For decades, the chaos in Kenya’s troubled neighbor, Somalia, pushed wave after wave of refugees across the border. They came in buses, on donkeys, and sometimes by foot.
But as the number of people moving to what was once the world’s largest refugee camp in Dadaab, Kenya swelled from thousands, to tens of thousands, to hundreds of thousands — there were many who registered as refugees who didn’t qualify.
“We have had Kenyans that have been caught in the refugee database over the last 25 years. Some of them were looking for food, for shelter, for opportunities,” said Mohamed Dahiye, a Kenyan member of parliament for Dadaab.
He said many people in nearby communities saw the free services and free food and registered at the camps, saying they were from Somalia. Often these Kenyans were a similar ethnicity to the people streaming across the border. Sometimes they were just as desperate for help, many arriving during times of drought and hunger in northern Kenya.
All told, there are at least 40,000 Kenyans registered as refugees in the Dadaab camps alone, according to both UNHCR and government numbers, in what officials euphemistically term “double registration.”
“The ‘double registration,’ as we call it, or the Kenyans registered as refugees in Dadaab, is an issue we know about and the government knows about as well,” said Fathiaa Abdalla, the UNHCR representative in Kenya.
She doesn’t blame the Kenyans who registered as refugees.
“I think as a human being you want to survive. You want to survive, and you don’t have a bad intention. These services were available in the refugee camp, but not available to you in the village,” she said.
Source: How fake refugees from Kenya got settled in the US and Europe
