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Victims of realpolitik: how the truth about refugees in Uganda is being suppressed (30 October 2017)

Date: 30/10/2017
Duncan Lewis, Main Solicitors, Victims of realpolitik: how the truth about refugees in Uganda is being suppressed

“Look!” interjected an old man, jerking up a shirtsleeve to reveal his emaciated forearm, his jaundiced eyes smouldered under a black fedora, “in Congo I was strong, now I’m a skeleton.”

We were huddled on a hill overlooking the patchwork of maize fields, paths of scored red earth and mud-and-wattle huts that make up the Rwamwanja refugee settlement, west Uganda. We had made our way through the settlement to the accompaniment of the squeals of children, “Mzungu! Muhindi!” (white man and Indian in Swahili) and the frank stares of baby-laden mothers, in all the colours of a butterfly, their little cargos swaddled up against the damp.

In mist-muted voices, they told us of their hunger. “In Congo we had enough to eat,” an elderly woman told us, skin taut over the contours of her skull, “we had plantain, cassava, avocadoes, groundnuts, rice, maize, fish; here we run out of food before the end of every month.”

With some rare exceptions, Uganda is eulogised in the media as a “go-to example” of how to receive refugees (The Conversation); “generous and exemplary” (Die Zeit); “the best place in the world to be a refugee” (The Guardian). My director Toufique Hossain (“Muhindi”) and I (“Mzungu”) have just returned from a visit to the refugee settlements of Rwamwanja and Kiryandongo in the west of the East African nation. We met refugees from South Sudan, Congo (DRC), Rwanda and Burundi. Having fled torture, rape and ethnic violence, they now find themselves facing the more prosaic but equally deadly demons of hunger, discrimination and corruption.

The inconvenient truth of their plight is being stifled; gagged for political convenience. On our last day in Uganda we met Dr Chris Dolan of the Refugee Law Project (RLP), an outreach project of Makerere University’s School of Law. We splashed our way through torrential rain, weaving-darting-swerving through traffic on boda bodas, Uganda’s kamikaze motorbike taxis, to the RLP offices in the old town of Uganda’s capital, Kampala, under the shadow of Gaddafi’s Mosque. By this point we were as baffled as we were exasperated by the disparity between what we had seen in the refugee settlements and what we continued to read in the media. We put this to Dr Dolan: “The difference is”, he told us, one eye-brow raised, “you spoke to refugees."

According to Dolan, most journalists and diplomats are taken on bespoke tours of the refugee settlements, meeting officials from the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), NGOs working under the aegis of UNHCR, and government officials from the Office of the Prime Minister (OPM). Any refugees they do meet are likely to be hand selected. This way reporters are fed a certain narrative which they churn back into the media, namely: Uganda admirably promotes self-reliance among refugees, they enjoy the right to travel and work and are even allocated a plot of land to cultivate. For these reasons, they conclude, Uganda is “a refugee paradise” (Dutch Public Broadcaster NOS).

This hunky-dory narrative suits everyone apart from the refugees. It serves the authoritarian 72-year-old President Museveni, ever seeking international recognition as a force for good and stability in the region; it suits wealthy nations such as the UK, keen to justify their abdication of responsibility towards refugees by demonstrating that the refugee “crisis” can be “contained” locally (“at the roots”); it suits key actors in the refugee world eager to inspire confidence in donors; it even suits journalists who aim, with some justification, to shame larger, richer, countries such as the UK (GDP circa $40,000 per capita), by comparing their mean response to that of Uganda (GDP of circa $600 per capita).

There is some fire behind this smoke. As of 29 September, Uganda hosts 1,355,764 refugees, over 1,022,000 of whom are from South Sudan. Over the past 12 months an average of 1,800 South Sudanese have arrived in Uganda every day, over 85% of them women and children. Uganda is now host to the largest refugee settlement in the world, Bidi Bidi.

Despite this phenomenal influx into a country physically the size of the UK, Uganda has not closed its borders or changed its relatively progressive refugee policies. Uganda is a signatory of the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) 1969 Convention, a brave and pragmatic resolution to supplement the narrow definition found in the 1951 Refugee Convention by including those seeking refuge due to “external aggression, occupation, foreign domination or events seriously disturbing public order”, thus bringing into the fold many forced migrants who would be refused asylum in the UK.

