Violence flared at a refugee camp in Glenanda, Johannesburg, on Wednesday night after four men leapt over the camp fence and demanded to see the camp’s leaders. The men were then apparently held hostage by camp members until police arrived on Thursday morning.
Although details were sketchy, it appeared the men were wearing the uniforms of security guards and ”wanted to speak to the camp’s leaders”, according to Hussein Niyibigira, a camp leader from Burundi.
”Four unknown men crossed the fence and came into our camp last night and we were suspicious because they wore orange uniforms and the security guards that guard here did not know them,” said Niyibigira.
Thirty-four refugee shelters were set up in the aftermath of anti-foreigner violence that swept the country in May. An estimated 32 000 people were displaced; the camp in Rifle Range Road, Glenanda, shelters 1 700 of these people, most of whom were previously placed in the Jeppe and Cleveland police stations.
After most of the violence had subsided in June, officials had said the residents would be reintegrated into their communities and the camps would be closed by the end of the month.
”Reintegration is not something we can do for an individual, it is a process that has to be dealt with by leaders and both the refugee community and the community where these people were displaced, and we are still working on it,” said Signet Mashego, the head of social facilitation for reintegration in the department of public works, on Thursday.
Mashego said that the foreign nationals in this camp are making the process of reintegration hard because they are not cooperating. ”We tried registering these people for identification but many of them don’t want to register.”
The incident this week has highlighted the difficulties of housing large numbers of people in temporary camps. Other issues include registering foreign nationals to obtain temporary identity documents and general anger among the refugees at their situation.
”We don’t want to register for these IDs because they put us in a situation to be identified by our enemies and victimised,” said Grace Ludumbe (19), from the Democratic Republic of Congo, adding that a woman was beat up at the Rifle Range camp two days ago. ”This woman had this identity card around her neck and she went to the shop and she was beat up by some men from this community, so you see that we are not safe here.”
Ludumbe said she had been kicked by a police officer in a scuffle that ensued when officers arrived at the camp on Thursday morning.
”We were a bunch of women blocking the gate because we didn’t want the men who we held hostage to leave before they identified themselves. The police were pushing us out of the way and some of us were sitting down … while I was down, a police officer kicked me,” she said. ”These people were throwing rocks at them.”
A woman stripped off her clothes during the stand-off with the police. She apparently became emotional when police officers threatened to open fire on them if they didn’t move out of the way. ”She pulled up her skirt and started screaming in tears, saying, ‘Go right ahead, shoot,”’ said Taban Malis (26), from Sudan.
Malis said that the situation at the camp has not been stable since the refugees moved in. ”I thought things were going to get better when we were still in Jeppe, but as soon we were moved here I realised that we had come a dead end and that it would be even harder to get our lives back to normal.”
Many foreign nationals feel that the South African government has failed them. ”We want nothing to do with this country’s government; they have left us to die. The only people we are willing to communicate with are people from the United Nations, maybe they will take us out of our misery,” said Malis.
Refugees have no intention of going anywhere that the government may suggest because, they say, that the government hasn’t ”told us what the next step is, and there is no reassurance if we will be safe in the communities that we come from”, said Bosco Mugisha, also from Sudan.
”We come from countries that have a lot of wars and we still have to face this here. You know what, we are not going anywhere, so they may as well bring in an army that will kill us all and they should bury us all here, since this place is big enough for a mass grave anyway,” he said.