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Deportations
of Zimbabwean migrants set to resume
IRIN
News
October
07, 2011
http://www.irinnews.org/report.aspx?reportID=93912
After months
of rumour and speculation, South Africa's Department of Home
Affairs appears to have quietly lifted a moratorium on deportations
of undocumented Zimbabweans who did not apply for legal status through
the Zimbabwe Documentation Process (ZDP).
The move contradicts
recent assurances from the director-general of home affairs, Mkuseli
Apleni, to parliament that deportations would not resume until the
ZDP was completed and Home Affairs Minister Nkosazana Dlamini Zuma
had pronounced the end of the special dispensation allowing Zimbabweans
to enter and remain in the country without documents.
The International
Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that 1-1.5 million Zimbabwean
migrants are living in South Africa, but only 275,000 Zimbabweans
had applied to be regularized through the ZDP by the 31 December
2010 deadline and the department has so far only issued permits
to just over half of them.
Earlier this
week, media outlets in Zimbabwe quoted a senior immigration official
based at Beitbridge, Zimbabwe's border with South Africa,
saying that South Africa's Home Affairs Department had notified
them of plans to resume deportations "with immediate effect".
Vincent Houver,
chief of mission for IOM in Zimbabwe, which mans a reception support
centre for returning migrants at Beitbridge, told IRIN his organization
had received a similar notice. "All we know for now is that
immigration authorities from both countries (South Africa and Zimbabwe)
have met to discuss the modalities under which forced removals may
resume," he told IRIN in an email.
Internal
directive
Meanwhile, police
appear to be acting on an internal directive sent by director-general
of home affairs Apleni on 27 September (IRIN has a copy), instructing
the police service, as well as the defence force and home affairs
offices to start deporting undocumented Zimbabwean nationals.
"This is
not honest, the way they've done it," said Braam Hanekom
of People Against Suffering, Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP), a
Cape Town-based refugee rights NGO. "We've had a lot of text
messages from people who've been arrested, mainly in Johannesburg,
since last week."
Several other
NGOs reported that Zimbabweans had been picked up by police, mainly
in Johannesburg, and were being detained at police stations.
"People
are being arrested and police are accepting bribes and being bullies
in our view," said Selvan Chetty of the Solidarity Peace Trust.
"Often relatives don't know where they are because their cell
phones are taken away."
"We've
worked very hard to get Zimbabweans to trust the NGOs and work with
Home Affairs," he added. "If they're not being open
and transparent with us then how do they expect us to engage in
an open and transparent way?"
The directive
from Apleni notes that deportations should only be done after verifying
that the suspect has not applied for asylum or any other permits.
However, Richard Rams, a Zimbabwean migrant living in an abandoned
building in Johannesburg's inner city, told IRIN that five fellow
residents of the building who were picked up by police last week
and taken to the city's Central Police Station, are facing deportation
despite three of them being documented.
"Two of
them had asylum papers and one had a passport with a permit in it,
but not on them," he told IRIN. "We tried to take [their
papers] to them, but they wouldn't let us give them."
According to
Rams, after two days at the police station, the five men were transported
40km outside Johannesburg to Lindela Repatriation Centre, the main
departure point for undocumented foreign nationals awaiting deportation.
No deportations
yet
Responding to
questions about the lifting of the moratorium on deportations of
Zimbabweans at a media briefing on 6 October, Home Affairs Minister
Dlamini Zuma said: "The moratorium applied to specific people
who entered South Africa at a specific time. There is no moratorium
for Zimbabweans who come into South Africa today and break our immigration
law... If you break our laws, we will arrest you."
Kaajal Ramjathan-Koogh,
who heads the Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme at Lawyers for
Human Rights, said that arrests and detentions of Zimbabweans had
been taking place for several months already, but that although
some were facing criminal charges for being in the country illegally,
so far none had been deported.
Mohamed Hassan,
who works for IOM in the border town of Musina, confirmed that "nobody
has been deported as of yet".
"We'd
advocate that should deportations happen, they happen in a humane
way and respecting the human rights of those affected, and we've
been given assurances that they will adhere to minimum human rights
standards," he said.
Before the moratorium
came into effect in April 2009, South Africa was deporting Zimbabweans
who had entered the country illegally at a rate of about 200,000
a year and refugee rights organizations regularly complained about
migrants suffering human rights abuses at the hands of police and
during detention at Lindela.
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