Landmark case: In South Africa, ALL pregnant women, women who are lactating, children under age six are entitled to free health services at any public health establishment. ALL. Period.

April 22, 2023 by Leave a Comment

Section 27 of the Constitution of the Republic of South Africa states, “Everyone has the right to have access to health care services, including reproductive health care.” Section 28 of that same Constitution states, “Every child has the right to basic nutrition, shelter, basic health care services and social services.” This week, the High Court of South Africa, Gauteng division, confirmed those sections, in no uncertain terms, in a landmark decision brought by the law and advocacy organization, Section27, and three women: Kamba Azama and Nomagugu Ndlovu, denied free health services while pregnant, and Sinanzeni Sibanda, whose child under six was denied free health services. While the judgement is a decided victory, many question why it had to come to this in the first place.

In 2020, the Gauteng Department of Health issued the Policy Implementation Guidelines on Patient Administration and Revenue Management, which was written and interpreted to allow Gauteng public hospitals to deny free services to pregnant women, lactating women, and children under six. Hospitals began charging exorbitant fees up front before offering any services. They believed provincial policy superseded the national Constitution; effectively, they believed the Constitution was, at best, an interesting document. Section27, Kamba Azama, Nomagugu Ndlovu, and Sinanzeni Sibanda said NO! to that policy and notion, and took the Health Department to court.

Over the last three years, reports of such abuse have increased. For example, “Julian” and his wife and child moved from Maratane Refugee Camp, in Mozambique, to South Africa, seeking, among other things, health care for the infant daughter, who lives with cerebral palsy. As an undocumented resident, “Julian” found only impediments: demands for identity documents, demands to pay upfront as a private patient. Today, he and his family struggle with the R40,000 debt that was imposed on him. Suffer little children …

“Grace Jean”, an asylum seeker from the Democratic Republic of Congo was eight months pregnant and suffered from high blood pressure. After consulting a clinic, she was referred to Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital. She went twice to the hospital. Each time, she was told to pay R20 000 to obtain a hospital file number and be treated. Unemployed, Grace and her husband could not come up with the money. She lost the baby.

“Fezal Blue”, an asylum seeker living with HIV, was in labor. She approached three hospitals. None would take her, because she couldn’t provide South African identity card and wasn’t carrying her asylum seeker permit. “Fezal Blue” gave birth in the back of a car, going to a fourth hospital. Mother and child survived, and the baby did receive nevirapine, preventing mother-to-child transmission of HIV.

In his decision, Deputy Judge President Roland Sutherland declared Gauteng’s policy to be inoperative and generally an incoherent mess, not to mention a violation of the Constitution. Additionally, he gave all health establishments, across South Africa, until July 17th to post in a clearly visible place, the following: “ALL pregnant women,

ALL women who are lactating, and

ALL children below the age of six

Are entitled to free health services at any public health establishment, irrespective of their nationality and documentation status.”

ALL is capitalized in the Judge’s orders.

The Gauteng policy targeted the most vulnerable: asylum seekers, undocumented persons and persons who are at risk of statelessness. It did more than declare them persona non grata, it declared them nonpersons, unworthy of rights, dignity, or simple human decency. As Mbali Baduza, legal researcher at Section27, explained, “The effect of this court order is that it applies across the country… Medical xenophobia or health xenophobia has been on the rise in certain provinces, and this court order makes it clear that all pregnant women and children under six — regardless of their status — can access hospital care for free… and that’s an important precedent”.

Sharon Ekambaram, head of the Refugee and Migrant Rights Programme at Lawyers for Human Rights and a spokesperson for Kopanang Africa Against Xenophobia, Kaax, noted, “It is concerning that our government needs to be reminded of their constitutional obligations as set out in our Constitution and in our policies. This situation is but one component of a much broader crisis of institutionalised xenophobia”. Dale McKinley, also of Kaax, added, “We should be angry that we’ve had to go this far and that we have to continue to force our government to do the most basic things in terms of what our law says”.

