of them. The rest live outside the camps.
“We would like ideally in the most relevant of the operations, Burundi, to come to close to 100,000 (repatriations),” Antonio Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told a news conference.
Need funds for repatriation
About 195,000 Burundians, who fled a recently-ended civil war in their tiny Central African nation, live in Tanzanian camps located to the north-west of the country.
Guterres asked donors to fund the repatriations because last year the U.N. agency was forced to divert money to Tanzania that had been budgeted for other countries to repatriate refugees from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda.
“I would appeal to the international community not to let us down in 2006, not to force us again to divert resources from other areas,” Guterres said.
Guterres said hunger in parts of Burundi may anyway discourage many of the refugees from returning from neighboring Tanzania.
“We know that with these problems in the beginning of the year, it will be probably difficult to reach those targets because nobody can go back to a place where the livelihood conditions are (poor),” he said.
Tanzania also shelters 148,000 Congolese. About 4,000 of them go back home every month, Guterres said.
Millions have died in the central African region since the 1990s in conflicts in the DRC, Rwanda and Burundi.
