ANGOLA-DRC: Hoping to halt reciprocal repatriation

Photo: MSF

Thousands of Angolans that fled civil war remain in the DRC

JOHANNESBURG, 15 October 2009 (IRIN) - The number of Angolan refugees deported from neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo [DRC] has now topped 28,000, raising fears that a newly announced agreement between the two governments might not necessarily bring a halt to expulsions.

Both countries agreed to "immediately stop the expulsions of citizens of their respective states", and said they regretted the "recent migratory incidents" in a joint communiqué issued after talks on 13 October in the DRC capital, Kinshasa.

"We hope that this time the agreement will be implemented; this time there was a more high-level delegation," said Francesca Fontanini, spokesperson for the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) in the DRC, noting that previous talks had failed.

Thousands fled Angola's long civil war by crossing the border into DRC, and over 111,000 Angolans were still living in the DRC before the repatriations began in August 2009. "The majority of these people were refugees," Fontanini told IRIN.

On the other hand, Angola has for years deported thousands of undocumented Congolese migrants - mostly thought to be illegal diamond diggers - working in Angola. In the latest surge, some 18,800 DRC nationals have been expelled from Angola since August 2009.

The move by DRC is seen as a retaliatory response. According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) there have been six major waves of expulsions since 2003, in which a total of 140,000 Congolese were deported from Angola.

Katharina Schnöring, the Chief of Mission of the International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Angola, said the Angolan government had set up a reception camp near the border post of Luvo/Lufu, in the northern province of Zaire, where most of the expelled Angolans had gathered.

"They have started registering people, distributing food, tents and NFIs [non-food items]," she told IRIN. The Angolan government estimated it had enough stock to last 30 days, and a joint government/UN assessment team was underway to appraise the situation, she said.

"The government wants to transport people home, but this is not always possible: some people had lived in the DRC for 40 or even 60 years," Schnöring said.

The 1960s saw the rise of various independence groups and guerrilla warfare in Angola. In 1974, tired of the war, Portugal agreed to hand over power to a coalition of the three major Angolan nationalist organisations, but civil war broke out almost immediately after independence in 1975 and lasted for the next 27 years.

The civil war ended in 2002, but the impact on the country has been immense: an estimated 1.5 million people lost their lives, hundreds of thousands were displaced, infrastructure was destroyed, more than half a million faced starvation when peace returned, and about eight million landmines littered the country.

Reintegrating the growing number of Angolans gathered at the border post into their original communities as soon as possible, rather than setting up camps, is seen as the best solution, but organizing transport would be a race against time: "The rainy season is approaching and the roads are not that good in Angola," Schnöring commented.

There are fears of xenophobia - that's the real danger now. We are worried this [situation] might explode

Even if the agreement was upheld on a diplomatic level, there were fears that the latest round of deportations might have fanned lingering animosity between Angolans and Congolese living in each other's countries. "There are fears of xenophobia - that's the real danger now. We are worried this [situation] might explode," Schnöring warned.

A recent assessment by UNHCR among the Angolan refugee population in DRC indicated that some 43,000 were willing to be repatriated voluntarily. "They had expressed a desire to go home," Fontanini said.

"We were planning to start that process before the end of the year - we would have sat down with both governments to discuss how this could best be done."

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