Dadaab Refugees

Introduction

Twenty-five years ago, in Kenya, was created what is today known as the world’s largest refugee complex: the Dadaab camps. Situated 100 kilometers away from the Somali-Kenya border, the Dadaab complex was established in 1991 by the Government of Kenya and the United Nations High Comissioner for Refugees to host 90.000 refugees, most of them Somalis displaced by the civil war, famine and drought. Today, the complex hosts more than 520,000 refugees (if it were a city, it would be the third largest in Kenya) and consists of three camps – Dagahaley, Hagadara and Ifo- but has been expanded to include the Ifo extension and Kambios. Nearly 99 percent of refugees are Somalis, while there are small minorities of Sudanese, Ugandans, Rwandans,

The OAU thus refers to refugee as “any person compelled to leave their country owing to external aggression, occupation, foreign domination, or events seriously disturbing public order in either part or whole of the country of origin or nationality”. However, defining a refugee in so many different ways often leads to dangerous processes of labeling which “lead to policies that do not enable refugees to regain control over their lives”, as claims Cindy Horst, research professor in Migration and Refugee Studies at the Peace Research Institute Oslo. Such policies can be noticed in the Dadaab camps, which have turned into an ever-growing protracted refugee situation. Having been in existence for more than 20 years, the situation in Dadaab constitutes a “protracted emergency”. According to the UNHCR, a protracted refugee situation is defined as one in which “refugees have been in exile for five years or more after their initial displacement, without immediate prospects for implementation of durable solution”. In other words, the continuing unstable situation in Somalia, where violent

Ifo is the oldest camp having been established in September 1991, followed by Dagahaley and Hagadera established in May and June 1992. The Ifo 2 camp extension was opened in 2011, while Kambios is the most recent settlement, having opened in 2012. All camps are within an eighteen kilometer radius of Dadaab town. Prior to 1991, Dadaab was a small town with about five thousand inhabitants, mainly nomadic camel and goat herders. Today, having been largely affected by the creation of the camps, the town’s economy is based on services for refugees and its infrastructure has been considerably enriched. More precisely, the town is now connected to an electricity supply, has an educational system and health facilities. Furthermore, the refugee complex has stimulated trade, created new jobs and attracted humanitarian aid (however, the fact that refugees have also consumed natural resources, used the local infrastructure and provoked conflicts has created a debate amongst researchers regarding the positive and negative effects of the camps on the local communities). The camps are divided into lines and cross-cutting avenues; those who have lived in the camps the longest are more likely to have a sturdy home made of good materials unlike the newcomers which often live in small and