"We are disregarding the very law we signed last year in the Children’s Act, where it states any child found destitute in South Africa should receive the same treatment as a South African child. My observation is that South Africa is ignoring every convention and law it has signed," says MP Ms Hilda Weber, DA spokesperson on Home Affairs and Social Development.

Ms Weber issued a statement after a fact-finding visit last Friday to Musina and Beit Bridge.

She said: "We should learn from the Holocaust that keeping atrocities away from the people has a habit of coming back to haunt you. Ignoring a crisis can do the same."

She described her visit to the holding camp for "illegal immigrants" at Musina as "heartbreaking."

"There were about 70 who had been arrested at the border for illegally entering the country. Among them was a mother with three children. When I asked why they were not treated as refugees, I was told they had not asked for refugee status and they had no papers, so they are illegal immigrants and would be sent back the next day by bus.

"The smell at the holding centre was nauseating. There are very well-barred, high windows, reminiscent of a jail. The only positive thing was they were being given a meal."

She referred to the way in which unaccompanied Zimbabwean children are being forced back by South Africa into circumstances which the children experience as life threatening and said this is in total negation of the principles of our own law and of the International Convention on the Rights of the Child.

"Both are blatantly disregarded because there is apparently no crisis."

She said there needed to be some sort of coordination between NGOs, the Department of Social Development and Home Affairs in efforts to meet the needs of these children.

"Without this cooperation, we are going to be guilty of one of the biggest humanitarian crises since Rwanda. We have to hang our heads in shame when children are pleading not to be taken to Social Workers because they will send them back to a life of beatings and starvation. A most worrying fact is that the present government does not seem to remember that those same Zimbabweans gave so many of them asylum when South Africa was a boiling pot," Ms Weber said.