E/CN.4/1503
Annex II page 17
cture ture.
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47.
The Government of Somalia, represented at the ICARA Conference 2/ in Geneva in April 1981 by the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, made it known on that oc- casion that the country's GNP had fallen from $ 120 to $ 90 per capita since the beginning of the refugee influx (which it states represents 20-25 per cent of the total population). The country's development budget had had to be waived because of the priority given to the more pressing problems.
48. The international community has provided considerable relief assistance to refugees from Ethiopia in the countries of asylum.
UNICEF, WFP/FAO and WHO quantify their unputs to the end of 1981 at over $ 200 million. Indeed the Govern- ment of Ethiopia has on more than one occasion suggested that the assistance being given in one area while being denied to areas adjacent to it had contributed to the influx of refugees. For its part, it declared a general amnesty and reports steps to assist the 151 000 people it states have already returned as well as the internally displaced. Calling on the international community for substantial assistance, its Relief and Rehabili- tation Commission submitted to the inter-agency mission led by the Co-ordinator of UNDRO in July 1980 projects for relief, rehabilitation, manpower development and sectoral development related to the uprooted and returnees which amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars.
49. With regard to the future, the Commissioner for Relief and Rehabilitation of Socialist Ethiopia, Mr. Shimelis Adugna, said at the ICARA Conference:
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"The refugees from independent Africa, no doubt, need and deserve generous assistance from the international communty. But the long-term solution lies fundamentally and to a large measure with the African countries themselves and on the necessary internal and external measures they
they take either removal of the problem itself, or for scaling it down to manageable proportions.
11
The Commissioner went on to say that "humane efforts should go beyond the provisions of relief assistance and should strive to create favourable conditions that would help attack the problem
He referred to long-term basis".
the view of the OAU Council of Ministers expressed at its 36th Ordinary Session that "the problem of refugees in Africa can neither be solved on an ad hoc basis,
basis, nor on perpetual charity handouts, but rather on working out concrete programmes of action that could provide long-term solutions of a permanent nature".
2/ International Conference on in Africa, April 1981.
Assistance to Refugees