Burundi: Kobero limbo

They were rounded up without warning, forcibly put on twelve open trucks, driven across the border and dumped there, all 472 of them.

Many were emanciated, some were sick. All were desperate and confused. Mothers tried to keep their babies calm, breastfeeding the infants, keeping the flies away in the noonday heat under the corrugated iron roof. A kiosk across the road was selling water, sodas and snack – but they had no money to buy anything.

They had no water, no food, no sanitation – and no one wanted them.

“We have had no food or water for five days,” said one man. “We were forced to leave all our possessions behind. My friend here had three cows – and now he has lost them because he could not show a paper proving his ownership to the Tanzanian police.”

Some of these ‘unplanned’ returnees had been living in Tanzania for over 30 years. One man said he had run away from Burundi during the violence in 1972 and that he had never even known where the refugee camps were.

Mrs. Siniremera, a woman in her early forties with two infants sucking on each breast, had fled to Tanzania in 1993 and hadn’t wanted to live in the refugee camps. “Bad conditions there,” she said. “We were just living in peace cultivating our crops when they came and burned our homes and forced us out. Now the Tanzanians will harvest our crops and we have nothing.”

As they had been living outside the refugee camps in Tanzania, they did not enjoy formal refugee status and the protection of the UNHCR, the UN’s refugee agency. In the eye of the law they’re not refugees but migrants. Illegal migrants.

The Burundian government agencies in the border area seemed powerless to act and the Burundi Red Cross volunteers, who had taken down their names and other details as they came across the border, had no resources to do anything except talk, console – and watch.

There were about ten of them with their Burundi Red Cross T-shirts and bibs, full of energy, eager to help with their willing hands – and increasingly frustrated because they had no tools to provide even minimum support. All they could do was to wait and watch their destitute countrymen who had appeared unannounced on their doorstep outside the village of Kobero on the northern border with Tanzania.

Back in Bujumbura, the Burundi Red Cross frantically worked the telephones trying to find help to provide at least minimum services to the returnees. It was proving difficult – no one had been expecting these people to arrive at this time and the limited stocks in the warehouses of relief agencies had been earmarked for the planned return of organized groups from within the refugee camps overseen by the UNHCR.

So, the 472 were stuck in limbo on a roadside in Kobero – a highly vulnerable group of desperately poor and illiterate peasants. Their children had been born in Tanzania and knew nothing of Burundi.

One woman, who came to Tanzania with her family when she was only a baby, had married a Tanzanian man and gave him four children. On the day of the police sweep, the husband was away while she was rounded up with the others and put into an enclosure outside the Lukoli camps near the Tanzanian border town of Ngara – the former home of some 500,000 Rwandan refugees who fled their country during and after the genocide of 1994.

She was stunned and unable to do or say much of anything. All of a sudden her family had been ripped apart and now she found herself with her young children sitting on a roadside in a country she could not remember. She did not even know where her family had come from. She had no means of contacting her husband on the other side of the border. What was going to happen to her now?

No one was able to tell her.

She was not alone. As the Burundians were rounded up and herded onto the trucks, their Tanzanian spouses and children were left behind. Mrs. Simieremiera had lost her husband while on the other side, so she was able to take her children with her. Holding her 10-month old twins in her arms and a toddler with a running nose by her side, she said her family had come from Kirundo – the neighbouring province on the border with Rwanda – but that she didn’t know anyone there. Her relatives had either been killed or gone into exile so she had no land there, no home, nothing to go ‘back’ to.

A man came up to us and said: My parents came from Burundi but I was born in Tanzania. My parents are dead and I do not know where they came from. I don’t know anyone in Burundi. Where am I supposed to go? What am I supposed to do?

Again, no one was able to tell him.

Some of the people on the roadside were not even in their own country. In the rush to get the ‘illegals’ out, the Tanzanian police had also rounded up some 60-70 Rwandans living in the bush and shipped them across the border to Burundi – already sheltering nearly 20,000 Rwandans asylum seekers in several camps in the rolling hills long the border.

“It is really difficult for us not to be able to help them in any way,” said Salvador Nzobonankira, the Burundi Red Cross Project Officer in Muyinga.

“But we have no funds to even given them water. The food we collected earlier this year has all been given to vulnerable families whose crops had failed and all the stock of non-food items we had in Bujumbura has also been distributed. We really need help to help these people. We have the skills, we have the manpower – but we don’t have the financial resources.”

The Red Cross branch in Muyinga offered to have its volunteers dig latrines for the group to ensure minimum sanitation but not wanting to ‘encourage them to stay’, the offer was turned down by the governor’s office.

At the end of the week – five days after having been unceremoniously dumped on the roadside in Kobero – there was finally some solution in sight for the ‘illegals’. The UN agencies in cooperation with the Burundian government had found a way to transport them out of the roadside limbo back to their home provinces and provide them with a minimum amount of food – albeit not the standard 3-month ration that is given to the returnees from the camps.

After 30 years it’s highly unlikely that any of them found their homes and little plots of land waiting for them as they had left it. For the accidentally returned Burundians, it’s not exactly a happy homecoming.