Nobel winner Malala visits world's largest refugee camp

Kenya’s government says Dadaab camp, which hosts more than 300,000 mostly Somali refugees, will be closed in the next year because it has become a security liability.

In this Tuesday, Aug 2, 2011 file photo, Woman refugees sit inside a food distribution center run by the World Food Programme (WFP), in the town of Dadaab, Kenya. Dadaab, a camp designed for 90,000 people now houses around 440,000 refugees. Almost all are from war-ravaged Somalia.

Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai is spending her 19th birthday in Kenya on Tuesday visiting the world’s largest refugee camp to draw attention to the global refugee crisis, especially as Dadaab camp faces pressure to close after a quarter-century.

Since last year, Ms. Malala has been in contact via Skype with a group of girls in Dadaab refugee camp and is looking forward to meeting them and others, said Taylor Royle, her spokesman.

Kenya’s government says Dadaab camp, which hosts more than 300,000 mostly Somali refugees, will be closed in the next year because it has become a security liability. The camp is in eastern Kenya, near its border with Somalia.

The possibility that the camp will be closed brings yet more uncertainty to the refugees, who face the prospect of returning to a Somalia still plagued with conflict. Kenya insists any returns will be voluntary, even as the international community has urged caution and warned against forceful evictions.

Many of Dadaab’s refugees have lived most if not all their lives in the sprawling camp, which has been open for 25 years and is a vast settlement of established homes and newcomers’ improvised huts of thorn branches and other materials.

Ms. Malala was expected to be asked about the fate of Dadaab during her visit. She won the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize after militants shot her in 2012 while she was returning home from school in Pakistan, where she was an outspoken advocate for girls’ education in a highly conservative culture. She now lives in Britain with her family.

Kenyan President Uhuru Kenyatta has said repatriations from Dadaab will be done in a humane way.

The Kenyan government claims that attacks on Kenya by the Somali extremist group al-Shabab were planned and facilitated in Dadaab camp. Al-Shabab has carried out numerous attacks in Kenya that have killed scores since 2011, when Kenya deployed troops to Somalia against the militants. The Kenyan troops are now part of an African Union peacekeeping force there.

Al-Shabab, which is linked to al-Qaeda, has vowed to continue attacking Kenya.