Spotlight on refugees this week

THIS week is refugee week worldwide, ending with Refugee Day on June 20. It is held to highlight the plight of refugees but also to demonstrate their contributions to cultural diversity around the world.
The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said yesterday that Namibia currently hosts about 8 000 refugees, most of them from Angola.

About 6 600 of these live at the Osire camp while the rest are spread around the country. Osire is a settlement in the middle of farmlands around the Okahandja-Otjiwarongo area.A UNHCR report states that ‘integration remains the most viable durable solution for these long-staying refugees’.To this end, the agency is in talks with Government to allow the refugees to stay and is supporting Namibia with the registration, healthcare provision, education, community services and food security of the refugees.In total the agency has a budget of about U$2,5 million for Namibia this year. The UNHCR report states that the humanitarian situation in southern Africa as a whole has stabilised over the past ten years as peace and prosperity have grown in the region.The one exception to this has been the development in Zimbabwe, which the UNHCR says it is monitoring closely. Due to the dire political and economic situation in the country, increasing numbers of people have left Zimbabwe for surrounding states, most notably South Africa. As the most prosperous state in the region, South Africa has always been a popular destination for refugees.It is currently host to the biggest number of refugees in Africa with a massive 40 000 and a further 120 000 asylum seekers. Most of them are from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe, Burundi, Somalia and Rwanda.The UNHCR has set up a special fund for South Africa to allow it to deal with the increases in refugees from Zimbabwe. The influx of foreigners recently led to xenophobic violence exploding in that country, as local residents accuse foreigners of stealing their jobs. The agency says the violence that erupted in May 2008 in South Africa and continued into 2009 claimed the lives of 62 people and displaced 46 000. Angola has become another favoured destination for refugees due to the recent economic growth in the country, although with 12 000 refugees it is still far behind South Africa. Most refugees in the southern African region come from the war-torn Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the report states.