Medical or health xenophobia is nationwide, across South Africa, as it is worldwide, and it’s spreading. Celebrate the victories, such as this landmark decision; and be concerned and angry. Part of the decision was to enforce the rule of law and the power and responsibility of the Constitution, and aprt of the decision was to emphasize the map. No assault on persons’ dignity is unique or individual, they are always part of a pattern of viral growth, and so every response must also be expansive. What happens in Gauteng does not stay in Gauteng.

 

(By Dan Moshenberg)

(Photo Credit: Jana Hattingh / Spotlight) (Image Credit: Section27)

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Once more, all that is human drowned in the sea

July 26, 2019 by 10 Comments

“I had said I wasn’t going to write no more poems like this”

Today was to be about the women in Puerto Rico who changed history, who sparked and sustained a movement against patriarchy, colonialism, injustice, imperialism, racism, misogyny. Today was to be about the women in Puerto Rico who continue to move a nation forward. But 150 women, children, men died – were murdered – off the coast of Libya, and the story that is told cannot stand. The story that is told is so much noise “tragedy”, tragedy, tragedy. Fear: feared drowned; feared dead; feared dead; feared drowned. These reports empty tragedy and fear of all meaning. As activist Helena Maleno has noted, Europe and the United States have militarized the borders into death zones, zones of necropolitics, necrocapitalism, necroborderlands, in which people are killed or abandoned to die. Criminalize all attempts at rescue or support, militarize the spaces between nations, criminalize those who seek rescue or support, fill the waters with sharks, and then, when the refugees and asylum seekers drown, call it a tragedy of monumental proportions. 

And now the surface of the Mediterranean is as it was the week before, as it will be in the weeks ahead, unbroken, and all that is human has drowned in the sea, as we walk in circles, intoning, “Tragedy. Fear. Fear. Tragedy.” The tragedy is in the mirror as is the farce. I had said I wasn’t going to write no more pieces like this … “but the dogs are in the street. The dogs are alive and the terror in our hearts has scarcely diminished.” I had said I wasn’t going to write no more pieces like this. I made a mistake.

Jose Campos Torres
by Gil Scott-Heron

I had said I wasn’t going to write no more poems like this

I had confessed to myself all along, tracer of life, poetry trends

That awareness, consciousness, poems that screamed of pain and the origins of pain and death had blanketed my tablets

And therefore, my friends, brothers, sisters, in-laws, outlaws, and besides — they already knew

But brother Torres, common ancient bloodline brother Torres is dead

I had said I wasn’t going to write no more poems like this

I had said I wasn’t going to write no more words down about people kicking us when we’re down

About racist dogs that attack us and drive us down, drag us down and beat us down

But the dogs are in the street

The dogs are alive and the terror in our hearts has scarcely diminished

It has scarcely brought us the comfort we suspected

The recognition of our terror and the screaming release of that recognition

Has not removed the certainty of that knowledge — how could it

The dogs rabid foaming with the energy of their brutish ignorance

Stride the city streets like robot gunslingers

And spread death as night lamps flash crude reflections from gun butts and police shields

I had said I wasn’t going to write no more poems like this

But the battlefield has oozed away from the stilted debates of semantics

Beyond the questionable flexibility of primal screaming

The reality of our city, jungle streets and their Gestapos

Has become an attack on home, life, family and philosophy, total

It is beyond the question of the advantages of didactic niggerisms

The motherfucking dogs are in the street

In Houston maybe someone said Mexicans were the new niggers

In LA maybe someone said Chicanos were the new niggers

In Frisco maybe someone said Orientals were the new niggers

Maybe in Philadelphia and North Carolina they decided they didn’t need no new niggers

I had said I wasn’t going to write no more poems like this

But dogs are in the street

It’s a turn around world where things are all too quickly turned around

It was turned around so that right looked wrong

It was turned around so that up looked down

It was turned around so that those who marched in the streets with bibles and signs of peace became enemies of the state and risk to national security

So that those who questioned the operations of those in authority on the principles of justice, liberty, and equality became the vanguard of a communist attack