Uganda also affords a range of rights to refugees not guaranteed everywhere. Under the Refugees Act 2006 refugees enjoy free access to the courts, the right to work and the freedom to travel. Unlike the UK, Uganda does not subject asylum-seekers to the arbitrary indignity of administrative detention, nor are they corralled and fenced into dense dusty camps like Kenya’s Dadaab and Jordan’s Za’atari. To reflect this, in Uganda they are called settlements, not camps.

The cornerstone of Ugandan refugee policy is the promotion of self-reliance rather than dependency in the refugee community. In this spirit, Uganda’s flagship refugee policy is the allocation of a plot of land by the government to grow crops to eat, selling the surplus so that they can buy essentials and pay for services such as education and healthcare.

There are some particular reasons for Uganda’s warm welcome of refugees from neighbouring countries. Uganda is already a land of many languages and peoples and nearly half of the nation’s 64 constitutionally recognized indigenous communities were divided from their kin by the colonial borders. This demographic reality is articulated in the ideology of Pan-Africanism, espoused by all postcolonial Ugandan leaders including the incumbent president:

“We handle refugees well because we do not believe in colonial borders. These are Africans; and Uganda is therefore their home.” (Museveni in 2015).

Finally, as has already been touched upon, Museveni is more interested in external recognition than domestic legitimacy, keen to position himself as an indispensable pillar of regional stability.

Whatever the reasons, it is praiseworthy that the government and people of Uganda continue to welcome refugees in such numbers without resorting to scapegoating or the casual denigration of refugees. You will not find Museveni, a former refugee himself, employing the pejorative collective noun ‘swarm’ for refugees (vide Cameron). So far so good, but the story should not end here, and it too often does.

In reality, as acknowledged in a report compiled by a team from the World Bank, refugees in the settlements merely enjoy a “semblance of self-reliance” [emphasis added]. The refugees we spoke to explained that the land allocated to them is being steadily divided up into smaller plots as a result of corruption. Kiryandongo and Rwamwanja settlements are now officially full and closed but this does not stop government officials receiving bribes of 50,000 Ugandan Shillings (about $14) for an individual, or 300,000 ($80) for a family, to register new residents. “When they register someone new, they just take some of your land and give it to the newcomers,” we were told by long-term residents in Kiryandongo. We also heard accounts of a previous settlement “commandant” selling tracts of settlement land to a local tribe: “If you complain, they just arrest you.”

The rumps of land left to each family are insufficient to sustain them. One family we spoke to in Kiryandongo told us that their plot has shrunk from one acre to less than a third of an acre. To make matters worse, the little land left is of poor quality, as a result of the climate, soil conditions and overuse

Smaller plots and poorer soil mean no surplus crops, which means no cooking oil, no variety in the diet, no education, no healthcare…and voilà!, the much-vaunted system of self-reliance implodes.

Forget surplus crops, the refugees we spoke to are struggling to cultivate enough to even feed themselves. In Kiryandongo, sitting in the shade of a tukul, the elegant round mud-and-thatch houses typical of South Sudan, we chatted to a women’s empowerment group as they prepared maize flour; scraping the white kernels off the cob then spreading them out on a ground-sheet. “We receive three kilograms of rations each a month [scrape]” one of them told us, focused on her deft knife-work, “but we need at least four times more than this [scrape] because they don’t give us enough land [scrape]”. Most of these women are widows, their husbands having been killed in the civil war raging in South Sudan, and are also victims of the sexual violence sweeping across that fledgling nation. These women are stronger together, but they still struggle to feed themselves, their own children, and the orphans in their care.

The refugees we spoke to often only receive maize as their ration, which is also what they cultivate: a high-yield crop to feed large numbers with little land, the equivalent of the potato in pre-famine Ireland. This meagre and unvaried diet is causing high levels of malnutrition, resulting in soaring levels of stunting and anaemia. According to Dr. Leon Salumu, a programme manager at Médecins Sans Frontières:

“Refugees are being put in an unimaginable position – to go without food and water, or risk their lives in a conflict just so they can eat.”

Refugees in rural settlements are unlikely to educate or train themselves out of this mire. In Rwamwanja for instance, there are approximately 30,000 children, but according to the Xavier Project, an NGO dedicated to refugee education, only seventy refugees are currently attending the settlement’s only secondary school. When we asked the refugees why, they told us that the school is remote and they simply cannot afford the termly fees of 120,000 Ugandan shillings ($33), plus a contribution of maize and beans. To put this in context, the average monthly income of a refugee in Rwamwanja is 28,000 UGX ($8). This lack of opportunities is being exploited by traffickers, they told us, who lure girls to Kampala promising education and career prospects, but then force them into prostitution.

