|
|
Ethiopia: IOM Assists Grenade Attack Victims Back Home
 |
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
The Daily Monitor (Addis Ababa)
16 March 2008
Posted to the web 18 March 2008
Biruk Girma
Addis Ababa
The International Organization for Migrants (IOM) on Wednsday said it brought home 33 Ethiopians who were victims of a grenade attack in Somalia's port town of Bossasso in early February as well as their close relatives.
IOM said the group was flown home to Dire Dawa in eastern Ethiopia accompanied by IOM staff from its office in Hargeisa.
The organization 21 of the 33 suffered mainly from bone fractures or limb amputations and in need of urgent hospitalization.
It said the victims, who since the attack have been in a hospital in Bossasso, have received a tremendous outpouring of sympathy from the local community.
The victims will however have to be admitted to the general hospital in Dire Dawa as limited facilities at the hospital in Bassasso have meant that open wounds have become infected and fractures still not set, the UN agency said.
Once their medical condition has been stabilized, IOM will provide psycho-social assistance to the blast victims.
The Organization will also arrange their rehabilitation and reintegration into their home communities in collaboration with other humanitarian actors once they return there.
The returnees, all men except for one woman, are from southwestern and northern part of Ethiopia.
The attack on 6 February killed 22 people and wounded another 74, mostly Ethiopian migrants wanting to make the perilous sea crossing across the Gulf of Aden to Yemen using smuggling networks.
The journey across the Gulf of Aden is particularly dangerous with 1,400 migrants reported dead or missing in 2007 alone, according to UNHCR.
IOM said large numbers of Ethiopian migrants still remain in Bossasso despite the change in weather making sea crossings too dangerous for small boats.
Tracing their families and exact home destinations and contacting family members has been difficult mainly due to the remoteness of their villages and the poor communication network, IOM said.
"We have yet to trace the families of all the bomb victims," Bill Lorenz IOM's operations Officer for the region, said in a statement.
"Some of the migrants are still traumatized by what has happened to them and are nervous about coming home. We're hoping that being back in Ethiopia will help lessen their trauma and that will help us to link them to their families," he added.
Together with UNHCR, UNOCHA and the Danish Refugee Council, IOM offices in the region have been working to provide assistance and information to migrants traveling to Bossasso in Somalia's Puntland, a major human smuggling hotspot for Somalis and Ethiopians seeking either protection or better work opportunities in the Gulf and beyond.
Many of the Ethiopians now want to return home, partly because of the grenade attack which has highlighted tensions towards this group of migrants by some parts of the local community.
IOM said that, in a bid to strengthen the capacity of the Puntland immigration authority to deal with the on-going migration crisis in the region, it will shortly begin a programme that will complement other projects in the Horn of Africa to help the Puntland Authorities to develop migration policies and to train immigration officers to enhance the ability of the authorities to respond to migration challenges.
|
In an effort to combat illegal migration of Ethiopians, IOM has begun a new counter-smuggling and counter-trafficking information campaign targeting potential migrants in rural Ethiopia, the organization said.
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 The Daily Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
