Kenya hosts about 1 million refugees from a volatile region.
Historically, Kenya has kept these refugees in U.N. backed refugee camps. There are people who have lived in those camps for decades, and even some multi-generational families of people born in the camps.
Now the government wants to close down those camps and let those people into the country.
The government also wants to re-open the Somali border.
In the past, Kenya has been victimised by terrorists from Somalia before. The northern region is still unstable, with conflicts and tensions in Ethiopia, Sudan and Somalia. So it is to the credit of the Kenyan government that they are moving away from the refugee camp model.
The world must support Kenya to get this right.
Relevance: Immigration rights, refugee policy, international solidarity, humanitarianism
Posted by Top_Lime1820
1 Comment
I want to leave an additional comment as a South African, currently watching people in my country unleash intimidation, harassment, violence and discrimination on foreigners here.
I often defend South Africa (and the ANC) on this sub because I feel that a lot of the criticism we receive is unfair in one specific sense. Much of the reason South Africa fails and generates these spectacular “shit-show” headlines is because we are often more ambitious than peer nations on the continent and sometimes internationally.
When White South African expats lecture about how ugly and messed up Joburg is today, I can’t pretend it’s not a mess or excuse the incompetence, maladministration and organised crime that the ANC has not just allowed but facilitated. But at the same time, it remains true that the Afrikaner Nationalist governments of the past were not playing on remotely the same level of difficulty. They could evict entire communities to build suburbs for White people and tell the evictees to go to hell and solve any social problems that emerged as a result with police brutality. We can’t even evict a single squatter from a building if he’s been there more than a week without a court order.
Similarly, when many people in other parts of the continent criticise us about the xenophobic violence, cruelty and hatred we unleash on immigrants, I can’t excuse it at all. There are acts of such evil which have occured in the last few months and years that they border on crimes against humanity. However these acts are not committed by the state, and the state has assumed a much higher set of responsibilities compared to many similar countries. We can’t do mass deportations as was done in Nigeria and Ghana in the past when they had problems with immigration from neighours. We have to allow people to apply and reside in the country while they apply for asylum and refugee permits. And I’m fairly confident we can’t have refugee camps in South Africa. The idea that a person can live for 20 years in a special area they and later their children are not allowed to leave will never ever be allowed in South Africa. I know that this would not be considered true anywhere else, but in our political context, this would be called Apartheid and would be shut down by the courts.
When countries aspire to do better, they have a responsibility to succeed. If they fail, they can cause more harm and suffering than if they’d never bothered at all. South Africa is presently failing immigrants, to a large extent, and that is our shame and we deserve to be criticised for it.
But if observers fail to understand that _it is our high ambitions which lead to our spectacular failures_, then all that will happen is that when other countries begin to aspire to do more, they will fail as well because they will not receive the support they need. They will not receive support commensurate with their ambitions, because the world never recalibrated after our failure, choosing instead to dismiss it as a product of us as a people alone and not also of our positive ambitions.
I am extremely happy to hear that the Government of Kenya is finally shutting down those camps to allow all those people a chance at a normal life. And I am happy to hear that they are going to open the border with Somalia. I want the Kenyans to show us how it’s done: a welcoming, sanctuary state in the heart of a troubled region which people know they can flee to and get protection.
But the rest of the world needs to support them. What cannot happen is that in 8 years someone commits a terrorist attack and a subset of the Kenyan population responds with xenophobic violence, and then the rest of the world simply dismisses Kenya as another African basket case.
We need a new model for handling refugee flows. Our goal must be to figure that out. Kenya gives us an opportunity to try something new. We must support them, not just wait to see if it is a failure so we can judge them. And if they do fail, we must recognise the initial effort and not decouple the failure from the aspiration.