Tide of desperate refugees is swelling
THE dormitories, which once heaved with Joburg’s refugees, were empty. Some would say, at last. Feet on the ruin of staircases brushed over the lost steps of the involuntary exiles.
But even as the five-storey Central Methodist Church finally expelled all the people who’d been streaming into its filthy corridors and dank corners, most seeking safety and shelter, for seven years, the tale of the frightened and displaced continues.
Today, as we mark World Refugee Day, South Africa’s most sought-after and yet detested destination for fellow Africans with nowhere else to go has closed its doors. We don’t know where the little girls who lifted their skirts to dance under its dangerous eaves have gone. We don’t know where their mothers, mostly Zimbabweans, have packed their treasured belongings, which once helped to replenish the drought in Plumtree, near the border with Botswana.
Most of the people have simply disappeared into the streets of a city covered in “Say No to Xenophobia” banners but which essentially doesn’t care for the displaced.
Nearly 4 000km away, in the tiny country of Rwanda, thousands of refugees are still trying to make sense of the horror that unfolded in their country, neighbouring Burundi, just a few weeks ago.
Two decades after the end of Rwanda’s own civil war, it is trying to create space for those needing refuge after Bujumbura fell into madness when President Pierre Nkurunziza announced he would be seeking a third term. More than 50 000 people fled to Rwanda, which has already been hosting around 75 000 refugees, mostly from Congo.
Seven thousand kilometres away, in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon, disparate groups of among the most oppressed and dislocated people in the world, the Palestinians, dream only of going home.
It’s been 67 years since the ethnic cleansing of Palestine saw massacres, widescale expulsions and demolitions – which carry on to this day. The ancestors of the refugees watched in terror as their villages were destroyed by militia of the State of Israel, before they were commanded to leave their histories and their lives, many at gunpoint. Today, more than 2 million Palestinians are refugees with no hope of return.
Nine-thousand kilometres from there, in Myanmar, Nobel Peace Prize winner Aung San Suu Kyi, once a moral icon for her unending bravery in the pursuit of human rights, has failed to stand up for the people of Rohingya. Described by the UN as the world’s most persecuted minority, they arrive on ramshackle rafts and boats as refugees in Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, denied citizenship in their own country.
Hundreds of thousands have been thrown out of their homes. What was once theirs has been set alight and destroyed by mobs.
The African refugees in South Africa, the Burundians with nowhere left to go, the Palestinians scattered across the world, the denied Rohingya… these are only a fraction of the 59.5 million people forcibly displaced worldwide because of persecution, conflict, violence and human rights violations.
This is an increase of 8.3 million in a mere year and the tragedy shows no sign of slowing down.
For facts and figures on refugees worldwide, go the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’s Global Trends report, which can be found at www.unhcr.org/2014trends. We commend the organisation for its courageous work all over the world.