South Africa to begin deporting illegal Zimbabwean immigrants

Zimbabwean families took refuge in a camp after they were forced out of their homes in a township in De Doorns by South Africans who claimed they were taking jobs. The camp has since been closed. (Photo credit: Courtney Brooks)

South Africa will begin deporting undocumented Zimbabwean immigrants on 31 July for the first time in over a year, leaving nearly 500,000 people in danger of being sent home to a country that is still politically and economically unstable.

A four-month push took place at the end of last year to document as many Zimbabweans as possible before the changes begin. Braam Hanekom, the head of Cape Town-based refugee advocacy People Against Suffering, Oppression and Poverty (PASSOP), toldMediaGlobal that while the move, called the Zimbabwean Dispensation Process, is progressive, the impending changes leave himself and other human rights activists alarmed.

“We are concerned that in August the government might not be planning or intending on mass deportations, but they will have the authority and it will be lawful to do so should they wish to,” he said.

New legislation to be implemented in January next year could compound problems for immigrants. The legislation, which seeks to speed up the decision making process on asylum applications, could result in the vast majority of the 400,000 applicants being denied refugee status, according to Hanekom.

The legislation will require Zimbabweans entering South Africa to apply for documentation at Department of Home Affairs office within five days of entering the country, rather than the current 14, and legalizes sentencing illegal immigrants to time in prison.

Hanekom said the rejection rate for those seeking asylum is already high, and speeding up this process could cause it to skyrocket.

There are an estimated 1.5 million Zimbabweans living in South Africa. According to Hanekom, about 800,000 were undocumented prior to last year’s documentation push, in which 275,000 Zimbabweans applied for work permits.

Furthermore, nearly 70,000 Zimbabweans have not picked up their work permits because they unable to acquire passports from the Zimbabwean consulates.
Hanekom said at least 70 percent of the dispensation process applications responded to thus far were approved.

Since the moratorium was implemented, things in Zimbabwe have improved, but remain tenuous. Food remains expensive, but as the country is now using foreign currency rather than the Zimbabwean dollar, the economy is more stable. The cholera epidemic of 2008 and 2009 has, for the most part, subsided.

Unemployment in Zimbabwe is over 80 percent.

“There remain huge, huge problems. We do not believe that it’s appropriate to deport people back to Zimbabwe in the current climate, but we do recognize that there have been several changes which would have affected the South African decision toward Zimbabwe,” he said.

Phillip Pasirayi, director of the Harare-based NGO Center for Community Development, said that the tense political situation in Zimbabwe also creates an extremely precarious situation for Zimbabweans deported from South Africa, especially if they left Zimbabwe to seek political asylum abroad.

Many Zimbabweans fled due to violent crackdowns on supporters of opposition party Movement for Democratic Change (MDC).

President Robert Mugabe, who has ruled the country since independence in 1980, and his Zanu-PF party supporters targeted opposition activists during the internationally condemned 2008 elections. MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai pulled out of a run-off vote citing violence against his supporters.

Tsvangirai and Mugabe have since entered into a power-sharing government, with Tsvangirai as prime minister and Mugabe remaining president. The arrangement has led to many improvements in the country, but Pasirayi said violence against MDC supporters and civil society members remain.

And, as Zanu-PF has called for elections this year and intensified the political turmoil, he said these human rights abuses have increased.

“The people that were responsible for committing gross human rights abuses that Zimbabweans in South Africa were running away from, nothing has been done to them. They are still moving freely. They have not been asked to account for their crimes,” he said.

“The structures of violence are still in place. They will face further reprisals from the people that committed these crimes in the first place,” he added.

Pasirayi said abuses are particularly prevalent in the provinces of Masvingo and Manicaland, where several of his own colleagues were detained two weeks ago, interrogated by police and then released without any charges being levied against them.

“We feel that if they were to deport large numbers of Zimbabweans, that would add huge pressure to the already tense political situation that exists there,” Hanekom said.

Hanekom also said that the Zimbabweans remaining undocumented in South Africa in August will have two options: repatriate to Zimbabwe voluntarily, or “go underground.”

He said having large numbers of illegal immigrants living in fear of being discovered could also lead to increased tension between South Africans and Zimbabweans.

Relations between poor South Africans and immigrants have long been volatile. Xenophobic attacks in 2008 left more than 60 people dead and 35,000 displaced from the townships, fearfully seeking refuge in churches, community centers and camps around the country.

A 2009 attack exclusively on Zimbabweans in a town called De Doorns, outside of Cape Town, left 3,000 Zimbabweans taking shelter in a camp hastily built for the internally displaced people.

On 5 June, The New York Times reported on “mob justice” in Johannesburg, which on at least one occasion left an innocent Zimbabwean man dead, killed by the hands of an angry crowd.

Hanekom said large numbers of Zimbabweans working illegally, vulnerable to exploitation by employers, and a possible increase in crime as people fight to survive, could all adversely affect the relationship between South Africans and the Zimbabwean population.

He added that immigration raids would also increase the potential for an outbreak of violent xenophobic attacks.

“If people are now going to be deemed illegal immigrants and if attention is going to be brought toward them, that would be very comparable to what happened in 2008 prior to the outbreak of xenophobic violence that South Africa is infamous for,” he said.

“South Africa is at a pivotal point where they’re really beginning to determine what their immigration policy actually is… But if the department decides to harshly implement the laws then there would be very, very large numbers of people being deported.”