Day: June 16, 2022

A record 89.3 million people had been driven from their homes by war, violence, persecution, and human rights abuse by the end of 2021, up 8% from the previous year, according to the U.N. refugee agency’s annual Global Trends report.

U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi says the figures are made even worse when the number of people forced to flee by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is included.

“Ukraine has displaced anyway between 12 and 14 million people, depending on how you count them. So, the figure has exceeded 100 million. This is due to a rise in conflict and crisis,” he said.

Emergencies have caused the numbers to climb every year over the past decade. The UNHCR says Russia’s Ukraine invasion has spurred the fastest, and one of the largest, forced displacement crises since World War II.

While the world is focused on Ukraine, Grandi urges governments to pay attention to the many emergencies that have preceded Ukraine and continue to shatter the lives of millions of people.

“We have Ethiopia at the end of 2020 and through 21. We had the Afghanistan situation in the summer of last year: Syria, for example, South Sudan. The question of Palestine refugees. These have been very longstanding crises that add to the numbers,” he said.

The UNHCR says refugee numbers rose to more than 27 million last year, while those displaced by conflict within their own countries increased to 53.2 million.

Dispelling common perceptions, the UNHCR says more than 80% of refugees fled to poor and middle-income countries.

The report finds five countries — Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar— account for more than two-thirds of the globally displaced. It says Turkey took in the most refugees, followed by Colombia, Uganda, Pakistan, and Germany. The United States is still the top refugee resettlement country in the world.

Source: Voice of America

Dozens of refugees camped outside the United Nations refugee agency office say they have been living in South Africa for two decades, but now they no longer feel safe.

Most are from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they escaped war.
But increasingly, they say they’ve had their small businesses looted, homes robbed and been personally attacked amid growing waves of xenophobia.

Lillian Nyota has been a refugee in South Africa since 2001.

“We ran away from our country, running from tribulations,” she said. “We came here in South Africa, we found more trouble, more tribulations. Because xenophobic attack is real, xenophobia is real, no one can deny it. It’s real.”

South Africa is home to more than 250,000 asylum seekers. Nyota’s group said they’ve moved from community to community, but violence eventually follows.

She said they’re now asking that the United Nations refugee agency move them to a safe third country.

“Any place that they can take us that way we can be safe with our families,” Nyota said. “We can live and move on with our lives so that our children can go to school.”

Xenophobic violence has become increasingly pronounced in South Africa with bursts of riots and murders since 2008.

Earlier this year, amid a wave of anti-migrant marches, a Zimbabwean man was killed in a Johannesburg township, authorities say because of his nationality.

Experts blame the problem on the country’s history of violence, socioeconomic issues and growing anti-foreigner politics.

Silindile Mlilo, a researcher at the University of Witwatersrand, said with xenophobic violence, there is usually no differentiation between refugees or asylum-seekers.

“If government is not seen as doing anything, it also discourages migrants and refugees who are in the country, because it’s like, is it safe for me?” Mlilo said.

Resettlement is not an option for most refugees.

The U.N. refugee agency, UNHCR, said only 1 percent of refugees globally are moved from one host country to another for exceptional circumstances.

Laura Padoan, spokesperson for UNHCR South Africa, said it’s only the most vulnerable refugees who are typically eligible for resettlement.

“That can be survivors of sexual or gender-based violence. It can be women and children at risk, people at risk because of their religious persecution,” Padoan said. “We really urge these refugees to take up the offer of local integration or repatriation, because no one wants to see people living out on the street.”

But these refugees outside her office maintain re-integration is not an option and say they will stay camped there until there’s a plan for them to leave South Africa.

Source: Voice of America

The Chinese government is working to prevent continued diplomatic fallout and protect its image in Africa after racist videos of African children made by a Chinese man living in Malawi surfaced this week.

The BBC’s investigative report into the videos found a man named Lu Ke who allegedly filmed African children unknowingly saying offensive things in Mandarin such as “I’m a black monster and I have a low IQ.” The videos were then sold on a Chinese website, according to the BBC.

The news sparked outrage in Malawi, with netizens expressing their fury on Twitter and Foreign Minister Nancy Tembo saying the country felt “disgusted, disrespected and deeply pained.”

After the Chinese Embassy in Malawi was initially criticized for its tepid response to the scandal, dismissing the videos as old news because they were filmed in 2020, they released a new, stronger statement on Thursday.

The embassy said, “The Chinese community in Malawi has voiced their condemnation to racism in strong words,” adding that “the isolated case by a fool individual does not change the whole picture.”

China’s top diplomat in the region, Wu Peng, has also been engaging in damage control. He went to Malawi on Tuesday, where he met government officials, tweeting, “Nice to feel in person the Warm Heart of Africa. Malawi is a beautiful country with lovely people.”

Wu Peng also tweeted, “I just reached an agreement with Malawian FM that both #China&#Malawi have zero tolerance for racism. China has been cracking down on these unlawful acts in the past yrs. We’ll continue to crack down on such racial discrimination videos in the future.”

The day after his visit, Malawi’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs tweeted about a new Chinese scholarship opportunity for Malawians to study in China for a master’s degree, which some skeptics online saw as another way for Beijing to mitigate the fallout from the scandal.

Many Malawians are unconvinced by China’s apologies. The online news publication Malawi 24 reported that a Malawi-based group, the Centre for Democracy and Economic Development Initiatives, has called on the police to trace all Chinese nationals in the country and find out whether they’re there illegally or misrepresenting their reasons for being in the country.

Ralph Mathekga, a South African political analyst, told VOA that China has a history of racism toward Africans, yet governments on the continent were often loath to raise such issues because of Beijing’s economic clout.

“The video is not too surprising. … I think China is never brought to account in human rights and race relations in the country’s relationship with Africa,” he said.

But Cobus van Staden from the South African Institute of International Affairs said the videos could still be damaging.

“These kinds of depictions of Africans have a long, bad historical precedence. … I think it could be harmful for China’s image on the continent,” van Staden told VOA.

In Washington, Marco Rubio, a Republican senator from Florida and one of the most vocal China critics in Congress, tweeted about the BBC documentary, saying it was “disgusting and inhumane” and directly blaming the Communist Party of China.

In recent years, one of Beijing’s key talking points has been racism in the United States. Chinese officials and state media regularly focus on high-profile cases of police killings of African Americans like George Floyd to accuse the U.S. of racism and human rights abuses.

Source: Voice of America