3,000 Rwandans seek refuge in the north

At least 3,000 Rwandans, who earlier this year sought asylum in Burundi but were repatriated, have returned to the northern provinces of Kirundo and Ngozi where they are awaiting the government's definition of their status, an official of the UN refugee agency, UNHCR, said on Wednesday. "They are not coming massively but, each week, there are newcomers," Catherine Lune-Grayson, the UNHCR public relations officer, said in the Burundian capital, Bujumbura. Up to 4,000 Rwandans were repatriated in June and a transit site that had been set up for them at Songore in Ngozi closed. Rwandan and Burundian officials supervised the site's closure in the absence of international organisations, including the UNHCR. Earlier, Burundian and Rwandan government officials had met in the northern province of Kayanza and decided to reclassify the Rwandans as "illegal immigrants". On Wednesday, Lune-Grayson said since the closure of the Songore transit site, the Rwandans continued crossing into Burundi. She said the agency carried out a census of the Rwandans in early September and found that some 2,300 had returned to Burundi. "We estimate them now to be more than 3,000," she said. Most of the Rwandans are living with Burundian families in several villages but mainly in Gatsinda and Mparamirundi in Ngozi Province and Rwisuri in Kirundo Province. Lune-Grayson said they were fleeing Rwanda due to harassment, discrimination, threats from neighbours and disappearances. However, she added: "But all these [reasons] are only allegations, we did not check." The refugee agency has been distributing food and non-food aid to the Rwandans and Lune-Grayson said the agency expected the Burundian government to determine their status and to assign them a site. An official in charge of refugees in the Ministry of the Interior, Col Didace Nzikoruriho, told IRIN on Wednesday that the government was aware of the problem and was ready to cooperate with the UNHCR on resolving it. He said the government was really willing to provide the Rwandans with a transit site but "the site is not yet identified". Nzikoruriho also said a team of lawyers and refugee and human rights experts would be recruited to define the status of the Rwandans. "If we find they are refugees, they will be treated as such, if not, they will be treated accordingly," he added. He said each case would be studied individually because even asylum seekers have the right to protection. However, Nzikoruriho said, in the long term, the Burundian government was preparing a bill on asylum seekers and the protection of refugees. If parliament adopted such a bill, the law would allow the government to set up a permanent secretariat on refugees.