Isabelle Wirimana was nine years old the last time she saw her family. All she remembers of fleeing their house in Kigali, Rwanda, during the 1994 genocide is the crowd of passers-by carrying her from the crumbling city, away from her parents and four siblings lost somewhere on the road.
Now 22, she sits on a plastic garden chair inside a purple-walled house in Yeoville, Johannesburg. The house, Wirimana’s home for more than eight years, is a shelter for 17 other refugee children from across the continent.
Run by the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS), a Christian NGO, it is one of the few places that houses displaced foreign children seeking asylum in the city. Of the thousands of refugees entering the country each month, unaccompanied children are often the most overlooked, having to make their own way in a system that barely serves their needs.
Clasping her hands in her lap, Wirimana stares at the floor as she recalls her journey to where she is today. ”I’ve seen many things,” she says. Her round face and almond-shaped eyes turn sorrowful and downcast. Once the youngest of five siblings, she now says of the others: ”I am sure they are not alive.”
In Rwanda, she drifted through towns in a crowd of strangers. ”With only the clothes I had on my body, for four months I just walked,” she says, remembering the day she fled her home. ”I slept on the roads with everyone else. Sometimes people asked where my mother is, and gave me a piece of bread or something to eat.”
At Rwanda’s border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, she made it to a refugee camp on the other side. Years later, in 1999, a neighbour from home recognised her and contacted the United Nations Children’s Fund, persuading it to send her to South Africa in the hope that she would have a better life.
Moving on
Now Wirimana is on the verge of another move. This week, she will leave the shelter in Yeoville, which could only afford to house and support her for a limited period of time because of other refugee children still waiting for a place to say.
She is apprehensive, as she does not have any job prospects or a place to live. Despite having qualifications from a course she took through the JRS, Wirimana does not have the necessary identity documents required by most employers, landlords, banks and other service providers.
”Everything is a document; if you don’t have a document, you are nothing here. No one is going to approach me to work with this paper,” Wirimana says, explaining that despite having lived here for almost 10 years, she still hasn’t received South African citizenship or the official, maroon-covered refugee identity book. Instead, she uses a single A4 sheet of white paper with a photocopied picture of herself issued by the Department of Home Affairs as her only form of official identification.
Wirimana’s permit has to be renewed every year for her to maintain refugee status. She talks about the three- to four-day renewal process she has gone through yearly since she was a teenager. ”A few weeks ago, I went [to the Department of Home Affairs in Pretoria] to renew it. There were about 500 people there. The line was so long, I slept outside on the street for two days waiting because it was too much money to come back every day.
”On the fourth day I was the last person left in the office, and they wanted to close at four. They said, ‘Come again,’ but I cried and begged because I couldn’t stay another day. I know after another year I am going to suffer again. I am ready for that; there is nothing I can do.”
Backlog
Last year, the Department of Home Affairs received more than 53 000 new asylum applications, less than 10% of which were effectively processed. Between 2000 and 2006, South Africa granted asylum to 30 200 people out of about 200 000 applications received.
The remaining applications are now part of a refugee ”backlog” the department hopes to have finalised by 2008, but that, in the meantime, has caused delays in the whole asylum system. As Ingrid Palmary from the Forced Migration Studies Programme at the University of the Witwatersrand says, a process that should ideally take about six months can now take up to eight years.
Assessing whether the rights of asylum seekers and refugees are being effectively upheld, a recent report released by the Consortium for Refugees and Migrants in South Africa (CRMSA) also found that ”reception offices continue to issue faulty documents to asylum seekers and refugees and … the [department’s] failure to determine refugee status and issue appropriate documentation acts as a major hindrance to securing employment”.
Even when documents do exist, they are not always recognised by the relevant bodies. ”Banks and others who provide services lack awareness about what these different documents are,” meaning that refugees cannot access even basic things like a bank account, Palmary says.
”Permits also do not look very official,” she adds, making it difficult for people like Wirimana to get a proper job.
