158 Sudanese refugees return home from Ethiopia

February 16, 2009 (ADDIS ABABA) – As a start of 2009 campaign for voluntary repatriation, Some 158 Southern Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia’s Sherkole camp returned to their homeland after two decades of forced asylum in the neighboring country.

In a press statement issued yesterday, the UN agency of refugees (UNHCR) said that all returnees crossed into Sudan and transported inland to their respective towns and villages.

The repatriation operation had been suspended last may on account of the rainy season which rendered the repatriation roads muddy and hardly passable.

UNHCR started the voluntary operation by the end of 2006 after the signing of a tripartite agreement, between UN, Ethiopia and Sudan for the return of 73,774 Sudanese refugees hosted in five camps in the western regions of Gambella and Benshangul-Gumuz.

Since around 36,000 refugees returned, and three of the five camps have been closed in Ethiopia.

“As in last year we are conducting this year’s repatriation movement together with our partners, notably the Ethiopian government, the International Organization for Migration and the World Food Programme,” said Sabine Wahning, UNHCR’s senior programme officer in Addis Ababa.

The first Sudanese refugees came to Ethiopia in 1969 and went back home following the signing of the Addis Ababa agreement in February 1972. Successive waves of Sudanese refugees followed in 1983 and in the early 1990s.

Sudan government and the former rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement signed in January 9, 2005 a peace agreement that ended a two decades of war in southern Sudan where more than two million were killed.

(ST)