It became so you couldn’t call a spade a motherfucking spade

Brother Torres is dead, the Wilmington Ten are still incarcerated

Ed Davis, Ronald Regan, James Hunt, and Frank Rizzo are still alive

And the dogs are in the motherfucking street

I had said I wasn’t going to write no more poems like this

I made a mistake

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYt2K6vacv0

 

(Photo Credit: Miriadna.com) (Video Credit: YouTube)

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Helena Maleno Garzón refuses to let all that is human drown in the Mediterranean

December 31, 2017 by 203 Comments

Helena Maleno Garzón at a workshop

The year ends with the surface of the Mediterranean concealing thousands of humans lost, sinking into the sea bottom as it reveals the sinking of our own collective humanity. Last year, over 5000 women, children and men drowned in the Mediterranean. The year before close to 4000, and the year before that, a little over 3000. This year, the reported death toll hovers just over 3000. That “success” is largely due to draconian measures that have sent refugees back to slave markets and brutal prisons in Libya and life-in-death in Morocco. Spain has replaced Italy as the preferred port of entry for those seeking a life, be they called migrants, refugees, or asylum seekers. Such is today’s morbid mathematics that over 3000 innocents drowned in one body of water in one year is touted as “success”. This is who we are … or not. Helena Maleno Garzón is a Spanish activist and journalist based in Tangiers. Working with Caminando Fronteras, a human rights group founded in 2002 that monitors and reports on the Spanish – Moroccan borders, Helena Maleno Garzón has spent the last years documenting, working with, rescuing and insisting on the dignity of migrant, refugees and asylum seekers crossing the Mediterranean into Europe. Helena Maleno Garzón refuses to let all that is human drown in the Mediterranean, and for that refusal, she is described as a criminal by both Morocco and Spain.

Two Spanish cities – Ceuta and Mellila – sit on Morocco’s coast. In 2015, Helena Maleno Garzón described the two enclaves as “the most heavily guarded borders in the EU to keep out African migrants.” Two years ago, Helena Maleno Garzón described a scene of mounting violence, excessive and illegal use of force, and preventable tragedies, such as the massacre of 15 African migrants on February 6, 2014, at the El Tarajal beach, in Ceuta. As a Liberian woman refugee explained, “We are subjected to ongoing institutional violence when we reach the border. This can range from denial of access to basic rights, to torture, physical abuse, and even sexual violence. What you see on the Melilla fence is only a fraction of what we suffer in transit.” In the intervening years, that fraction has grown as it has intensified. After 15 years of engagement in the area, Helena Maleno Garzón and her colleagues at Caminando Fronteras have declared that the area is now a war zone.

And so, the Moroccan government, at the behest of the Spanish government, has charged Helena Maleno Garzón with smuggling and human trafficking. The Spanish government tried the same trick a few years ago, but had to withdraw the charges earlier this year. Earlier this week, the Moroccan court postponed Helena Maleno Garzón’s trial until January 10 of next year. In Morocco and in Spain, many are rising to Helena Maleno Garzón’s defense. Across Spanish social media, #DefendiendoAMaleno appears next to #NoEsDelito. The defense of Helena Maleno Garzón rejects the criminalization of assisting others in need.

Helena Maleno Garzón stands trial for asking which is the greater crime, to cross a border, to assist crossing a border or to maintain that border with lethal force?  Spanish policy mirrors European policy, and “what you see on the Melilla fence is only a fraction of what we suffer.” Look into the mirror. Let us move closer to the water’s edge, grasp one another’s hands, encircle the Mediterranean, and speak the names of every child, woman, and man who died in the sea or at the hands of border guards while trying to find haven. Let us do so for the sake of humanity.

