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The Other Refugee Crisis

FOR the past five years I have been visiting the world’s largest refugee camp, a city made of mud and sticks the size of New Orleans called Dadaab, in northeastern Kenya. The camp was established in 1991 as a temporary refuge for around 90,000 people fleeing Somalia’s civil war. Today it is home to half a million.

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Dadaab, #Kenya / The Other Refugee Crisis - The New York Times
▻http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/10/opinion/the-other-refugee-crisis.html

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Dadaab in 2011. The camp was established in 1991 as a temporary refuge for around 90,000 people fleeing Somalia’s civil war. Today it is home to half a million.

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the world needs to adjust to the new reality of permanent refugee cities in legal limbo. Even if host nations wish to deny citizenship to long-staying refugees, it would make sense to allow the United Nations and refugees themselves to invest in infrastructure to reduce disease, provide employment and make these ramshackle slums more habitable. They could perhaps become autonomous open cities or international zones where those with United Nations documents were permitted to move and trade within the normal international visa regime. If camps were economically viable they might at least offer some pull to remain there. As one man told me as I was nearing the end of my time in Dadaab: “I belong nowhere. My country is the Republic of Refugee.”

#réfugiés #camps #photographie