Stuck in poverty, and without recourse to secondary education or vocational training, the refugees have little to be optimistic about. As is acknowledged in the World Bank report mentioned above, “What all refugees in Uganda lack is a long-term solution”. Many refugees will not be able to return home in the foreseeable future, their home countries embroiled in protracted violence, and nor are they likely to be included in the less than 1% of refugees in Uganda who are resettled in a third country such as the USA, Canada or Australia. In 2016, the UNHCR resettled only 11 South Sudanese refugees. Their only hope then would be to be to naturalise as Ugandan citizens, enabling them to vote, to own property, to feel they belong.

Theoretically, a Ugandan refugee could naturalise under the Ugandan constitution were they to fulfil the requirements legislated by Parliament, namely, they must: have lived in Uganda for at least a total of twenty years, including the last two years; have an adequate knowledge of either a vernacular language of Uganda or English; be of good character; and intend to remain in Uganda permanently. Indeed, the right of a refugee to become a Ugandan citizen is implicit in the Refugee Act and the 2010 Refugee Regulations.

Again, the reality is rather different. We met many refugees who fulfil these criteria but have never so much as heard of the possibility of naturalising. According to the Refugee Law Project, refugees who do approach the Immigration Office are sent away on the premise that they are disqualified from becoming Ugandan citizens by the Constitution which requires of a citizen that “(ii) neither of his or her parents and none of his or her grandparents was a refugee in Uganda”. This eisegetic interpretation clearly contradicts domestic legislation and policy and violates the 1951 Refugee Convention. Whether this stems from ignorance, populist convenience, or a combination of the two, it means Ugandan refugees are condemned to be guests forever. This reality is no frolic in ‘paradise’; refugees in Uganda languish in limbo at best.

Given the sheer numbers of refugees arriving, and the lack of support from the international community, it is not surprising that Uganda is struggling to meet the needs of the refugees within its borders. In August, the UNHCR announced that they had only received 21% of the $674 million needed to support the South Sudanese refugees in Uganda for 2017 and last May, the World Food Programme (WFP) announced a shortfall of $60 million in its Uganda operations, meaning that they were forced to drastically reduce food hand-outs.

The international community, including the UK Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson, continue to praise Uganda’s response to the massive influx of refugees from South Sudan. But praise does not feed refugees and nor does it build schools. As the Ugandan Minister of Foreign Affairs Sam Kutesa warned the UN General Assembly last year, “while Uganda gets accolades for its generous refugee policy, Uganda needs tangible support to put in place the necessary infrastructure.”

The international community has shirked its moral responsibility to support this small nation, but neither is the Ugandan government innocent. In addition to the overfilling of settlements and the unlawful barring of refugees from attaining citizenship, the Ugandan government has actively contributed to the regional unrest by supporting rebels in Congo and by sending Ugandan forces to support forces loyal to President of South Sudan, Salva Kiir.

Moreover, ‘severe’ Ugandan government corruption is actively discouraging international donations, especially because foreign governments know that the UNHCR’s hands are tied by the Ugandan government in their operations. In 2012 for instance, when news emerged that $12.7 million in donor funds had been embezzled from the Office of the Prime Minister, the EU, the UK, Germany, Denmark, Ireland, and Norway all suspended aid. As Human Rights Watch reported in “Letting the Big Fish Swim”, no one was held accountable for this swindle. There is no evidence that the government has clamped down on corruption since this scandal. According to Transparency International, Uganda currently ranks 151 out of 176 nations in the corruption index, rubbing shoulders with Tajikistan and Zimbabwe.

In Uganda we found progressive refugee policies, but they are undermined by underfunding, compromised by corruption and, in the matter of citizenship, downright disingenuous. Reporters trotting out the hunky-dory narrative are not doing anyone any favours. The international community needs to know that Uganda needs more support, corruption at the highest levels needs to be stamped out in order to encourage such support, and pressure needs to be put on the Ugandan government to enable refugees to become citizens. “We don’t need apologists,” Dr Dolan told us as we left his office, “we need constructive critical engagement.” Without this, the old man in the fedora will continue to suffer in limbo, a silent victim of realpolitik.

Author, Patrick Page, is a senior caseworker in the Immigration and Public Law department at Duncan Lewis.

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