Let in refugees from Horn of Africa

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/07/2011 (4668 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The news out of the Horn of Africa in recent days is horrific. Gut-wrenching stories of refugees fleeing Somalia. Children dying of starvation and exhaustion, left unburied where they fell. Thousands crossing the borders into Ethiopia and Kenya, seeking safety.

There is drought and famine in central and south Somalia, adding to the anarchy that has existed there for 20 years, and already causing one of the world’s largest outflows of refugees. The Dadaab camp in Kenya now has 360,000 refugees with more arriving daily.

It is a colossal human tragedy. Antonio Guterres, the UN’s High Commissioner for Refugees, is calling on the nations to respond with aid.

Doubtless Canada will write a cheque as a gesture of our government’s concern, as it usually does in these high-profile disasters.

There is something else that Canada could do that wouldn’t cost a penny — stop the appalling rejection rate for Somali refugees who have already been sponsored to come here to safety by families and friends, churches and community groups.

Canada’s office in Nairobi is the principal processing point for privately sponsored refugees in the Horn of Africa. In 2010, it rejected 37 per cent of applications processed. The usual reason is “credibility” — in other words, the interviewing officer refuses to believe the refugees’ stories. Hope is lost and lives destroyed with a couple of sentences in rejection letters that follow a standard bureaucratic format. I have seen many.

Contrast this with what is happening in Damascus. Canada’s office there has an annual target of 2,500 privately sponsored refugees to be sent to Canada (Nairobi’s target is 1,000), and is only rejecting four per cent. Why? Because Canada has responded to urgings of church leaders and others to help in the rescue of Iraqi Christians who have fled persecution in Iraq, to relative safety in Syria.

Processing at the Damascus office is cursory and quick because these refugees are considered to have a prima facie case for rescue, much like refugees from the 1990s Balkan conflict, or behind the Iron Curtain or Southeast Asia were handled in earlier days of the private refugee sponsorship program.

But a different standard is apparently at work in Africa. The need is dramatically real there, too, as the high-profile events involving Somali refugees this week once again demonstrate. And this is only the most recent example. Horn of Africa refugees — whether Somali or Ethiopian or Eritrean — have been facing high rejection rates in Nairobi and Cairo for years despite the notoriety of the regimes and conditions they have fled.

Why is there this seeming double standard? Why are sponsored refugees in Africa subjected to grillings in Nairobi and Cairo that don’t happen in Damascus? Why are so many African refugees being rejected when a solution was already proffered for them by generous Canadians? The optics are bad.

In fact this is not happening for sponsored refugees from Africa being processed through Canada’s Paris office. The recent expedited rescue by Canada of Eritrean refugees who had escaped the turmoil in Libya to camps in Tunisia is a remarkable and heart-warming example of what Canada can do when there is a will.

This suggests that the real reason for the apparent double standard has more to do with a lack of ministerial attention (which plays into the rule-bound propensities of foreign service staff) than it does with prejudice. All it would take to change this paradigm would be for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney to issue a directive to his department to act in Nairobi and Cairo as they do in Damascus and Paris.

Perhaps the same church leaders that inspired the action for Christian Iraqis in Damascus might consider doing the same for Somali Muslims in even more desperate circumstances in the Horn of Africa.

Many Canadians have already offered their help by extending sponsorship to Somali refugees. The sponsoring documents sit in Canada’s offices overseas. Positive treatment rather than now-too-frequent rejection would make a major contribution in the current disaster without cost to the Canadian government. It is processing the files anyway.

 

Tom Denton is an executive director of Hospitality House Refugee Ministry.