No goodwill in callous treatment of refugees

AN AMERICAN actor turned philanthropist came to SA to play Francois Pienaar as captain of the 1995 World Cup-winning Springboks in a new film directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Morgan Freeman as Nelson Mandela. On the way to the movie set, Matt Damon — one of the founders of a humanitarian group called Not On Our Watch — decided to visit Limpopo two weeks ago to see how the government is treating Zimbabwean refugees at a refugee reception centre in Musina.

The problem is that somebody forgot to tell our government that one of the world’s most visible celebrities (voted “Sexiest Man Alive” by People Magazine in 2007) was visiting the most invisible refugee camp on the Zimbabwe border on the same day that the Department of Home Affairs decided to expel several hundred residents.
Nobody told Damon in advance. And nobody notified the refugees either. Nice timing, home affairs.
Although the closure of the camp had been mooted for several weeks, the department failed to inform the camp’s residents — or even the local church groups and international agencies working there for the past six months — that the camp would be closed on Tuesday morning. Callous bureaucratic ineptitude on a gross scale left hundreds of Zimbabwean refugees with few alternatives for shelter, food, water or sanitation.
There were reportedly 30 women with babies dispatched to a local church. There were apparently 150 unaccompanied children who fled to an aid agency’s local office, looking for help. Department officials allegedly said these children would be deported to Zimbabwe unless nongovernmental organisations and church groups found alternative accommodation for them — as if someone else had a greater obligation to shelter these undocumented children than the South African government itself.
The closure of the refugee reception centre in Musina came less than a day after officials shut down the last remaining refugee camp in Gauteng, 10km outside Pretoria in Akasia. Tshwane metro police and the SAPS allegedly used pepper spray and force to dislodge defiant refugees from the camp. Police stood by while a private company hired by the Tshwane municipality got on with the dirty business of destroying every shelter in the camp. Refugees told The Star that police started fires to burn down their shelters and drive them from the camp; the police retorted that refugees torched their own camp to protest the latest attempt to evict them from Akasia.
When it was our own people, we called these cruel evictions forced removals.
Things got so bad on the Monday in Gauteng, according to The Star, that a group of Somalis living adjacent to the camp “decided almost unanimously that they wanted to be moved to the Lindela Repatriation Centre, with the aim of returning to war-torn Somalia”. If the fire gets too hot in xenophobic SA, these refugees must have reasoned, life in Somalia is a better option.
Could the closure of these two refugee camps be unrelated events in SA’s political calendar?
Just as the African National Congress government’s parole of Schabir Shaik this week told the electorate “we will protect our own at any cost”, the destruction of these refugee camps and dispersal of desperate foreigners told South African voters : we will protect our own at any cost.
Was it not coincidental that the talented Damon visited the Musina show grounds to witness first-hand the heartless eviction of Zimbabwean refugees from their camp? After all, the purpose of Not On Our Watch is “to focus on mass atrocities and gross violations of international human rights”, according to its website. “We work in areas where global attention is minimal and the response from the international community remains muted.” Damon, goodwill hunting, found precisely what he was looking for in SA.
It’s not on his watch. But it’s definitely on ours.

•Kadalie is a human rights activist based in Cape Town.

Source: Business Day