RWANDA Afghan refugees in Rwanda, the contradictions of a ‘safe’ country

British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has proposed sending all asylum seekers who cross the English Channel to Rwanda. About 250 girls from a Kabul school had already been transferred to Kigali, via Doha, in August 2021, after the recapture by the Taliban. But the government of the African country uses the relocations to protect itself from the reports of violence that it also receives outside its borders. Thousands of Afghan refugees detained in the Gulf in inhumane conditions.

Milan () – Rwanda has become one of the countries where Western states prefer to send Afghan refugees when they are not trapped in third countries or returned to their own, as Turkey and Iran are known to do. More and more asylum seekers are being relocated to Africa (thanks to the support of United Nations agencies), but to states that are certainly not immune to criticism for human rights violations.

Immediately after the recapture by the Taliban in August 2021, some 250 students from the School of Leadership Afghanistan (SOLA) for women who had been evacuated to Doha, Qatar, were transferred to Kigali “to continue their education”, which for two years is prohibited for girls who remained in their country. In the same period, Uganda also received more than 2,000 Afghan refugees at the request of the United States government.

The idea of ​​sending Afghan refugees to Rwanda is now back on the lips of British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who earlier this month announced a bill to prevent migrants crossing the English Channel illegally from seeking asylum in the UK. London intends “as soon as reasonably possible” to relocate asylum seekers to Rwanda or to a “safe third country” to “counter illegal immigration,” the prime minister said. However, in 2022, one in five people who arrived by sea in the United Kingdom were Afghans, a nationality that is granted political asylum in 98% of cases due to persecution and human rights violations by the Taliban. .

Even without going into the legal entanglements that distinguish types of international protection from irregular immigration, and without assessing whether the UK government’s decision violates the refugee conventions to which London is a signatory, it is difficult to situate Rwanda (along with Uganda, Sudan and Somaliland and all the African countries that have offered to host Afghan refugees) in the “safe countries” category.

Rwandan President Paul Kagame had already threatened to expel the refugees who were in the country (about 127,000 only those registered by UNHCR, the UN refugee agency) if the international community criticized his government’s decisions, led by the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which rose to power after the 1994 genocide. Human Rights Watch has criticized the party’s campaign against political opponents, who are often arbitrarily detained and tortured. But the violent actions of the Rwandan government also extend beyond its borders, affecting dissidents and members of the diaspora even abroad, and militarily supporting the rebel group M23 that fights against the Rwandan government. Democratic Republic of Congo.

Shabana Basij-Rasikh, teacher, women’s rights activist and founder of SOLA, in August 2021, documenting on Twitter the relocation of the students, he explained that it was a “non-permanent resettlement”, a kind of “semester abroad” before “going back home to Afghanistan”.

Things went differently (soon more girls will arrive at the school that will take the International Organization for Migration for the start of the new school year) and ultimately sending the Afghan refugees to Rwanda is a solution everyone agrees on: Afghan girls can continue their studies, the US can feel less guilty about abandoning the country to the Taliban after of 20 years of war (a report on SOLA and Afghan girls, presented as “a story of hope”, was broadcast a few days ago by the well-known American television channel CBS), while African governments can clean up their image before the international community, and hope that thanks to the “humanitarian aid” they are taking care of, no one will impose sanctions or restrictions on them.

The issue of Afghan refugees is posed in a similar way in the Gulf: 2,700 people have been parked in the United Arab Emirates for 15 months, where they have no chance of accessing legal pathways to refugee status. Also in this case, responding to the US State Department’s request to accept asylum seekers before they are resettled in the United States, the Abu Dhabi authorities have locked up the Afghans in a place called Emirates Humanitarian City, which witnesses say is overcrowded, decrepit and infested with insects. A Human Rights Watch report also states that the majority of detainees suffer from depression.

Meanwhile, conditions in Afghanistan continue to worsen, and not just from a humanitarian standpoint. According to a report from the Global Terrorism Index published a few days ago, for the fourth consecutive year it is the country with the highest number of attacks in the world. The latest, recently launched by the local branch of the Islamic State (IS-K), was against a group of journalists in Mazar-i Sharif, the capital of Balkh province in the north of the country. The Taliban confiscated the cell phones and detained the survivors, perhaps to give the impression that they had the situation under control and prevent the news from spreading abroad.