unitex@rubbs.fidonet.org (unitex) (09/16/89)
OROMO REFUGEES IN SOMALIA APPEAL AGAINST RETURN TO ETHIOPIA
Posting Date: 09/14/89 Source: UNITEX Network, Hoboken, NJ, USA
(Reuter Library Report, September 11, 243 words, DATELINE:
MOGADISHU)
Refugees from Ethiopia's Oromo tribe have asked the United
Nations to prevent them being forced home from Somalia.
The self-styled Oromo Refugee Committee said in a letter to the
U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), copies of which
were released in Mogadishu on Sunday, that the Oromo refugees
faced possible persecution by Ethiopia's Marxist government.
The UNHCR agreed with Addis Ababa and Mogadishu last July on a
scheme for the voluntary repatriation of about 400,000 Ethiopian
refugees in Somalia and a similar number of Somali refugees in
Ethiopia.
The repartriation programme was due to start in October, but the
UNHCR cut off food aid to some 140,000 refugees in war-torn
northern Somalia at the end of August, fearing the supplies were
being siphoned off to combatants in Somalia's civil war.
UNHCR officials in Nairobi said they could not immediately
estimate the number of Oromo refugees, who are concentrated in
Somalia's northern camps, and said they had never heard of the
Oromo Refugee Committee.
The Committee said it was sending a copy of its letter to Somali
President Mohamed Siad Barre.
Thousands of Oromo from eastern central Ethiopia fled to Somalia
from 1984 to escape drought and the Marxist government's
programme to move millions of peasants from scattered rural
homesteads into planned villages.
The Oromo Liberation Front was formed as a rebel group in 1973,
but little has been heard of it in recent years.
* Origin: UNITEX --> Toward a United Species (1:107/501)
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