Zimbabweans fleeing into South Africa are not entitled to refugee status and border camps should not be set up to accommodate them, a senior Department of Home Affairs official said on Friday.
Accused of being too soft on Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe by his critics, South Africa has received the largest number of people escaping food and fuel shortages in Zimbabwe.
”No decision has been taken to establish refugee camps, I don’t know that it would be taken in the future,” Mavuso Msimang, Director General of Home Affairs, said in an interview. ”If I had any say in that, I would argue strongly against the establishment of refugee camps on the border.”
Critics blame the economic crisis on the policies of Mugabe, who is also accused by Western countries of human rights abuses.
President Thabo Mbeki has been mediating between Mugabe and his opponents, although Western diplomats doubt his diplomacy will succeed.
The flood of refugees from Zimbabwe has strained the economies of surrounding countries and, despite enjoying a boom, South Africa is also feeling the pressure.
Msimang suggested Zimbabweans were economic migrants, not refugees. ”What we do have are economic migrants, who I believe, [and] I’m speaking personally, need to be helped but they are not to be helped as refugees, because they are not refugees,” he said.
”There has been nothing that has happened in Zimbabwe the past few months that would make us believe that there is a refugee problem in the conventional sense of the word ‘refugee’,” he added
The United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) has said hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans are starting to run out of food and made an urgent funding appeal to donor countries.
Without assistance, vulnerable families will be forced to resort to eating potentially poisonous wild foods, selling their remaining household assets and exchanging sex for food and other desperate measures to survive, it said. — Reuters