The World - News from May 8, 1989
About 70,000 people fleeing ethnic riots in Senegal and Mauritania have been taken home in a weeklong international airlift, Senegalese military officials said in the capital of Dakar. A total of 40,000 Senegalese living in Mauritania were repatriated by plane, while the repatriation of about 30,000--or one-tenth of the estimated 300,000 Mauritanians living in Senegal--was completed. Thousands of other refugees have decided to return home by road. The riots, sparked by a dispute over grazing rights, began in Mauritania on April 9 and quickly spread to neighboring Senegal as decades of simmering racial tension between the two West African nations surfaced.
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