Daniel Neumann
29 June 2009
Nairobi — In a section of the Mtabila refugee camp on the vast and lonely western frontier of Tanzania, Burundians have been ordered to pull down their huts and sign up for "voluntary" UN convoys to the border.
If they don't destroy them, the refugees have been warned, the government of Tanzania will do it for them.
"This is the normal procedure for closing a camp," said Camp Commandant Fred Nishajile, the Tanzanian official in charge of the 37,000 refugees living here.
Weeks earlier his office had razed all vacated huts, 30 of which were still occupied by refugees away at food distribution points.
Mtabila is the last of the eight giant camps on this borderland that was once an asylum to a half million Burundians during more than a decade of civil war in their country of origin.
Now, with the last Burundian rebel group, the FNL, disarming last April, Mtabila camp has been slated to close by the end of June. Its inhabitants, however, are resisting the move.
The Tanzanian authorities have pressured them to return by closing their markets, restricting their cultivation of crops and arresting their leaders.
In meetings, they have been told the army will be brought in to stay at the camp, and that "soldiers and refugees can not share the centre."
I would rather have them kill me and my family here, than be forced into a bus," says Ndayisaba, a 30-year-old Burundan in Mtabila.
The refugees are not allowed out of the camp for fear that they will disappear into the surrounding communities.
Ndayisaba has lived the majority of his life as a refugee. While in exile, he married a Burundian woman whose entire family had been murdered during the war.
He says she never wants to return.
The Mbatila area represent a blemish in what the UN High Commissioner for Refugees otherwise views as a successful repatriation campaign.
Last month, the agency began a similar push in Uganda to return the remaining 17,000 Rwandans there.
The agency and the nations involved appear to be moving to clean up the massive population displacements that emanated from the conflicts here in the 1990s.
There's no denying that the conditions of generalised violence that caused these people to flee have changed. What we're saying now is that voluntary return is the best option," said Yacoub El Hillo, head of the UN refugee agency in Tanzania.
But the voluntary nature of the return is what rights groups here are questioning. They warn that intimidation, such as the tactics employed by the Tanzanians, could force out refugees with legitimate fears of returning.
Over the past two years, through an agreement with the Tanzanian and Burundian governments, the UN refugee agency has bused 460,000 Burundian refugees to reception sites inside their country, supplied some material support and helped set up a commission to reconnect the refugees with their land.
But the refugees are complaining.
Large numbers of Burundians that fled their homes when spasms of Hutu-Tutsi violence racked the troubled country in 1992 have returned to find their land occupied.
Many now languish in bleak temporary camps set up by UN in the Makamba Province in southern Burundi.
The majority of Mtabila refugees say this is one of the reasons they have remained in Tanzania. And while armed clashes in Burundi have ceased, and the ethnic violence that drove the civil war has abated, many still fear their government.
A Human Rights Watch report from earlier this year points to "a political culture in which violence and repression are deeply rooted."
In Uganda, greater numbers of Rwandans have been signing up for UN convoys from the Nakivale and Kyaka camps to the border, but some of the refugees who came to Uganda after the 1994 genocide have been fleeing the camps and hiding in nearby villages.
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This practice of force repatriation by the UNHCR and east african countries is alarming. While it can be argued that there is relative security in Burundi, some refugees have legitimate fear of returning. First,security is not guaranteed according to most reliable reports. Forcing people into a county where their safety is not certain sounds like a violation of their human right. The UNHCR and east african countries should work out ways to completely absorbe people who are unable or unwilling to return to their countries of origin. Why bother with regional integration if countries remain so jigoistic in their relation to citizens of other nations?