Herculean task for refugees returning home to Eritrea

DRESSA, Eritrea, Feb 21 (AFP) — Sitting outside her kiosk in the western Eritrean village of Dressa, Frawine Abraham, who was born a refugee in Sudan, is glad to be back in her homeland but she struggles here to make ends meet.

“I was born in a refugee camp in Sudan. I wanted to come and live in my country. Here, I can move about more easily, but I don’t have enough money,” said the 24-year-old.

Frawine was repatriated in 2001, one of an estimated 120,000 refugees who have returned since then from neighbouring Sudan, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) here.

Together with her husband, a farmer, they decided to settle in the western Gash Barka region, Eritrea’s most fertile.

But settling back in their motherland after decades of exile is a tough assignment that has scared off many Eritrean refugees in Sudan.

Faced with the difficult odds, many chose this fertile region as the best place to set up a new home, according to local UNHCR officials.

Of the 8,500 inhabitants living in nearby Gerset village, about 50 kilometres from the Sudanese border, more than half have arrived from Sudan since 2001, according to local authorities.

“The returnees are welcome because they are from the same tribe or culture as us and often they came from Gerset originally,” the village chief, Kesha Aman, told AFP.

“We temporarily share with them until they get their own land. Of course it’s not always easy,” he added, flanked by seven other sub-chiefs.

“We came back to Eritrea with almost nothing,” added one of them, himself a former refugee. “It was a challenge but we wanted to return to our country. We feel free even if sometimes we are hungry. For the last four years, we have suffered from drought.”

A few huts away, another returnee Tekle Gerges said he had lived in Sudanese refugee camps for more than two decades, from 1977 to 2001.

“My greatest challenge today is to farm my land, despite the drought. But I won’t give up, that is my job,” he said.

Like most of the returnees, the Eritrean government has given him two hectares (five acres) of land, said UNHCR.

The refugees fled the 1961-1991 Eritrean war of independence from Ethiopia, settling in Sudan from the mid-1960s onwards, and starting to return after the Horn of Africa country became independent in 1993.

However, according to Alphonse Munyaneza, head of the UNHCR field office in the nearby town of Tesseney, they face a string of challenges upon their return, from economic hardship to difficult access to schooling.

The country’s education sector cannot accommodate all of them, he said.

“This constraint is coupled with another difficulty, language, for the Arabic-speaking students who are far behind in English and Tigrinya, the two official languages of the Eritrean education sector,” he said.

Arabic is the official language in Sudan.

“And until the border with Ethiopia is demarcated, Eritrea will maintain a strong mobilisation of its armed forces. This probably discourages some young refugees from coming back,” Munyaneza added.

In 2000, Eritrea and Ethiopia signed a peace agreement that ended their 1998-2000 border war, but the border has yet to be demarcated.

Owing to the difficulties facing returnees, many refugees have chosen to stay on in Sudan — about 95,000 Eritrean refugees in Sudan have not asked to return to their country, according to UNHCR figures.

Yet others, after returning, pack up and leave Eritrea for Sudan once again, although the UN agency does not have exact figures.

“Living conditions are sometimes better in the Sudanese camps than in the returnee villages,” explained to a humanitarian worker in Tesseney.

“And Sudan offers more job opportunities, it is a much bigger market. By coming back to Eritrea, returnees can improve their legal status, but are not sure to improve their socio-economic situation,” the worker added.