”The temporary nature of an asylum seeker permit can lead to reluctance on the part of financial institutions and other bodies,” agrees Busisiwe Mkhwebane-Tshehla, director of refugee affairs at the Department of Home Affairs. Work is being done to ensure the full recognition of these documents, but ”there are those institutions that are still sceptical about these documents”.
Hard life
Lievin Manisha (18) understands the difficulties in finding a job. He came to the country in 2005 after his parents and two younger siblings were murdered by rebels in his home country, Burundi. He now lives in the shelter run by the JRS, but when he first arrived to South Africa he needed a place to live and the money to pay for it.
Manisha has an asylum-seeker permit, which is similar to the A4 white document Wirimana uses, except that his needs to be renewed every couple of months. Because the document is hardly officially recognised, the only work Manisha could get was running the midnight shift for an inner-city security company.
He held the job for eight months, working from 6pm to 6am every night, earning R1 200 a month, paid in cash, and attending high school during the day. He recalls the difficulties he had as a 16-year-old trying to balance everything. ”It really affected my schooling, so I had to quit — That’s when I moved to the shelter because I could no longer pay my rent,” he says.
By law, priority is given to unaccompanied refugee minors when processing applications in the asylum system, says the Department of Home Affairs’s Mkhwebane-Tshehla.
Ideally, minors must be referred to social workers and appear before the Children’s Court ”to have such children assisted by a legal guardian appointed by the court in lodging their applications”, she says. ”These offices are sensitive towards unaccompanied minors and prioritise such children over adult applicants given their vulnerability.”
However, many agree that in reality this is not the case.
”In practice, this is not happening routinely” says Palmary. Both Wirimana and Manisha had to find their own way to the Department of Home Affairs when they first got to South Africa, and both have been heading their own processes of applying for asylum, without any added assistance from the government or social services.
”Children often attempt to apply alone and are turned away by the Department of Home Affairs who tell them to go to social workers … Also, many unaccompanied minors do not know about the asylum system and never attempt to use it, leaving them without any documentation,” Palmary says. ”Social development does not know the appropriate steps to follow to assist children in the asylum system.”
‘Turned away’
The report by the CRMSA agreed: ”Minors seeking asylum who are not accompanied by parents or guardians are being turned away from the reception offices, and social workers continue to be unwilling to deal with cases of foreign unaccompanied minors, especially in assisting them to receive documentation.
”In almost all cases, unaccompanied minors coming to South Africa face the risk of exploitation and receive almost no protection from government.”
The report added: ”Unfortunately, the country’s legislative framework and moral commitments are not supported by the necessary human and financial resources to secure basic protection to asylum seekers and refugees,” and there is a ”lack of political will” to secure the rights of non-nationals.
”There needs to be better interdepartmental collaboration between government departments to ensure that there are proper guidelines for dealing with unaccompanied minors in ways that are within human rights standards,” Palmary says.
And Mkhwebane-Tshehla agrees that to ”ensure closer working relations between the relevant departments dealing with unaccompanied minors” would be the best way to ease the problems they face.
Talking about government departments such as home affairs and social development, as well as the South African Police Service and the courts, Mkhwebane-Tshehla says ”there are forums that involve some of these stakeholders where we strategise and network to ensure that unaccompanied minors are dealt with in a more coherent way”.
In Johannesburg, the city has already set up a migrants’ help desk that works to link migrants and refugees with the relevant government departments, NGOs and individuals to best assist them. Working with a hands-on approach, the desk engages with the public to understand and better serve their needs.
Launched in April this year, it is gaining momentum, having served almost 200 people since its inception.
But, despite some successes, the CRMSA report still noted other general concerns: ”There have been improvements in certain areas, with local authorities and others making fresh moves to incorporate refugees and asylum seekers into South African communities. However … rights are severely compromised by administrative incoherence, ignorance, and discrimination throughout the public sector.”