Wars and Rumors of War: The Politics of Forced Migration for Kenya and Tanzania

Abstract

Kenya and Tanzania have never been major refugee-producing countries. In the early post-independence years in the 1960s Kenya was not a key refugee-hosting country either, except for relatively small numbers of refugees fleeing from the wars of liberation in southern Africa. On the other hand for Tanzania, “from the 1950s, internal conflicts within neighbouring states have periodically forced a considerable number of refugees to seek sanctuary in Tanzania” (Daley 1993, 10). This makes the two countries rather unique in a region dominated by countries that have simultaneously produced and hosted large numbers of refugees. For Kenya and Tanzania, therefore, refugees have tended to be viewed largely as an “external” problem, which has had serious implications in the way that they are received and treated. The changing refugee policies in the two countries will be examined in the next chapter. This chapter seeks to identify and analyze the factors that produced refugees in the neighboring countries—principally Somalia, Ethiopia, and Sudan for Kenya and Rwanda, Burundi, and the DRC for Tanzania.