Zimbabwe’s refugees wait for a saviour

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By Tom Burgis in Johannesburg
June 25 2008

For the huddled congregation at the Central Methodist Mission in downtown Johannesburg, the wait for a saviour goes on.
Many of the more than 2,000 Zimbabweans who have sought sanctuary at the church in the South African capital are coming to terms with the fact that Morgan Tsvangirai will not contest Friday’s presidential run-off election against Robert Mugabe.

Reflecting some of the initial anger Godfrey Charamba, the chairman of the refugees sitting beneath an enormous crucifix in the main hall had said on Sunday, hours after Mr Tsvangirai’s decision: “He is letting down the hope of the people.”

The exiles’ initial outrage gives way to more sober sentiments closer to the epicentre of the violence. Bella Matambanadzo, head of George Soros’ Open Society Initiative’s Zimbabwe programme, said on Tuesday that in Harare “there is a feeling that the MDC has done absolutely the most responsible thing”.

In the south-west, however, where there have been fewer attacks, “a lot of people said they wanted to vote against Mugabe and have been denied”, says David Coltart, an MDC Senator for Bulawayo. “But they have not been brutalised the way people in the north have.”

He says Mr Tsvangirai was “damned if he continued and damned if he didn’t”.

Some 1.5m Zimbabweans have poured into their ravaged homeland’s vast southern neighbour since 2005, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch. Other estimates put the total as high as 3m – almost equivalent to the population of Cape Town.

They are caught in a dangerous limbo, pinioned between atrocities and economic ruination at home and the mobs that have stalked Johannesburg in recent weeks, killing dozens of African foreigners, brutalising hundreds more and sending streams of migrants from squatter camps into refuges such as the Methodist mission.

The attacks have been variously labelled as xenophobic, as a symptom of competition for scant resources in a country where at least one in four people are unemployed, or simply as another manifestation of a national violent crime epidemic.

“What emerged was criminality,” Jacob Zuma, leader of the ruling African National Congress, said last week. ”Xenophobia has been used as an excuse to loot.”

Whatever the root cause of the violence come of the Zimbabweans at the church say they have rarely ventured out since the start of the attacks, which have more than doubled the numbers sheltering there. Patrick, a 24-year-old with a distant gaze, recalls witnessing a mother and daughter beaten to death nearby. “It is like living in a prison,” he says.

The choice is stark: return to Zimbabwe and face the consequences of flight and the suspicions it arouses, or eke out a living taking low-profile part-time work in Johannesburg.

All but one of the refugees who speak to the Financial Times say they have found it impossible to obtain proper papers as immigrants.

The Human Rights Watch report calls for South Africa to halt deportations of Zimbabweans and grant them temporary work rights. Siobhan McCarthy, spokeswoman for the home affairs ministry, says the government is working on a new classification for the majority of such arrivals who, she says, are primarily economic migrants fleeing financial collapse. At the same time, the authorities face intense pressure from poor South Africans with scant access to health services and decent housing.

The Zimbabweans counter accusations that they are undercutting South African wages by saying employers who offer them domestic or construction work pay Zimbabwean rates. Even here, it seems, there is no escape from the hyperinflation that has scuppered their homeland’s economy.

There is an irony, too, that the immigrants are locked out of a labour market desperate for skilled workers. “Look at these people from Zimbabwe,” says Martin, 29, a former soldier from central Zimbabwe who was fired from the army for his political views. “They have diplomas, degrees. They need jobs.”

The exiles are not a particularly religious bunch, Mr Charamba says. In recent days their agnosticism has spread to the institutions and leaders they feel have failed them – the South African Development Community and Thabo Mbeki, the South African president leading the regional grouping’s mediation effort in Zimbabwe; the African Union; the United Nations; and now even Mr Tsvangirai, the man only days ago they still hoped might deliver them.

Some accept Mr Tsvangirai’s argument that the toll of more than 80 opposition supporters killed and thousands more tortured and injured would have risen still further had he pushed ahead with Friday’s planned run-off.

Others feel betrayed. “It shows that there is no future,” says Martin, who now forms part of the ad hoc security contingent at the Methodist centre. “Someone from outside Zimbabwe will have to come to the rescue.”

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