A human rights scandal with far-reaching negative international implications is in the making in the northern part of the Limpopo Province. Zimbabwean refugees fleeing to South Africa from political violence in their country are being seriously neglected and even harassed by South African officials.

The tragic circumstances of the people of Zimbabwe are also being abused by morally questionable elements in both the public and private sectors in this part of the province.

Arrogant, incompetent, ignorant and corrupt officials, along with fraudsters and guma-guma gangsters, are adding to the woes of desperate refugees. Official government actions and attitudes are compounding the problem.

In the latest incident, SAPD members, along with a Home Affairs official, conducted a raid last week on refugees (including pregnant women and infants) lining up for emergency aid on the premises of the international Jesuit Refugee Services in Louis Trichardt. According to eye-witnesses, refugees without documents were arrested and loaded into several police vehicles. The officials entered the premises, closed the gates and started demanding to see the documents of those inside. Those without documents were ordered into the police vehicles. According to universally accepted international principles, a person who is a likely candidate for asylum should not be harassed or arrested by law-abiding officials who have a regard for basic human rights. The present situation in Zimbabwe makes all people from Zimbabwe likely candidates.

The SAPD police spokesperson in Louis Trichardt, when asked on whose instruction the raid on the Zimbabweans had been executed, how many refugees had been involved, and what further action had been taken against them, promised to find out and come back. He did not.

The incident was also brought to the attention of the regular meeting of local and international stakeholders monitoring the Zimbabwe refugee situation in Musina. The meeting was attended by representatives of the United Nations Human Rights Commission and the International Red Cross. It was also brought to the attention of the national communications office of the SAPS and to members of the South African Parliament.

Repeated e-mail enquiries directed to the national spokesperson for the Department of Home Affairs produced no results.

The department earlier failed consistently to react to requests to clarify the functions of the special office opened in Musina. Confusion reigned amongst refugees, who did not know about the office at first and now do not know how long the services of the office will be available. This week, rumours had it that the office was closing down again. Uninformed refugees who had already proceeded to Louis Trichardt, on their way to the asylum offices in Gauteng, expressed uncertainty this week as to whether they would be wasting their last money by returning to Musina for their asylum papers.

“Although we are refugees, we are being treated as criminal fugitives,” one asylum seeker, whose house was burnt down by pro-Mugabe thugs in Zimbabwe, complained. He had to forfeit his job and fled the political violence with his entire family, whom he left in the comparative safety of the remote southern rural areas, while he himself crossed the border in an effort to find alternative employment to sustain his family.

In the meantime, fraudsters are charging exorbitant fees selling fraudulent work documents on official Home Affairs stationery, with the official date stamp of the department, to desperate refugees eager to legalize their presence in South Africa. One refugee in Louis Trichardt paid his last money plus money he borrowed to the sum of R500 for such a fraudulent “Corporate Worker Permit” offered to him by a person who posed as a roving representative of Home Affairs.

Last Friday, the Musina show grounds were swamped by hundreds of asylum seekers, converging on the temporary mobile offices of Home Affairs deployed there. Asylum seekers who arrived outside the gates were told to return on Monday morning. Many indicated that they would be sleeping in the open in a vacant stand alongside the railway line until then, while others said they would be returning to the church in Nancefield where they can find food and shelter for the weekend. At one stage during Friday morning, some 400 refugees were waiting for food, prepared in one single large pot on the premises of the Anglican Church in Nancefield.