NAIROBI, Kenya — Pres­i­dent Uhuru Keny­atta of Kenya on Wednes­day soft­ened a threat to ex­pel hun­dreds of thou­sands of So­mali refugees within three months, say­ing there would be no forced repa­tri­a­tions.

Mr. Keny­atta made the as­sur­ance af­ter meet­ings with the top refugee of­fi­cial from the United Na­tions. He also met with Sec­re­tary of State John Kerry here this week.

Kenya’s gov­ern­ment was sharply crit­i­cized last month for vow­ing to close Dadaab, one of the world’s old­est and largest refugee com­plexes, home to more than 350,000 So­ma­lis, about 60 miles from its bor­der with So­ma­lia. The deputy pres­i­dent, William Ruto, said the United Na­tions refugee agency had three months to re­lo­cate Dadaab’s res­i­dents, or “we shall re­lo­cate them our­selves.”

The threat was part of Kenya’s re­sponse to the deadly April 2 at­tack on a uni­ver­sity in Garissa by fight­ers of the Shabab, the mil­i­tant group based in So­ma­lia.

Kenyan of­fi­cials have called Dadaab a breed­ing ground for Shabab re­cruit­ment.

Of­fi­cials from the United Na­tions, emer­gency re­lief groups and gov­ern­ments have said that clos­ing Dadaab would vi­o­late in­ter­na­tional law and cre­ate chaos. They ex­horted the Kenyan gov­ern­ment to re­con­sider.

“Kenya has been, and will con­tinue, ful­fill­ing its in­ter­na­tional oblig­a­tions,” Mr. Keny­atta said in a state­ment is­sued by his of­fice on Wednes­day, ac­cord­ing to news agen­cies.

Af­ter his meet­ing with Mr. Keny­atta, An­tónio Guter­res, the United Na­tions high com­mis­sioner for refugees, told re­porters that any repa­tri­a­tion of refugees would be vol­un­tary and in ac­cor­dance with an agree­ment among the United Na­tions, So­ma­lia and Kenya.

“The worst thing that might hap­pen would be to send back a large num­ber of peo­ple when con­di­tions are not right, who are then forced to come back, move to an­other coun­try or be re­cruited by ex­trem­ist groups,” Mr. Guter­res said.

On April 14, Mr. Guter­res’s agency pub­licly urged Kenya not to close Dadaab, say­ing such a move “would have ex­treme hu­man­i­tar­ian and prac­ti­cal con­se­quences and would be a breach of Kenya’s in­ter­na­tional oblig­a­tions.”

On Mon­day, Mr. Kerry urged the Kenyan au­thor­i­ties to keep the camp open un­til “fun­da­men­tal prob­lems in So­ma­lia are solved.”

Dadaab is a com­plex of camps es­tab­lished in 1991 as the So­mali gov­ern­ment col­lapsed dur­ing a civil war, which sent hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple flee­ing to neigh­bor­ing coun­tries. The com­plex, orig­i­nally meant to house 90,000, is se­verely over­crowded.

Mr. Guter­res was sched­uled to travel to the So­mali cap­i­tal, Mo­gadishu, on Thurs­day be­fore head­ing to Dadaab on Fri­day.