Kenya’s Second-In-Command Wants 600 K Refugees Shipped Out
NYERI, Kenya, April 11 (UPI) — Kenya’s second most powerful official has effectively issued an ultimatum to the United Nations — demanding that the world body move more than 600,000 Somali refugees out of his country, or else his government will do so.
Deputy President William Ruto made the demand Saturday to the U.N.’s refugee agency, giving it three months to move out every last refugee from the Dadaab camps — the largest in the world.
More than 600,000 refugees reside in the camp, which is located just more than 50 miles from the Somalia-Kenya border in the Garissa District — the same district where terrorists stormed a university last week and killed 147 people.
“The way America changed after 9/11 is the way Kenya will change after Garissa,” Ruto said in a report by CNN. The deputy president said the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) refugee base must be relocated.
The Dadaab camps were first built in the Garissa District in 1991 and took in the first refugees from Somalia’s civil war. In 2013, the foreign ministries of both nations reached an agreement to pave the way for voluntary repatriation of the refugees living in the camps.
The CNN report said part of the reason Kenyan officials want to move the camps is their belief that the al-Shabab terrorist organization, which was responsible for this month’s school attack, has influence among refugees there.
“We have asked the UNHCR to relocate the refugees in three months, failure to which we shall relocate them ourselves,” Ruto said.
