Last Hutu refugees leave Tanzania

The refugee are accommodated at a makeshift camp

The last group of Rwandan Hutu refugees in Tanzania are now settling in at a makeshift camp in Rwanda some 80 km from the border.

Some 900 were forcefully kicked out of Tanzania on Wednesday after their claims for asylum were rejected.

More than one million Rwandans fled the civil war that followed the genocide in 1994 to neighbouring countries with nearly half of them going to Tanzania.

The group of 900 were the last of a rump group of 28,000 refugees that had remained in Tanzania since 1994, fearing reprisals over the genocide.

Rwandan regional commissioner in Kibungo, James Kimonyo, said that the Rwandan government would not screen the returnees because they posed no security threat.

"These are our people returning home and we have nothing to worry about," Mr Kimonyo told the BBC African Great Lakes service.

"They will remain at the Kiyanzi camp until such time that they are able to return to their original homes".

Disappointed

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees, UNHCR, said it was disappointed with the role played by the Tanzanian authorities in the forced repatriation to Rwanda.

The refugee were not allowed to take their belongings with them

The refugees themselves complained that they were forced into trucks and were not allowed to take their possessions with them.

They also said that there had not been sufficient consultations with individual refugees to allow them to decide whether they wanted to move to a third country that would take them in as refugees.

Tanzania is home to hundreds of thousands of refugees from Burundi and the Democratic Republic of Congo.