REFUGEE DAY: Pending Asylum, a Cat and Mouse Game With Police

By Moyiga Nduru Reprint | | Print |

Moyiga Nduru

JOHANNESBURG, Jun 18 2004 (IPS) - A man who wishes to be identified as Soyu Mokili has discovered that the streets of South Africa’s main commercial city, Johannesburg, are not paved with gold in the way he expected.

Although Mokili came to South Africa to seek refuge from the turmoil in his country, the Democratic Republic of Congo, he does not yet have legal refugee status. As a result, he spends most of his time playing a cat and mouse game with the police.

“Whenever I see the police I disappear from the scene as fast as my legs can carry me,” he told IPS, smiling. But, he immediately added, “I’m submitting my application for asylum soon.”

In the meantime Mokili exists on the fringes of society, eking out a living in Hillbrow: a high-density suburb of Johannesburg which is notorious for crime and drug dealing. He does menial jobs and occasionally runs errands for a restaurant owner in the area.

His salary of less than 150 dollars a month barely covers the cost of renting a one-bedroom apartment in Hillbrow, and buying food and medicine. To make ends meet, he shares the room with another two asylum seekers, one from the DRC, the other from Angola.

The story of how Mokili arrived in South Africa makes for a fascinating, if harrowing, tale.

The 19-year-old crossed through six countries – Burundi, Tanzania, Malawi, Zambia, Zimbabwe and Mozambique – before arriving in South Africa. Under United Nations regulations, people fleeing their country must declare themselves to authorities in the first state they enter – in Mokili’s case, Burundi.

“But Burundi is at war, and there is nothing much one can do there,” he said. “Although life is tough in South Africa, it’s much better than Burundi.”

His Congolese roommate, who calls himself Pierre, nods. “If you work hard in Johannesburg, you can make it. But you must have skills and connections in order to find a good job,” he told IPS.

Under the UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, adopted in 1951, a refugee is defined as a person who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group, or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.”

Financial hardship in many countries has also created a burgeoning group of ‘economic refugees’, however.

Mokili says he fled conflict in the DRC. According to the London-based human rights watchdog, Amnesty International, over two million people have died since fighting erupted in this central African country in 1998. Although the war officially ended last year, a recent upsurge of violence in eastern DRC and a failed coup attempt on Jun. 10 have shown that the situation in the country remains volatile.

As the international community marks World Refugee Day on Sunday, Jun. 20, the hope is that more attention will be paid to Mokili and countless others in his situation.

Last year, South Africa’s parliament heard that there were 24,000 recognised refugees in the country, with 51,000 asylum applications pending. Most asylum applicants came from the DRC, Angola, Mozambique, Burundi, Rwanda, Somalia, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Nigeria.

These figures pale in comparison with statistics from other countries in the region, however. Tanzania currently hosts the largest number of refugees in the Southern African Development Community: 648,184. Zambia has taken in 238, 910 refugees and Botswana 2,818, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). In an ironic twist, the DRC is itself host to almost 273,000 refugees.

Inevitably, these influxes have weighed heavily on countries which are already struggling to meet the demands of their own populations.

Some hope, however, has been created by the outbreak of peace in Angola, which has prompted many who fled that country to return home voluntarily. Last week, about 365 Angolan refugees left the Meheba settlement camp in western Zambia with the assistance of the UNHCR, to return to their country.

More are expected to follow in weekly convoys from Zambia, with the repatriation of groups from the Mayukwayukwa and Ukwimi camps scheduled to begin in July. The UNHCR plans to help 40,000 Angolan refugees leave Zambia before the start of the rainy season at the end of October.

A separate programme, which got underway in May, focuses on repatriating Angolans who sought refuge in Namibia. In all, the UNHCR expects 145,000 Angolan refugees to return home this year, 90,000 of them with the agency’s assistance. About 223,000 Angolans are thought to be living in the DRC, Zambia, Namibia, the Republic of Congo, South Africa and Botswana.

Once home, the returnees are provided with agricultural tools and seeds. They also receive plastic sheeting to build homes. But life remains hard.

“Often widows, orphans and the elderly come to look for money for feeding, school fees and medicines,” Isaias Samakuva, Chairman of the opposition Union for the Total Liberation of Angola (UNITA), told IPS in an earlier interview.

UNITA, which operated as a rebel movement for over 30 years, signed a ceasefire with government in 2002 after the death of its founder, Jonas Savimbi, who was killed by government troops.

This week some 150 legislators from 26 African countries met in Cotonou, Benin, to promote refugee protection. According to the UNHCR, four million Africans live as refugees, while another 13 million have been internally displaced, due to war and human rights abuse.