 

(Photo Credit: El Pais / Caminando Borders)

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AUSTRALIA IS NOT SHOCKED BY THE ROUTINE TORTURE OF WOMEN ASYLUM SEEKERS ON NAURU

August 4, 2016 by 12 Comments

A woman asylum seeker on Nauru discusses the abuse she’s suffered

Australia is “shocked” by the routine torture of women and children asylum seekers (October 2015). Australia is NOT shocked by the routine torture of women asylum seekers on Nauru (June 2016). It’s August now, so here goes: AUSTRALIA IS NOT SHOCKED BY THE ROUTINE TORTURE OF WOMEN ASYLUM SEEKERS ON NAURU. Is anybody listening? Does anybody care? Another month, another devastating report on the systemic torture of women, children, men asylum seekers, by the Australian government, in Nauru. The language is strong, the pictures distressing, the analysis trenchant, the conclusion clear … yet again. The government denies everything, people claim shock and dismay; the women and children and men prisoners on Nauru continue to suffer intense degradation and torture, all according to plan. None of this is new, and, in that redundancy, none of us is innocent. We share the shame … or we will, someday.

This week’s report, Australia: Appalling abuse, neglect of refugees on Nauru: Investigation on remote Pacific island finds deliberate abuse hidden behind wall of secrecy, is a collaboration between Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Reiterating the kinds of torture imposed on women has become a kind of asylum pornography. Once a month, belly up to the window, plunk in your currency, and wait for the curtain to rise and the show to begin. The stories are exactly the stories one has come to expect: abuse, sexual coercion and violence, abysmal health care, absent mental health care, filthy living conditions, despair, despair, despair.

What is somewhat specific to Nauru, but barely, are the extremes to which the Australian government has gone, both in terms of cruelty and secrecy. As Anna Neistat, Amnesty’s Senior Director for Research, noted, “Australia’s policy of exiling asylum seekers who arrive by boat is cruel in the extreme. Few other countries go to such lengths to deliberately inflict suffering on people seeking safety and freedom.” Michael Bochenek, Senior Counsel on Children’s Rights at Human Rights Watch, added, “Australia’s atrocious treatment of the refugees on Nauru over the past three years has taken an enormous toll on their well-being. Driving adult and even child refugees to the breaking point with sustained abuse appears to be one of Australia’s aims on Nauru.”

Australia and Nauru have colluded in building “a wall of secrecy” not only around the conditions of life, and death, among asylum seekers, but they’ve managed to weave that wall into the fabric of the asylum seekers’ lives and community as well as that of the nation: “The Australian government’s offshore operation on Nauru is surrounded by a wall of secrecy, with both Australia and Nauru going to great lengths to prevent the flow of information off the island. Service providers and others who work on the island face criminal charges and civil penalties under Australian law if they disclose information about conditions for asylum seekers and refugees held offshore. Nauru has banned Facebook on the island and has enacted vaguely worded laws against threats to public order that legal experts fear could be used to criminalize protests by refugees and asylum seekers. Journalists in particular face severe restrictions on entry, with an $8,000 non-refundable visa fee and a protracted application process. Nauru has granted visas to just two media outlets since January 2014. Other requests have been rebuffed or met with no response. UN officials have been denied entry or in some cases have concluded that a visit would be impractical due to severe limitations on their access.”

What starts in Nauru spreads to the entire nation. According to another report issued this week, “Almost half the deaths in immigration detention over the past five and a half years remain unsolved, including two deaths from 2013 and three deaths from 2014 … Since January 2011, 21 people have died in immigration detention, including 18 in onshore detention. The death toll could be higher, as the figures do not include all stillbirths, infants who died in hospital shortly after birth, or miscarriages of people in immigration detention. The Department of Immigration and Border Protection refused to answer questions about infant mortality and miscarriages among detainees and a Freedom of Information request was rejected, despite new claims women detained at Nauru suffer from a high rate of pregnancy complications … Of the 18 deaths in onshore immigration detention since the beginning of 2011,two occurred at the Curtin detention centre in WA, two at Yongah Hill in Northam (WA), two at Phosphate Hill on Christmas Island, four at Villawood in NSW, two in Sydney IRH, and one death each in Darwin, North West Point facility in NSW, Melbourne ITA, Maribyrnong IDC in Melbourne, Wickham Point IDC outside Darwin, and Scherger IDC in Weipa, Queensland. Six of the resolved cases were suicides. Of the 10 unresolved deaths, two were on Manus Island and one on Nauru, two at Yongah Hill, one at Villawood, one at Darwin, one at Phosphate Hill, one at Melbourne, and one at North West Point.”

