Too risky for Burundi refugees to return yet-U.N.
By Dan Wallis
DAR ES SALAAM, Oct 9 (Reuters) - The U.N. refugee agency said on Thursday it was still too dangerous for hundreds of thousands of Burundians uprooted by war to go home despite a peace deal between the government and Hutu rebels.
"The southern provinces are not safe yet for the refugees to return," said Ivana Unluova, a UNHCR spokeswoman in Tanzania, home to the largest single group of the estimated one million Burundians displaced or living outside their own country.
"Fighting between the rebels, and between the rebels and the army, means we are not there to monitor conditions for returning refugees," she said. Most Burundian refugees in neighbouring Tanzania are from the south of the tiny central African country.
"It is important that these people are able to return in safety and in a dignified manner and we have not been able to be there to verify that. The moment conditions allow we will intensify our effort to get these people home," she added.
The main rebel group of the Hutu ethnic majority, the Forces for the Defence of Democracy (FDD), signed a new peace accord with the government on Wednesday aimed at ending a decade of war that has killed 300,000 of the 6.5 million population.
But another rebel group that has refused to talk peace, the extremist Hutu Forces for National Liberation (FNL), quickly rejected the deal and dismissed the negotiators as liars.
The FNL has fought clashes with FDD in recent weeks amid intensifying competition for Hutu popular support, adding a new layer of violence to a civil war that normally pits Hutu rebels against the army of the politically powerful Tutsi minority.
Some 350,000 refugees, the vast majority of them from Burundi, live in camps in Tanzania under the care of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
The International Crisis Group (ICG) thinktank says at least another 300,000 Burundians are dispersed across Tanzania.
Tens of thousands more have taken refuge in other countries while about 280,000 people are displaced inside Burundi itself.
In a report written just before the peace deal was signed, the ICG said too little consideration was being given to the repatriation of refugees in the event that peace takes hold.
"Lack of planning for the eventual mass return of refugees and displaced persons, and the land questions it raises, risk destabilising any transition to peace right from the outset."
"A final ceasefire... carries the risk that a great many people who were uprooted will return to a country not yet prepared to receive them," said Francois Grignon of ICG.
To one degree or another, all refugees and displaced persons had been the victims of land expropriation, he said.
"The foreseeable disappointment of a large number of refugees who will be unable to recover their property on return offers ideal political opportunities for the one rebel group still not involved in the peace process: the FNL," the ICG said.
10/09/03 06:35 ET
