South Africa deported some 450 Zimbabweans overnight from a border detention center to a homeland beset by political violence and uncertainty, an international aid group said on Saturday.
Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) said one of its teams visited the center on Friday — the day a widely criticized presidential runoff was held in Zimbabwe — and found more than 450 men, women and children there saying they had crossed the border in recent days, “fleeing instability and political violence.”
When the aid team returned on Saturday with supplies, it found the center empty the agency said in a statement. It said South African authorities had confirmed all the Zimbabweans were sent back.
“Hundreds of people have been sent back into the country from which they fled, without any recognition of their right to seek asylum,” said Rachel Cohen, head of MSF in South Africa.
She said the deportations were “unacceptable” and “in violation of international as well as South African law, which guarantee the right to seek asylum.”
Siobhan McCarthy, a spokeswoman for the Ministry of Home Affairs, said on Saturday that foreigners caught at the border are screened to determine their status.
“I don’t know the particulars of this case, my assumption would be that they would be in the country illegally and do not qualify for refugee status and therefore were returned to Zimbabwe,” McCarthy said.
As many as 3 million Zimbabweans are in South Africa. Some have been here for years, and many come and go regularly. Some work in South Africa for weeks or months between visits home, while others come on day trips to buy goods scarce in their economically ravaged country.
South Africa views most Zimbabweans crossing its border as economic migrants, not refugees.
Few apply for asylum, in part because that could make it difficult to return.
“Everybody who comes into the country is allowed to seek asylum, but the majority of the people crossing the border from Zimbabwe into South Africa, they do not qualify for refugee status and it is on that basis that many of the applications for asylum have been turned down,” McCarthy said.
But she said South Africa was reviewing its policy of sending economic migrants home, mindful that powerful forces spur Zimbabweans and others to come to the region’s economic hub.
“The minister has said that these deportations are a fruitless exercise because people are entering the country faster than we can deport them and by the time we deport some they just find their way back into the country again,” she said.
Human Rights Watch said 200,000 Zimbabweans were deported from South Africa last year, with most returning within days.
Recently, however, Zimbabweans have been targeted in xenophobic attacks by South Africans who claim foreigners are stealing jobs and using scarce resources.
On Friday, a South African court ordered the Home Affairs Ministry to grant the status of asylum seeker to 33 Zimbabwean opposition supporters who had faced deportation, the South African Press Association reported.
The 33 had been arrested while protesting a Chinese ship’s attempt to dock in South Africa and unload Chinese arms bound for landlocked Zimbabwe.
‘DISCRIMINATION’: The US Office of Personnel Management ordered that public DEI-focused Web pages be taken down, while training and contracts were canceled US President Donald Trump’s administration on Tuesday moved to end affirmative action in federal contracting and directed that all federal diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) staff be put on paid leave and eventually be laid off. The moves follow an executive order Trump signed on his first day ordering a sweeping dismantling of the federal government’s diversity and inclusion programs. Trump has called the programs “discrimination” and called to restore “merit-based” hiring. The executive order on affirmative action revokes an order issued by former US president Lyndon Johnson, and curtails DEI programs by federal contractors and grant recipients. It is using one of the
One of Japan’s biggest pop stars and best-known TV hosts, Masahiro Nakai, yesterday announced his retirement over sexual misconduct allegations, reports said, in the latest scandal to rock Japan’s entertainment industry. Nakai’s announcement came after now-defunct boy band empire Johnny & Associates admitted in 2023 that its late founder, Johnny Kitagawa, for decades sexually assaulted teenage boys and young men. Nakai was a member of the now-disbanded SMAP — part of Johnny & Associates’s lucrative stable — that swept the charts in Japan and across Asia during the band’s nearly 30 years of fame. Reports emerged last month that Nakai, 52, who since
EYEING A SOLUTION: In unusually critical remarks about Russian President Vladimir Putin, US President Donald Trump said he was ‘destroying Russia by not making a deal’ US President Donald Trump on Wednesday stepped up the pressure on Russian President Vladimir Putin to make a peace deal with Ukraine, threatening tougher economic measures if Moscow does not agree to end the war. Trump’s warning in a social media post came as the Republican seeks a quick solution to a grinding conflict that he had promised to end before even starting his second term. “If we don’t make a ‘deal,’ and soon, I have no other choice but to put high levels of Taxes, Tariffs, and Sanctions on anything being sold by Russia to the United States, and various other
In Earth’s upper atmosphere, a fast-moving band of air called the jet stream blows with winds of more than 442kph, but they are not the strongest in our solar system. The comparable high-altitude winds on Neptune reach about 2,000kph. However, those are a mere breeze compared with the jet stream on a planet called WASP-127b. Astronomers have detected winds howling at about 33,000kph on the large gaseous planet in our Milky Way galaxy approximately 520 light-years from Earth in a tight orbit around a star similar to our sun. The supersonic jet-stream winds circling WASP-127b at its equator are the fastest of their kind
RSS