Kenya on the spot over IDPs

IDPs Kenya
May 19, 2010
By Francis Mureithi
The government has been accused of failing to assess the needs of persons who were displaced during the 2008 post election violence.
Though the government managed to resettle about 200,000 Internally Displaced Persons in the course of 2009, it failed to conduct needs assessment hence violating the rights of most of the IDPs, says a Geneva based international organization.
“During the year, the government made no significant effort to profile or assess the needs of populations displaced by conflict or violence,” the Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre (IDMC) has said in a report released on Tuesday titled Global Overview of Trends and Developments in 2009.
IDMC which was established by Norwegian Refugee Council monitors conflict-induced internal displacement worldwide and releases annual reports on every country assessed.
On Kenya, IDMC notes that IDPs who have returned to their homes have been unable to rebuild their lives for lack of proper reconciliation between communities which fought after the disputed 2007 elections.
“The government forced IDPs to return even though the situation that gave rise to their displacement had not been properly addressed,” reads part of the report. The agency says this has prevented progress towards durable solutions to the conflict.
It adds that despite government claims that the majority of IDPs had been resettled, a substantial number were still living in camps and with host communities at the end of 2009.
The report also points out that most of the women IDPs and children were exposed to rape and sexual violence. The centre says the government closed some camps and forced the IDPs to return to their homes yet conditions were not conducive for the displaced to return to their homes.
The report says that Kenya has still a long way to go in finding durable solutions for IDPs, despite ratifying the Pact on Security, Stability and Development in the Great Lakes Region and signing the Kampala Convention in 2009.
The report covers 54 countries, 21 of them being in Africa. In total IDMC says 6.8 million people were forced to flee their homes in 2009, bringing the total number of displaced people around the world to 27.1 million by year-end.
This is the highest figure since the mid 1990s. Eight countries have been cited as where most of the displacements occurred as a result of armed conflict.
They are Pakistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, Somalia, the Philippines, Colombia, Sri Lanka and Ethiopia. In Africa alone, there is estimated 11.6 million IDPs representing more than 40 per cent of the world’s total IDP population.
Sudan had the largest internally displaced population in Africa with about 4.9 million IDPs, followed by DRC with 1.9 million and Somalia with 1.5 million.
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Kenya on the spot over IDPs