CANADA-ZAIRE: Not All Zaireans May Stay

By Paul Weinberg Reprint | | Print |

Paul Weinberg

TORONTO, Feb 13 1997 (IPS) - “Canada will have blood on its hands,” the Canadian Council for Refugees says of Ottawa’s conclusion that unsuccessful refugee claimants from Zaire can safely return home.

“I don’t understand how anybody of good conscience can state that it is safe to deport people to Zaire,” says Nancy Worsfold, executive director of the Montreal-based body. “The entire country is disintegrating, and there are widespread human rights abuses,” she said, referring to the fighting in eastern Zaire between government troops and a rebel alliance.

Deportations of Zairean citizens and their families, in at least 25 cases, had been suspended since December as a committee advising the Canadian minister of Citizenship and Immigration examined a request by Worsfold’s organisation that Zaire be added to a list of countries recognised as too dangerous for the return of refugees. The other countries on the list are Rwanda, Burundi, and Afghanistan.

But the minister, Lucienne Robillard, was moving to act on the committee’s recommendation to begin the process of sending people back to Zaire, according to spokespersons in his ministry.

Richard Saint-Louis, a programme specialist within the Citizenship and Immigration department, told the Globe and Mail that refugees are removed “in the most acceptable fashion possible”. He added that Canada has little control over what they face at home.

Canadian departmental officials from both Citizenship and Immigration and Foreign Affairs were recently briefed on the worsening situation in Zaire by prominent Zairean human rights advocates, Guilleume Ngesa and Denis Tougas.

“I was very surprised,” said Tougas “We had the impression that (the Zairean refugees) would be able to stay.”

Nevertheless, Tougas has not given up. He and Ngesa are meeting with officials in Foreign Affairs and the Canadian International Development Agency (CIDA) to try to get Ottawa to change its mind about the Zaireans.

Dr. Ambroise Manika, president of the Metropolitan Montreal Zairean Community says deportees face immediate arrest and torture upon landing in Zaire’s capital, Kinshasa.

Because of the documents in their possession, rejected refugee claimants can easily be targeted by Zairean military officials who charge them with espionage and promptly arrest them, says Manika.

He told IPS that 90 percent of the Zaireans who have been deported were well-educated, professional people, including an academic who has written a critique of the notorious regime of President Mobuto Sese Seko.

One former Zairean government employee who faces immediate removal to Kinshasa after exhausting the Canadian appeals process, says she fled her country with two children to avoid being arrested for writing to the political opposition, detailing how representatives of the Mobuto regime approached her department to collect public money for the president’s use.

“I don’t know where my husband is,” she says. “He was arrested a long time ago.”

Manika relates a case in which a young man was jailed on arrival in Kinshasa. His parents obtained his release by bribing military officials with a few thousand dollars. He is now in hiding.

Manika adds that after leaving Canada, the young man switched planes in Zurich. He found himself on the same plane as five other Zaireans who were being sent home from countries in Europe.

“The six Zaireans on the plane had to give their papers to the pilot who, (during the flight), told Kinshasa airport whom he was carrying,” Manika says.

Tom Clark, coordinator for the Toronto-based Inter-Church Committee for Refugees, says the North’s generally hard attitude toward refugees and other immigrants has not escaped Canada.

He notes that Canada provides human rights bodies and non- governmental groups around the world with financial assistance, while the country has problems resolving issues at home because of a flawed constitution.

“The PR works, and so everybody assumes that it must be great inside,” he observes.