Focus on Chiluba’s ‘open-door’ refugee policy

The approach of World Refugee Day on Thursday has prompted the Catholic Church in Zambia, which hosts the biggest refugee populations in the region, to issue a strong warning against xenophobia. “We are dismayed that politicians and civil servants sometimes produce statements which tend to foster rejecting our fellow Africans. General criminalisation of a social group is an expression of racism and xenophobia completely contrary to the law of God and the tradition of hospitality that the people of Zambia have always honoured,” a pastoral letter released by the Catholic Bishops of Zambia said. “The law of the land withholds some basic rights from refugees. They include such basic rights as freedom of movement, the right to freely engage in salaried work or start a business, the right to property and the right to a nationality,” the letter added. The numbers of refugees entering Zambia continues to rise every month as fighting in neighbouring Angola, and to a lesser extent, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) persists. According to new statistics released by UNHCR on Wednesday, the total number of refugees in the country rose by around 3,000 to around 258,000 over the past year. The refugees include some 200,000 Angolans and around 50,000 Congolese, as well as several thousand from Burundi and Rwanda. Most of them live in long-term refugee camps in northern and western Zambia and are not allowed free movement outside the camps. Although the refugees are fed by UNHCR and have access to health care, restrictions on work and movement have seen some refugees leaving their camps without permission to seek jobs in urban areas. The presence of refugees in towns and cities, however small, appears to feeding a growing perception among Zambians that foreigners are largely to blame for the high rates of crime and unemployment in the country. Some observers, including refugee leaders, say that the large number of refugees, who often have to compete with locals for economic and other opportunities, has pushed Zambians capacity for tolerance to the limit. Refugee leaders want other countries to share the refugee burden with Zambia. “We would like to appeal to the diplomatic missions in Zambia to initiate resettlement programmes in their respective countries as one way of reducing the already over-burdened Zambia of the population of refugees,” Lusaka Refugees Co-ordinator Sashimba Chinyangwa said. In an effort to help normalise the refugee question in Zambia, government recently said it was considering citizenship for long-term refugees. However, there are doubts among church leaders that the government is prepared to give the idea more than lip service and are calling for a definite programme under which deserving refugees will be integrated into the community. “For thousands of our brothers and sisters, their provisional situation as refugees in Zambia has become permanent. The restrictions on their basic rights prevents many of them from rebuilding normal lives. It makes them vulnerable to all kinds of abuse and exploitation. When it lasts for years or decades, this situation has to be considered decidedly inhuman,” the Catholic Bishops said. Refugee leaders concur.” We would like to see the government in conjunction with UNHCR shift from the theoretical to the practical aspects of the local integration of refugees, especially professionals and people with other skills,” Chinyangwa said.