Announcing that he will send asylum seekers to Rwanda who try to enter the UK illegally, Prime Minister Boris Johnson said that the African country, 7,000 kilometers away from his own, is “one of the safest in the world, recognized globally for receiving and integrate migrants”.
In fact, the small nation of 13 million inhabitants has, according to the United Nations agency that takes care of the issue, “a policy open to refugees” and offers them regularization and work permits to integrate economically. Today there are around 130,000 people in this situation, most of them from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi, many of them living in the country for decades.
In practice, however, it is not simple to access these rights. The refugee camps, where 90% of this population live, have infrastructure problems, especially the older ones, in which families have grown over the years without any adaptation to accommodate them.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) itself recognized this when criticizing Boris Johnson’s program. “While Rwanda has generously provided a safe haven for refugees fleeing conflict and persecution for decades, most live in camps with limited access to economic opportunities,” Gillian Triggs, assistant high commissioner for protection, said in a statement from April 14th.
For Triggs, rich nations should support the immigrants that Rwanda already harbors, not transfer others there “as if they were commodities”.
Refugees in the country have also been victims of the human rights violations that the government of President Paul Kagame is accused of imposing on the population. In 2018, at least 12 Congolese were killed by police outside a UNHCR office. They lived in the Kiziba camp, which was home to 17,000 people at the time, and were protesting a reduction in the food quota they received.
Several others were injured when police shot at protesters, according to the international organization Human Rights Watch (HRW), and 60 were arrested on charges of crimes such as rebellion and “spreading false information to create hostile international opinion against the state.”
“Rwanda has a known record of extrajudicial executions, suspicious deaths in custody, unlawful or arbitrary detention, torture and abusive prosecutions, particularly against critics and dissidents,” says a report by the organization.
The British government itself has acknowledged that Kagame – a former rebel leader who overthrew the regime responsible for the country’s 1994 genocide and has been in power for 27 years – disrespects human rights, urging him to stick to “democracy and Rule of Law”, in a speech in Geneva in January 2021. The UK, incidentally, has been granting asylum to Rwandans who have fled due to political issues in Kigali.
The persecution of dissidents in exile is another point raised by critics of the UK proposal. According to an HRW report addressing the human rights situation in Rwanda in 2021, “the government and those operating on its behalf are exerting pressure on the Rwandan diaspora as far away as Australia and Canada.”
“Rwanda has routinely shown that it has little regard for the protections afforded refugees under international law,” Lewis Mudge, HRW’s director of Central Africa, told AFP.
The organization claims that refugees critical of Kagame are threatened and harassed and that some of them were kidnapped and forcibly sent back to Rwanda, where they ended up missing or dead.
The best-known example is that of Paul Rusesabagina, whose story of protecting Tutsi ethnic civilians during the genocide was told in the film “Hotel Rwanda”. A critic of Kagame, the activist claims he was kidnapped in Dubai and taken on a private flight to Kigali, where he was arrested and sentenced to 25 years in prison on charges of incitement to terrorism.
Exiled to Belgium, Rusesabagina’s daughter, Carine Kanimba, appeared on a list released by Amnesty International in July last year of people allegedly spied on by Rwandan authorities with the spyware Pegasus. The list included more than 3,500 activists, journalists and politicians, who, according to the organization, had their cellphones hacked in and outside Rwanda.
Opposition politicians have also expressed concern about the pressure of large numbers of refugees arriving in the densely populated country, which is already facing land shortages and economic problems stemming from the pandemic.
The Rwandan government denies the allegations of disrespect for human rights and defends the agreement with the United Kingdom. Announcing the partnership, Chancellor Vincent Biruta said the country’s recent history has “a profound connection with the plight of those seeking security and opportunity in a new land” and that those who arrive will be “protected, respected and empowered” so that stay permanently if you want.
This Friday (22), while participating in an event, Paul Kagame declared that his government is not “trading human beings”. “Not the case, please. We’re really helping,” he said, describing the deal as a breakthrough.
The president argued that Rwanda has already received refugees detained in Libya, under an agreement with the African Union and UNHCR. “When the question came up, I said ‘well, we’re not a rich country, we’re not a big country, but there are solutions, we can always help, find and solve big problems’.”
There are few details on how the deal will work in practice, which Boris says is intended to make life more difficult for criminal organizations that smuggle people. The measure is seen as a nod to the Conservative Party electorate, which opposes immigration policies and which elected him to carry out the Brexit process in 2016. a scandal of parties held in his office during periods of lockdown.
The United Kingdom is due to contribute an initial amount of 120 million pounds (R$ 738 million) to the government of Rwanda, but analysts point out that Kagame’s motivation for accepting the pact is more of the diplomatic field – it would be a way to gain international relevance. and, who knows, gain a strong ally to face criticism of human rights violations, including against their own exiles.
