ABSTRACT
The three refugee settlements near the Somali border in northeastern Kenya – Ifo, Dagahaley and Hagadera – managed collectively as the Dadaab camp, are a model of failure in relief camp land-planning to support human rights of refugees. Continuously inhabited for over 19 years, the camp population, always prone to erratic fluctuation, soared to over 300,000 people by 2010, making it the largest refugee settlement in the world. The Dadaab camp history, marked by periodic destructive flooding of the Lak Dera, sporadic food shortages due to disruptions in delivery, and continuous violence, particularly against women, is a blistering narrative of isolation and privation, accessory to the violence of Somalia. To add to the internal stress, the scale of impact of the camps and the growth of undocumented refugee settlement outside the camp boundaries, has destroyed home-territory and escalated conflict with the local Kenyan population. The conditions in the camps at Dadaab constrain the scope and complexity of their inhabitant’s lives to the extent that fundamental human rights cannot be achieved within the current parameters of long-term refugee encampment. In a September 2009 Alertnet press release, Robbert Van den Berg, Oxfam International’s spokesman for the Horn of Africa, is quoted: “Somalis flee one of the world’s most brutal conflicts and a desperate drought, only to end up in unimaginable conditions in camps that are barely fit for humans” (Nyakairu, 2009).
