3 December 2007
Maputo — The Marratane refugee camp in the northern Mozambican province of Nampula is receiving a growing number of refugees mostly from countries in the Great Lakes region, reports Monday's issue of the Maputo daily "Noticias".
Statistics from the Nampula delegation of the National Refugee Support Institute (INAR) show that there have lately been about 62 applications for refugee status a month, compared with about 40 a month last year.
The INAR delegate in Nampula, Jaime Ernesto, told "Noticias" that most of the new refugees are from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Rwanda, Burundi, and Ethiopia. They enter Mozambique across the borders of the northern provinces of Niassa and Cabo Delgado.
Ernesto commented that "one strange phenomenon is that currently we have been receiving people from the province of South Kivu, in the DRC, where there is no armed conflict nowadays. The current conflict is in North Kivu".
An INAR study to understand this phenomenon found that people prefer to take preventive measures, rather than wait until war breaks out in their region. The refugees fear that conflict will spill over into South Kivu.
A study in October found that there were 4,042 refugees at the Marratane Refugee Centre, but Ernesto noted that many more refugees or applicants for refugee status were not registered because they were outside of Nampula province at the time of registration, which means that the real figure is probably rather higher. He thought it could be more than the 4,192 refugees counted in 2006.
Some of the refugees have found jobs, and are working in trade, transport and various other services.
The real number of refugees and asylum seekers will be published next year, because a new registration is still underway.
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