Shannon Ebrahim
YESTERDAY morning James Biamungu* – the Democratic Republic of Congo refugee in search of human security – woke up in a bed.
It is the first time in months he has not slept on a wooden plank in Pretoria Central Prison cells, or on the pavement outside the offices of the city’s UN building.
On Friday at 9pm he was released from detention by the department of home affairs, into the care of his lawyer, after an 11th hour agreement that halted his deportation to Zimbabwe.
Biamungu and his wife, Annaline, were overcome with emotion as they left the prison after a harrowing few days.
Despite having been given refugee status by Zimbabwe in 2005 after they fled persecution in the DRC, they fled Zimbabwe in 2010 following brutal beatings and persecution at the hands of the Zimbabwean police and Hutu refugees in the Tongogara refugee camp where they had lived.
The Biamungu’s lawyer, Nyaradzo Chiwa, had saved the day by convincing the department of the grave danger the family’s lives would have been in were they to have been deported back to Zimbabwe.
Having fled persecution in Zimbabwe herself, Chiwa was more than aware of the revenge that could have been exacted on Biamungu for having exposed the beatings he and his wife received at the hands of Zimbabwean police in the offices of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Harare, under the auspices of a UNHCR protection officer.
The Biamungu family had fled the refugee camp after repeated attempts on their lives and sought protection at the UNHCR offices in Harare.
What they got instead was a vicious beating and $50 to return to the refugee camp.
Officers at Lawyers for Human Rights in Zimbabwe (ZLHR) had told the family that the UNHCR protection officer who oversaw this episode was in fact President Robert Mugabe’s nephew.
After accommodating the family for a month, ZLHR instructed them to go back to the offices for assistance, but the family was denied access to the building.
They were then advised by ZLHR to go to South Africa and seek the protection of the UNHCR regional office – which they did.
For the past six years the family has been sent from pillar to post by home affairs and the UNHCR, both claiming the other had the responsibility to protect the family and sort out its situation.
UNHCR said South Africa should give them refugee status, this was denied to the family by the Refugee Appeal Board as they already had refugee status from Zimbabwe.
The department then turned over the family’s fate to the UNHCR – stating it was their obligation.
The UNHCR organised them shelter for a year with the Jesuits, but when funding ran out, the family was on the streets.
The UNHCR did nothing to find alternative shelter for them, but proceeded to hold resettlement hearings with the intention of possibly resettling the family abroad.
In the end, the family signed documents stating that they accepted the protection of the UNHCR and were told that it would try and settle them in Australia, the US or Canada. This never transpired and the family had no other option but to sleep on the streets.
Then came detention for Biamungu for four months earlier this year in Lindela Repatriation Centre, and then two periods of detention in the Pretoria Central Prison.
His five children, who are aged between 3 and 11, were taken away from him and none had ever entered Grade 1.
While the parents may be released from detention, and are supposed to be reunited with their children, who are in two different shelters, this week their fate is still uncertain as they have no legal right to live in South Africa.
The UNHCR has also not taken steps for their resettlement.
For now they are living on the generosity of different families of a church in Pretoria who are providing them with accommodation and food. The story continues.
The UNHCR does not comment on individual cases.
*Biamungu is not this refugee’s real name. His identity has been concealed for the family’s safety. SOMEWHERE along the line, it seems that we have lost our humanity, our caring for those that live on the margins of society. Perhaps there are just too many poor people all around us, and there are just so many refugees and illegal migrants in South Africa, that we begin to tar them all with the same brush.
“These refugees that sleep on the pavement outside the UN building in Pretoria – they are just creating a cinema,” someone told me this week. “They just want to get to Europe and so they create all this drama to get people to feel sorry for them,” he said. He even claimed that the refugee family which made the headlines this week for their odyssey of trials and tribulations in first the DRC, then Zimbabwe, and in South Africa over the past six years were just fakes.
“Your Biamungu was gainfully employed as a car guard, so why did he have to sleep on the pavement?”
Well the last time I checked, car guards do not make all that much money, and if you have five children sleeping out on the pavement with you and you wife for much of the past two years, I would hope that you tried to do some car guarding instead of merely relying on inconsistent hand-outs from local churches. It is very easy to dole out such criticism when you live in a huge house in the eastern suburbs of Pretoria.
And yes, there are many refugees whose objective it is to pull the wool over our eyes, and invoke our compassion and that of the UN’s in the hope of getting resettled to the US, Canada or Australia. But that does not mean that every refugee does not have a genuine fear of persecution, or that somehow their case hasn’t fallen through the cracks in a never-ending bureaucratic nightmare.
We have become immune to poverty and distress to the point we even think it is okay – it is them and us – and we even begrudge these people their hope for a better life, one of human security. We appease our consciences by throwing them a R5 coin, and then we feel better about going back to our comfortable warm homes at night.
I wonder how those officials at the UN building in Pretoria felt as they walked by the destitute refugees sleeping on the pavement outside their offices for more than two years, knowing that it is their agency that is the only body with a mandate to sort out their situation as refugees.
After weeks or months those officials must have also convinced themselves that these homeless refugees were just crooks, out to get a better deal, even if it meant sleeping night after night on a pavement through the winter in temperatures that went down to zero degrees – not in tents but just on sponge mattresses.
We know that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) doesn’t take kindly to criticism, but we expect them to step up to the plate and do what they are here in South Africa to do – protect those on the margins of the society who rely on their protection and assistance. For too long the UNHCR has shirked their responsibility to protect the Biamungu family – from the very moment they fled to South Africa and arrived at Musina.
The UNHCR knows they were wrong to expect South Africa to give the family refugee status when they already had refugee status