Hostile Refuge
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MINUTES LATER, the police herded Brian and about 50 other prisoners into a barred Home Affairs lorry for the nine-mile ride to Zimbabwe. The men grunted and moaned as they packed into the airless rear compartment. "We've only got two buses today," Roet told me. "We must load 50 or 60 at a time, otherwise we'll be sitting here until dark." The cops allowed me to ride with them in the front cab as we breezed past the South African border post and crossed over the Limpopo. Between me and the driver sat an off-duty cop from Johannesburg, who stared out the window nervously. "I'm coming to Zimbabwe for the first time—I just wanted to see it," he told me. "I wonder if they arrest South Africans just like we arrest Zimbabweans."
The Zimbabwean authorities waved us through without inspecting our documents. They paid no attention to me, apparently assuming that I was a South African police officer. (A good thing, too: Journalists working without accreditation in Zimbabwe can be sentenced to two years in prison.) The country's desperate poverty became apparent the moment we crossed the border: The road disintegrated into a potholed, pitted ribbon through sere, brown hills. A half-mile-long line of South African fuel trucks, Zimbabwe's life support, waited to cross back to Musina. A mile down the road, the driver stopped in front of a police station, leaped out, and unlocked the lorry's steel rear door. Out spilled four dozen sweat-soaked, miserable prisoners, who squatted abjectly in the dirt. "The police will shake them down and then send them on their way," the driver said. "Most will return to South Africa before nightfall." Back in the Musina rail yard, hundreds of Zimbabweans were still crouched in the broiling midday sun. Except for those who were lucky enough to have brought some with them, they'd been without food or drink since departing Lindela nearly 24 hours earlier. Tempers flared: The police roughly shoved the next bunch into the Home Affairs truck. The off-duty cop who had made the last Zimbabwe run watched, then turned away. "It's too much," he said.
The deportation of undocumented workers, while harsh, is consistent with international law and the South African Refugees Act of 1998, which established the grounds under which a person can be granted asylum—including persecution by race, tribe, gender, sexuality, politics, or religion. "Destitution alone does not fall within those grounds," acknowledges Kaajal Ramjathan-Keogh, a legal counselor at Lawyers for Human Rights in Pretoria. But the catch, she says, is that much of Zimbabwe's economic misery is a direct or indirect result of the regime's brutal politics. For example, Mugabe's opponents charge that Operation Murambatsvina is aimed at punishing their supporters.
And human rights groups say that South Africa has routinely turned away Zimbabweans who appear to clearly fall under the category of political refugee. "When Zimbabweans started coming across the border in large numbers, two years ago, they weren't even let in the door of the immigration office. They were told, ‘There is no war in Zimbabwe. Just go away,'" says Ramjathan-Keogh. Pressure from human rights organizations has obliged the government to soften the policy. But there are only five Refugee Reception Offices; the main one, in Johannesburg, is often closed, and the wait to get a hearing can take weeks. Moreover, of the 5,000 applications for political asylum filed by Zimbabweans in 2004, fewer than 20 were approved. Ramjathan-Keogh is representing two anti-Mugabe activists who endured long periods of torture at the hands of the Zimbabwean military intelligence—one was subjected to electric shock; by the time the other fled to South Africa burn marks covered half his body. Yet both were rejected after months of waiting. "The authorities said that they ‘had not shown a well-founded fear of persecution,'" she says. She is appealing: "They cannot be returned to Zimbabwe or they will be killed."
Back at the border fence along the Limpopo River, Jethro Moyo follows the footprints of the latest undocumented immigrants, which disappear into a tomato patch. The Zimbabwean illegals' plight is worse than ever, he says. Hunted down relentlessly on the streets of Johannesburg, Pretoria, and other cities, many of those forced back into Zimbabwe have been subjected to abuse by that country's independence war veterans, who are among Mugabe's most ardent supporters. "They say, ‘You are fleeing Zimbabwe, you don't support your country, you're against Mugabe.'" He shakes his head. "That government is total shit." We turn down a dirt road, where two battered taxis are parked in the moonlight, waiting to drive new arrivals to Johannesburg. The drivers look at us with suspicion. "Who is this white man?" one asks. "Don't worry about him," Moyo assures him. "He's not going to give you any trouble." As we drive on, I watch several huddled figures climb inside the vehicles. Then the taxis rumble through the bush, headlights off, beginning the next leg of a desperate journey.
Joshua Hammer is the Jerusalem bureau chief for Newsweek and has reported extensively from Iraq. He is the author of A Season in Bethlehem: Unholy War in a Sacred Place.
