Nairobi — A Somali diplomat on Tuesday called for the Kenyan government to protect Somali refugees who escaped from the ongoing violence in the horn of Africa nation.

Mohamed Ali Nur, the Somali ambassador to Kenya, told reporters Kenya and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees are needed to play a key role in assuring the security of Somalis in Refugee camps.
He reiterated his call about enlarging the refugee camps that located just northern Kenya where hundreds of thousands of Somali refugees lead.
A United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) report released on Monday revealed deep imbalance in international support for the world’s forcibly displaced, with a full four-fifths of the world’s refugees being hosted by developing countries – and at a time of rising anti-refugee sentiment in many industrialized ones.
UNHCR’s 2010 Global Trends report shows that many of the world’s poorest countries are hosting huge refugee populations, both in absolute terms and in relation to the size of their economies. Pakistan, Iran and Syria have the largest refugee populations at 1.9 million, 1.1 million and 1 million respectively.
Particularly distressing are the 15,500 asylum applications by unaccompanied or separated children, most of them Somali or Afghan. The report does not cover displacement seen during 2011, including from Libya, Côte d’Ivoire and Syria.
‘In today’s world there are worrying misperceptions about refugee movements and the international protection paradigm,’ said AntÃ’nio Guterres, UN High Commissioner for Refugees. ‘Fears about supposed floods of refugees in industrialized countries are being vastly overblown or mistakenly conflated with issues of migration. Meanwhile, it’s poorer countries that are left having to pick up the burden.’
Reflecting the prolonged nature of several of today’s major international conflicts, the report finds that the refugee experience is becoming increasingly drawn-out for millions of people worldwide. UNHCR defines a protracted refugee situation as one in which a large number of people are stuck in exile for five years or longer.
In 2010, and of the refugees under UNHCR’s mandate, 7.2 million people were in such a situation – more than at any time since 2001. Meanwhile only 197,600 people were able to return home, the lowest number since 1990.
Some refugees have been in exile for more than 30 years. Afghans, who first fled the Soviet invasion in 1979, accounted for a third of the world’s refugees in both 2001 and in 2010. Iraqis, Somalis, Congolese (Democratic Republic of the Congo) and Sudanese were also among the top 10 nationalities of refugees at both the start and end of the decade.