UN offers cash to woo refugees back to Burundi

BUJUMBURA, July 6 (Reuters) Thousands of Burundian refugees in Tanzania will receive 50 dollars for returning home in a bid by the UN refugee agency to boost flagging repatriations to the central African nation, officials said TOday.

UNHCR had planned for 60,000 of the 150,000 refugees still in Tanzania to return to Burundi this year as the country emerges from a decade of civil war that killed 300,000 people.

Some 300,000 refugees have returned from Tanzania since 2002 but UNHCR has only registered 3,539 returnees this year.

''We think that by giving them cash while increasing food rations to four months from three months previously, that will encourage refugees in Tanzanian camps to return in big numbers,'' UNHCR spokesman Andreas Kirchhof told Reuters.

The new measure would take effect from July 10, he said.

Successive cycles of ethnic bloodshed have forced hundreds of thousands of Burundians to flee to neighbouring countries since their homeland won independence from Belgium in 1962.

But during a visit to Burundi last month, Tanzania's President Jakaya Kikwete urged Burundian refugees in his country to return home, saying their nation had finally found peace.

REUTERS RKM HS2117