We met Hassan, a young Djiboutian working in a store, on our first day in the country. As we were chatting, we explained why we came to Djibouti and our desire to talk with Somali refugees. "They're our brothers and sisters," he said, "and you can find them everywhere."
Djibouti can give the impression of a fairly modern town at first glance, but a walk in the backstreets outside the city centre reveals crippling poverty. Families from Djibouti, Ethiopia and Somalia live side-by-side in tin-roofed shacks, half-constructed buildings and huts made of twigs and pieces of cloths.
It's in one of those neighborhoods that Hassan took us at nightfall to meet with a local women's association. We were ushered inside a house to a large room where about 30 women and children were huddled together. All of them had come from Mogadishu and had sought refuge in Djibouti in the past three months. One woman had arrived just three days prior. The journey from Southern Somalia to Djibouti can take up to two months by car and by foot. The road is dangerous, with militias manning hundreds of checkpoints all along the way.
For the next two hours, we listened to their stories and took careful notes: destroyed homes, murdered husbands, hunger, grueling walks, beatings at the hand of soldiers, looting of their meager possessions, sexual harassment. They had come to Djibouti because they heard it was a safe place. Most had left family members behind and were without news of them. A girl of 13 was alone in taking care of her four younger siblings. A woman in her 40s showed us a wound in her leg: a stray bullet had hit her as she was outside her home in Mogadishu. She had also been raped on the road to Djibouti.
The women's association receives no external funding, and depends on the goodwill of people in the community to buy some food. However they don't receive nearly enough. The families we met with live in makeshift shelters on the dry river bed. Children eat only a bowl of rice per day. We were told that there were hundreds more like them.
Somalis from the South and Central regions where the conflict rages are granted refugee status immediately upon their arrival in Djibouti. They are free to choose between staying in a refugee camp, or trying to eke out a living in Djibouti town. The vast majority of people choose the camp and are registered by the government. However an undocumented number of refugees prefer to stay in the city. Unfortunately, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) and other agencies provide no services to them. More worryingly, there have been few efforts to identify this urban population and assess their needs.
As High Commissioner Antonio Guterres explained in a recent speech: "life in urban centres is very different from life in camps," and the specific challenges that urban refugees face should be an "important focus of UNHCR future policy." For the sake of the women and children we met, that challenge should be tackled in Djibouti.
[ Any views expressed in this article are those of the writer and not of Reuters. ]
Afghan refugees flee from the troubled Bajaur tribal region in Pakistan October 22, 2008. Pakistani authorities are expelling Afghan refugees from a tribal region that has become the main battleground between ...
