Thank you very much. I am grateful for this opportunity to speak to the committee. I will just be very brief.
The UNHCR, together with its implementing partners, calls its operation an emergency operation, which means they provide for the most important basic human needs. Number one on the list is food, but there are many questions concerning it, whether food is actually provided in Dadaab and whether it is consumable by a normal human being, even if that person is a refugee. The UNHCR provides food through its top implementing partner, the World Food Programme, WFP, but the food that's given in the real sense is something that I would say cannot even be given to livestock. It's what refugees give to donkeys—things like maize, or corn as you would say—and it's very poor quality.
I am very grateful to the UNHCR, the Government of Kenya, and the international community at large for having been very helpful to the Somalis in particular, because as the numbers indicate, the Somalis are the largest group there.
There are many questions regarding the humanitarian issues in Dadaab, especially [Inaudible—Editor]. Everyone now knows that Dadaab is the largest refugee camp in the world, but it was only recently, when the Kenyan government decided to say they were closing the camp, that everyone came to realize that there is a place called Dadaab. Before that, not many people knew about Dadaab, I believe.
Something else I also wish to mention is that everything concerning Dadaab, like meetings or talks or discussions, is always done outside Dadaab. If we had had today's discussion in Dadaab, no one would require any explanation regarding the humanitarian and human rights issues there.
As I said, food is one of the first things that the UNHCR and its implementing partners are targeting. It's not enough. The reason I say this is that every child under the age of five goes to the hospital five to 10 times a month, just because of malnutrition. Even in the hospital, there is no help from medicine.
Basically, no big issue is being made of the food thing. Another thing about the issue of food is that the staple, or most common foods eaten in Dadaab or in Kenya or in the east of Africa, is things like rice. The Somalis are a pastoral community, and normally what we eat daily is animal products, livestock products, milk, and all that. But those foods are not there, so a child who was born and grew up on a farm—with milk, meat, and all that—is now told to eat things like sorghum and corn, and it's out of the question; those foods are not suitable for consumption. That's why most of us seem to be younger than we are. When I came here, for example, they were asking me whether I was 15 or 16, but I'm not. There is too much malnutrition, and there are too many issues to do with food.
The little food that is given, which I said cannot be consumed by a normal human being, is not something that you could get easily. You have to be in a long line for hours and hours, and everyone who has gone there knows that it's between 45 degrees and 50 degrees. It's terrible.
It's been 25 years, which is why I talked about the issue of the emergency operation. It's not an emergency operation. Twenty-five years is not a short period, so all this time, if the UNHCR and the international community at large had let the Somalis or other refugees living in Dadaab find food for themselves, at least they would have done that, but you are in this concentration camp, as I call it. It's a concentration camp. You cannot go to Kenya. You cannot go to Somalia. You can't carry out anything [Inaudible—Editor], even if you wanted to earn food from your own ways. It's kind of a concentration camp. Back home, we call it an “open prison”. That's what we call it. There's nothing you can do, especially for the youth. We were born and grew up in the camp. We went to some form of a school and then, after the end of high school, there's nothing else ahead, except for the few of us who had the opportunity to get some scholarships.
The situation in Dadaab is terrible and I would recommend that something has to be done, especially to the Kenyan government. We cannot be thankful for Kenya when the Kenyan government is benefiting from the refugee camp, to be very honest. Everyone working there is a Kenyan national and Kenyan nationals working for the UNHCR and other implementing agencies are earning seven times more than Kenyan nationals working for the Kenyan government. At the same time, the Kenyan government wants the refugees to be thankful for that. What are we grateful for? There's nothing to be grateful for. It's the Kenyan government that makes the refugee camp.
As for statement that they want to close the camp, .I don't think they need to close the camp. If they wanted to close the camp, they would have done it a very long time ago. They don't want that.