Mere end 200.000 somaliske flygtninge frister en kummerlig tilværelse i Yemen, efter at være blevet afvist ved grænsen til deres oprindelige mål, Saudi-Arabien. Mange ønsker at vende tilbage til deres fædreland, og det ønske vil FN og den somaliske regering samarbejde om at opfylde, efterhånden som situationen i Somalia stabiliseres.
ADEN, 7 November 2013 (IRIN) – “It is eight years since Esmahan Abdaqadir Ali left the Somali capital Mogadishu for a new life in Saudi Arabia, and things have not quite turned out as planned. For a start, she never reached her destination.
She was granted refugee status automatically upon arriving by boat in Yemen. Then she married, became pregnant and joined the ranks of Yemen’s semi-permanent Somali refugee community, estimated to number around 232,000 according to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
“We’ve been through so much – we don’t think any longer about tomorrow – we are just thinking of how to live from one day to the next,” she told IRIN at a kindergarten in the southern city of Aden.
Yemen’s largest refugee community faces a dilemma; most Somalis, community leaders in the southern city of Aden say, would return home if given the chance.
A delegation from the new Somali government visited Yemen in April, where they met UNHCR and discussed the possibilities for refugees to voluntarily return home once conditions in south and central Somalia improve further. At the moment, UNHCR supports some limited returns through a voluntary repatriation programme run by the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to Puntland and Somaliland in northern Somalia. But there is no comprehensive return package and volunteers need a security clearance from the authorities in the two Somali regions before travelling.
Læs videre på http://www.irinnews.org/report/99078/somali-refugees-in-yemeni-limbo
