Tripoli, 23 March 2013:
The Choucha refugee camp on the Tunisia-Libya border will close on 30 June, according to the Tunisian News Agency TAP.
Spokesperson for the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR), Ursula Aboubacar, said at a news conference in Tunis that closing the camp would give the refugees a better life.
“It is time to think about the future of these people, beyond the context of urgency,” said Aboubacar, “to give them a more appropriate form of life, beyond the living conditions of a camp.”
During the revolution, the camp housed mainly sub-Saharan Africans who had been working in Libya but fled when the conflict started. It is understood that 2,854 refugees from the camp have recently been resettled elsewhere, including 195 in Germany.
In his update for the Middle East in March this year Yacoub El Hillo, director of UNHCR’s MENA bureau, said that, at the end of February, 907 people remained at the camp “awaiting solutions.” [/restrict]
