- Title: Kenya to close the world's largest refugee camp - Deputy President
- Date: 23rd May 2016
- Summary: DADAAB, KENYA (FILE) (REUTERS) VARIOUS OF DADAAB REFUGEE CAMP VARIOUS OF PEOPLE LIVING IN CAMP
- Embargoed: 7th June 2016 20:00
- Keywords: Turkey U.N. humanitarian summit refugees Dadaab camp Kenya
- Location: ISTANBUL, TURKEY AND DADAAB, KENYA
- City: ISTANBUL, TURKEY AND DADAAB, KENYA
- Country: Kenya
- Reuters ID: LVA0034J166O7
- Aspect Ratio: 16:9
- Story Text:Kenya will close the world's largest refugee camp this year because the facility, which houses Somalis displaced by decades of war, poses an "existential security threat" after a series of attacks, Kenyan Deputy President William Ruto said on Monday (May 23).
The United Nations and Western states have urged against forcibly repatriating the 350,000 or so Somalis who still live in the sprawling Dadaab camp in northeast Kenya, some for decades, saying it would violate international obligations.
But Ruto, speaking on the sidelines of a U.N. humanitarian-aid summit, told Reuters it is the international community that has failed Somalia, still struggling to recover from the anarchy of the 1990s, and not Kenya, which has spent $7 billion on Dadaab over the past quarter century.
"The refugee camp poses an existential security threat to Kenya," Ruto said, arguing attacks including the Westgate mall rampage in 2013 and the Garissa University massacre in 2015, which claimed hundreds of lives, were all planned at Dadaab.
The U.N. refugee agency UNHCR said in January might miss a 2016 target to repatriate 50,000 refugees as the Somali government battles the al Shabaab insurgency and there are few public services for returnees. Somalia is slowly rebuilding and is due to elect a new parliament in August. - Copyright Holder: FILE REUTERS (CAN SELL)
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