Integrate, don’t close, Africa’s largest refugee camps

The forced closure of the Kakuma and Dadaab refugee camps would be a humanitarian and cultural catastrophe.

On March 24, Kenya’s government demanded that the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) announce a clear timetable for closing the country’s, and Africa’s, two largest refugee camps – the Dadaab refugee camp near the Somali border and the Kakuma refugee camp near the borders of South Sudan and Uganda – within 14 days. The government also informed the UNCHR that it would shift more than half a million refugees currently living in Dadaab and Kakuma to the border with Somalia if the commissioner fails to announce a plan for the camps’ closure in the required timeframe. It was not the first time the government made such a threat. The Kenyan authorities had announced their intention to close the Dadaab camp for the first time in May 2016, in what was largely seen as an attempt to capitalise on the public’s growing concerns about national security in the aftermath of the Garissa University College terror attack. The Kenyan High Court eventually blocked the move, deeming it unconstitutional. Observers hope last month’s threat, which came on the back of growing tensions between Kenya and Somalia, and whose timeframe has now expired without any move to forcibly close the camp, is again a political theatre. However, the adamant tone assumed by government officials on the issue, and UNHCR chief Filippo Grandi’s recent visit to Nairobi, have caused aid workers and camp residents to worry that the threat, if not the time table, is serious. On April 8, a Kenyan court temporarily halted the government’s plans to forcefully evict the refugees, but the fate of the two camps still appears to be uncertain.