Rwanda opens borders to migrants seeking asylum
GASHORA, Rwanda — At a sprawling complex of brickrow houses and gleaming new apartment blocks in this town wedged between two small lakes, hundreds of Africans have found what they could not elsewhere: refuge after enduring servitude and torture in Libya.
The fenced facility in Gashora, about 40 miles south of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, offering stark, clean rooms with double beds, is a way station for refugees awaiting asylum or resettlement elsewhere. And it is a symbol of the government’s efforts to position Rwanda as a country with a solution to the global migration crisis.
At a time when Western nations are adopting increasingly tough stances against migrants, the tiny nation of Rwanda has opened its borders to refugees, striking deals with European countries such as Britain and Denmark to house deported asylum-seekers.
Rwanda’s president, Paul Kagame, has said his government is motivated by altruism and a moral responsibility to provide a solution to “a very complicated problem all over the world.”
But critics say the country is seeking to benefit financially and geopolitically from the arrangements and is offering itself as a refuge to deflect attention from its problematic record on human rights.
The migration deals with the West are part of “Rwanda’s drive to launder its image abroad,” said Toni Haastrup, a professor of international politics at the University of Stirling in Britain.
Rwanda, a landlocked nation with lush, undulating terrain, is one of the smallest, most densely populated countries in Africa. Kagame has been the de facto leader of this nation of 13 million since the end of the 1994 genocide, in which up to 1 million people were massacred in 100 days. Since then, he has transformed the nation into an ambitious state that punches above its weight politically, economically and on the security front.
Kagame has also positioned Rwanda as a major host of African refugees. The country houses tens of thousands of refugees from countries like Burundi, the Congo, Eritrea, Somalia and Sudan.