Fleeing terror, but forced to return
“I think host governments are getting sort of fed up that a very large proportion of the burden is falling on them.” KATHLEEN NEWLAND MIGRATION POLICY INSTITUTE CO-FOUNDER
BANKI, NIGERIA— The soldiers arrived in the middle of the night, tearing through the village of Nigerian refugees, barging into stick huts where families slept in knots on the floor.
For years, those refugees had been on the run from Boko Haram insurgents, finally escaping across a dried riverbed that served as the border with Cameroon. They had settled in the village of Majina, where they farmed beans and millet. “A peaceful place,” the men said. And then, in March, the Cameroonian soldiers arrived.
The troops rounded up the refugees haphazardly and pushed them into military trucks The refugees soon realized where they were headed: back to one of the most dangerous corners of Nigeria. Today, they are living in a displacement camp in Banki, a city racked by one of the world’s biggest hunger crises.
The United Nations would put a label on what happened that night and many others to follow — “forced return.” Over the past few months, at least 5,000 Nigerian refugees were rounded up in Cameroonian villages and refugee camps and expelled to a region under frequent attack by insurgents, according to UN officials. Some aid officials believe that the actual number of those forcibly returned is over 10,000.
As the number of refugees around the world soars — topping 20 million — they are facing growing hostility from host countries and shrinking protection from the international legal framework put in place to defend such vulnerable people decades ago. A forced return like the one reported in Cameroon emblemizes the most extreme and unforgiving reaction to those searching for safe haven.
Under the 1951 Refugee Convention, ratified by 145 countries — including Cameroon — victims of war or persecution should not be returned to nations where they will face serious threats. But that edict is being ignored, according to human rights groups.
“Poorer countries hosting huge numbers of refugees for many years, such as Kenya, Pakistan and Turkey, have recently pushed back hundreds of thousands of refugees and asylum seekers,” said Gerry Simpson, a migration expert at Human Rights Watch. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has sought to reach agreements with countries that are sending home refugees, to ensure they are only going voluntarily.
But the agency’s assistance came too late for thousands of Nigerians in Cameroon.
Aid groups are unsure what prompted what they call a mass eviction. Some UN officials say the refugees were likely forced out in advance of a military operation. Other groups say that Cameroon, one of the world’s poorest nations, has simply grown tired of hosting them. Cameroon has been inundated by refugees in recent years, with more than 300,000 fleeing wars in the Central African Republic and Nigeria.
The Cameroonian government has rejected the UNHCR statements on the forced returns.
In addition to the thousands who were reportedly forced from Cameroon, many more were persuaded to go back to northeastern Nigeria after being lied to about the conditions there, according to refugees and aid officials. The refugees are finding a lack of housing, severe overcrowding and a scarcity of food and water.
The Cameroonian military moved so hastily in removing the refugees that it inadvertently swept up a group of Cameroonian women and children in a raid.
Abba Goni, 76, fled Banki nearly three years ago on a bicycle, riding from village to village, an old man much faster on two wheels than on his two gnarled feet.
Goni was born and raised in Banki, once a city surrounded by fertile farmland, just more than a mile from the Cameroonian border. In September 2014, the Islamist extremists known as Boko Haram surged into town, shooting wildly and burning down buildings. Goni’s first escape on the bicycle was in the dead of night. His two wives and nine children followed.
Since Goni was a boy, members of his Kanuri ethnic group had moved back and forth into Cameroon, without any documents. Boko Haram, too, had crossed the border with impunity. But the group’s stronghold remained in Nigeria, and Goni knew that if he headed deep enough into Cameroon, he would likely be safe.
Parts of Nigeria were meanwhile inching closer to famine. When the aid group Doctors Without Borders finally got access to Banki last summer, after the military drove out Boko Haram, they found a hunger crisis, with more than 10 per cent of children suffering from severe acute malnutrition and people dying of preventable disease. For Goni and his family, their hamlet in Cameroon wasn’t just an escape from Boko Haram but from starvation.
The Cameroonian government, though, was struggling to provide for so many refugees. Residents of northern Cameroon blamed food shortages on refugees.
Experts see that frustration reflected in other countries where refugees have been pressured to leave.
“I think host governments are getting sort of fed up that a very large proportion of the burden is falling on them, without enough international assistance,” said Kathleen Newland, co-founder of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washingtonbased research organization.
In Majina, Goni never experienced that antagonism. On that March day, when he heard the sounds of trucks and shouting men, Goni first assumed Boko Haram had arrived. Then he looked outside and saw the men in uniform.
“Who is Nigerian?” the soldiers shouted, Goni recalled.
Goni asked if he could at least collect his things. The soldiers refused. Everything happened quickly. When he looked around, in the back of the speeding military truck, he found only one of his wives and two of his children. The rest had been left behind.
The following morning, Goni got his first look at what was left of Banki. Entire blocks had been flattened, most likely by military airstrikes.
Although aid groups had begun to distribute food and open rudimentary clinics, the military still controlled access, posting checkpoints and barring residents from leaving town. That no possibility of leaving Banki again.
After being interrogated by Nigerian soldiers, Goni was directed to an abandoned building. The UN refugee agency, UNHCR, gave him a mat and a blanket. It was his new home: one room with 18 people sleeping on the floor.
A few blocks away, in another grey, unfinished building, 32 Cameroonian women and children waved their documents — Cameroonian birth certificates and voter registration cards — when they spotted a visiting journalist.
“We kept telling the soldiers, ‘We are from Cameroon,’ but they brought us here anyway,” Fati Kadi, 40, said.
Stories of other forced returns emerged throughout March and April. More than two million people had already been displaced internally in Nigeria’s war with Boko Haram. With the flow of refugees from Cameroon, that number was rising.
Three hundred kilometres from Banki, in the city of Ngala, the border superintendent watched one day in April as the Cameroonians deposited hundreds of Nigerians on a bridge that connects the two nations.
“They just wanted to get the Nigerians out,” Mohammed Gadam, the border chief, said in an interview.
In March, UNHCR reached an agreement with the Nigerian and Cameroonian governments, mandating that refugees only return to Nigeria voluntarily. The number of forced returns appears to have dropped off recently, according to UNHCR.
“There is now a framework for voluntary returns,” said Cesar Tshilombo, head of UNHCR’s sub-office in northeastern Nigeria.
But other relief workers say people are still being pressured to go back to a dangerous, desperate place.
“They are threatened by Cameroonian authorities until they agree to return,” said one relief worker in Banki who interviewed the refugees last month. He spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the issue.
For now, the thousands of refugees, such as Goni, who have been forced back to Nigeria, have pragmatic questions. When will they be reunited with their families? How will they get their belongings in Cameroon? Will they ever be free to return?
“They keep us here like prisoners,” he said. “We weren’t ready to come back.”