50,000 refugees, asylum seekers registered in Mauritania

The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) has registered over 50,000 refugees and asylum seekers in Mauritania, the UN agency said in a statement issued on Sunday in Nouakchott.

The statement said over 90 percent of those registered were Malians who had fled hostility that began in 2012 in the northern part of their country.

"About 1,500 refugees and asylum seekers were mainly from Cote d'Ivoire, Central African Republic and Syria," the statement added.

The UNHCR said it was providing essential support to those registered, especially protection, provision of primary education, distribution of food, provision of health services, water, sanitation, housing as well as energy.

"Living conditions in Mberra camp in eastern Mauritania have considerably improved since 2012. We have achieved humanitarian standards in most critical sectors such as nutrition, health and access to drinking water," said Ursula Schulze Aboubacar, UNHCR representative in Mauritania who was cited in the statement.

"Close to 400 new Malian refugees have entered Mauritania since April 2015," she said, adding that the "arrival of the new refugees shows that we need to remain mobilized, with capacity to respond rapidly to an influx of refugees," the UNHCR representative concluded.

Mauritania had earlier received some 70,000 Malian refugees who had fled the violence in the northern part of the country.

Official statistics show that 20,000 among them returned to their country in 2014 and 2015 under a voluntary repatriation program initiated by UNHCR and the Malian authorities. Endi