The refugee situation in the East and Horn of Africa region remains complex. The civil war in the Sudan raged on, in spite of the April 1997 peace agreement, uprooting some four million people internally and since late 1996 prompting 374,000 to seek refuge in neighbouring countries. In northern Uganda, there have been indiscriminate attacks on both national and refugee populations by two different rebel groups operating in the north, while security in the entire north-west of the country is threatened by the conflict in neighbouring Democratic Republic of the Congo. Since the border dispute between Ethiopia and Eritrea still simmers, plans to accept the return of some 151,000 Eritreans living in the Sudan have been halted. Bandit attacks on refugees in general and the rape of refugee women in particular around the Dadaab camps in northeast Kenya created a high level of insecurity in the area.
Women easily become victims when gathering firewood outside the camps.
The El Ni o weather phenomenon of 1998 caused major flooding that washed out roads in northeast Kenya. Food and other assistance items had to be air freighted during the first quarter of the year. The repatriation of some 72,300 Ethiopian refugees from the Sudan, begun in 1993, was concluded in May 1998. Some 55,500 Somali refugees from camps in Ethiopia have already returned home under this programme. The voluntary repatriation of 9,500 Congolese refugees from Uganda to the Democratic Republic of the Congo was completed in August 1998.