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.
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