Focus on positive aspects of refugee crisis

While seen by many as a burden on the country, the refugee crisis and the subsequent relief and development programmes in western Tanzania have, in fact, encouraged investment and opened up an inaccessible and forgotten part of the country, government officials and development workers in the region have said. After the initial impact on the local residents and the environment of thousands of refugees fleeing conflicts in Rwanda, Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the 10-year-old crisis has not had as negative an impact as has been reported by the media or perceived by the public, government officials and development workers said. "I think that if people are saying that impact is only negative, they are not being honest," said Jesse Kamstra, Kibondo project coordinator for Tanganyika Christian Refugee Service (TCRS), an organisation that has been involved in relief and development for work in the region for over 10 years. "I have been here for five years and I have seen tremendous growth in the Kibondo District and Kigoma Region alone," he said. While Kibondo is still a fairly remote town, some 1,400 km west of Tanzania's commercial capital, Dar es Salaam, Kamstra said the influx of relief and development organisations had had a positive effect on the host communities, government revenue and infrastructure in the area. "At TCRS alone we employ 350 personnel, and those people are paying their taxes and spending their money here in Kibondo," he said. "Also, the trucks that are coming up with food for the refugees are transporting products such as maize and peanuts to be sold outside the region. I really have seen a huge impact on the economy." Locals agree that improvements to transport and infrastructure have also made travel and communications in the region much easier. "It used to take over three and a half hours to travel from Kigoma to Kibondo, but now we can do the trip in just over an hour," a Kibondo resident said. "Also, there used to be just one bus a week, but now there are three a day that make the journey." Those who feel that the impact of the refugee influx has been purely negative often claim that compared to the refugees in the camps, Tanzanians in the refugee-affected areas are completely ignored. However, those working in the development and governing of the district say that the imbalance is being corrected. "At the beginning we had 20 national and international organisations working with the refugee camps, but not a single one was looking at the refugee-affected areas," Helen Macha, Kibondo's district executive director, said. "Nobody realised that the refugees stayed in the classrooms and the dispensaries and used the same facilities as the people of Kibondo. However, these organisations realised that there was an imbalance and this was causing tension between the refugees and the Tanzanians." Nature of development That situation has now improved, she said, with many primary schools being built and the Tanzanians being granted access to some of the health facilities in the refugee camps. "As a result, this tension has been greatly reduced," she said. The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says these developments have been carried out through projects that have continued to "rehabilitate and construct selected schools, teachers' houses and health centres, and to improve water supply systems in the refugee affected areas". Statistics on enrolment at primary school and on health problems support these claims of development. Official figures for primary school enrolment in the district have risen from 30 percent in 1998 to 88 percent in 2002. Meanwhile, figures for cases of malnutrition have dropped from about 10 percent in 1998 to 2 percent at present in some of the divisions of the district. The sectors critics seem to have the most problems with are the degradation of the environment and decreasing security because of the movement of so many people in a region that is dogged by war. Challenges Development organisations recognise that an influx of so many people and the subsequent increased demands on firewood have led to large-scale environmental degradation. However, Kamstra said, these organisations had started to tackle the problem. "The agencies have tried to tackle the environment issue, with our own agency [TCRS] having planted over a-million-and-a-half trees, while the development side of our organisation has even larger operations in the refugee-affected areas," he said. Insecurity Humanitarian workers say the security issue is more complicated as there have been many reports of the availability of small arms and of Burundian rebels using the refugee camps as training grounds for their operations in Burundi. The Institute for Security Studies in the South African capital, Pretoria, said in a report on small arms in Tanzania that while levels of ownership and use were not at "crisis levels", penetration was a "serious concern" for the government. Some Tanzanians who live near the border with Burundi share these concerns, and say that armed bandits are plentiful in the area. However, Kamstra said the area had always been prone to banditry and, with the help given the police in the region by agencies such as UNHCR, "there isn't such a huge difference now". Likewise, a representative of the Ministry of Home Affairs in Kibondo, Epiphany Chokola, told IRIN: "There are cases of both locals and refugees being arrested with small arms, but in general the camps are calm and, as of today, banditry is not a problem around the camps." He added, "In the end, the coming of the refugees has been positive."