UN agency airlifts first 100 Angolan refugees back home from Namibia
Some 100 Angolan refugees living in Namibia have been repatriated under a programme of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to return people to their homes in Angola’s interior regions, the first of its kind, the agency announced today.
Some 100 Angolan refugees living in Namibia have been repatriated under a programme of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to return people to their homes in Angola’s interior regions, the first of its kind, the agency announced today.
Thursday’s operation, carried out with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), returned 105 people to Huambo in the central Angolan highlands, a spokesperson for UNHCR said in Geneva.
Some 27 flights are planned to carry more than 4,000 of the 10,000 Angolans currently in Namibia, as poor roads, broken bridges and mines make it impossible to safely return the refugees to the central highlands by any other means.
“For many of the refugees it was their first flight, but their nervousness was overcome by excitement at the prospect of going home,” spokesperson Jennifer Pagonis said at a press briefing.
The UN agency has also been repatriating Angolans from Namibia in road convoys to the border provinces of Kuando Kubango and Cunene. It said that by using both land and air routes, it hoped to repatriate nearly all Angolans from Namibia this year.
Overall, nearly 24,000 Angolans refugees have returned home in 2004 on UNHCR-organized convoys from Namibia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Zambia.
An estimated 441,000 Angolan refugees were estimated to be living in bordering countries at the time the peace accords were signed in April 2002. Since then, some 250,000 have returned home, leaving about 200,000 in the major asylum countries of the DRC, Zambia, Namibia and the Republic of the Congo.