Australia declared war on refugees and asylum seekers and then weaponized the bodies of women, children, and men who had already come to Australia seeking haven. They are just so much materiel meant to be used up or left behind, like shrapnel or land mines. It’s happening across Australia; it is Australia. AUSTRALIA IS NOT SHOCKED BY THE ROUTINE TORTURE OF WOMEN ASYLUM SEEKERS ON NAURU. Can you hear me now?

Refugee children protest their relocation to Nauru

 

(Photo Credits: Amnesty International)

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Immemorial Day and the unbroken surface of the Mediterranean

May 30, 2016 by 13 Comments

“Fear not suffering’s gravity.
Return to earth its weighty share;
heavy are its mountains, heavy the sea.”
Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets to Orpheus

Last week at least 700 people – refugees and asylum seekers – drowned in the Mediterranean. That raises this year’s known death toll to 2000. Italy plans to build a cemetery, a memorial of sorts, to those who die at sea. It would be located next the remains of the country’s largest fascist concentration camp. While the cemetery is the least Italy, or any country, can do, that cemetery is not a “final resting place”. There is no final resting place for those refugees and asylum seekers. This weekend is filled with images of cemeteries and those who come to the cemeteries: families, dignitaries, people. But there is no picture of the surface of the Mediterranean, and there should be. As we stare at the photographs of cemeteries, we should be made to stare at the unbroken surface of the Mediterranean. We should remember all who have perished in the name of war.

One day, impossibly, we will come to the water’s edge and grasp one another’s hands. We will encircle the Mediterranean and we will say the names of every child, woman, and man who drowned in the heavy sea while trying to find haven. Amen.

(Photo Credit: Europe Now)

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#LetThemStay: Australia tells asylum seekers detention is freedom

April 4, 2016 by 2 Comments

What does freedom mean? Don’t ask the Australian government, who this weekend hit a new low by proudly announcing it had released all refugee and asylum seeking children in Australia, when, apparently, it had merely changed their designation from “held detention” to “community detention”, without actually moving them. When torturing children just isn’t enough, try torturing the language as well. Freedom’s just another word …

Years ago, Australia’s government looked out upon the waters, saw small boats filled with desperate people, declared them a crisis and installed a state of emergency. The State has tried everything, from detention and torture to offshore detention and torture to way offshore detention and torture, from places like Villawood Immigration Detention Centre to Nauru Regional Processing Centre to who knows what or where in Cambodia. The landscape is littered with rising piles of bodies, commission reports, and expressions of shock at the routine torture of women, children, and men. Lately increasing numbers of Australians have protested in favor of a more open policy, under the banner #LetThemStay. And so, over the weekend, the State tried a new sleight of hand, and declared the war is over, even though the fighting actually continues.

When challenged on the terms of “release”, Australia’s Immigration Minister explained, “We’ve been able to make a modification to the arrangement so the children aren’t detained, they can have friends over, they can go out into the community.” Pushed by reporters, he further explained, “The same definitions apply today as they did before. There are certain characteristics that need to be met in relation to all these definitions, but that’s all beltway stuff. They’re outside of ‘held detention’, so that’s the answer that I’ve provided to you before.” Still unsatisfied with the release that is not a release, reporters continued to seek clarification, and a spokesperson for the Minister complied, “There are arrangements that have been put in place. Those arrangements now sit with the fact that it’s community detention.” That kind of obfuscation is “stuff” that beltways are made of.

Here’s the situation in plain words: “Families with children in `held detention’ in the `family compound’ of Villawood detention centre were told by letter on Friday that their detention was now classified as `community detention’. They have been `released’ from detention without moving.”

On Saturday night, a nineteen-year-old woman attempted suicide. Others will follow. Today Australia’s Immigration Minister vowed to ship the families to Nauru … and beyond. The bodies pile up, the lies grow more intricate and more brazen, the shame deepens, and people and words are made to disappear. Soon, if all goes according to plan, no one will care about words like democracy, freedom, decency, or humanity.

 

(Photo Credit: The Guardian / Pacific Press / REX / Shutterstock)

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We are the mothers, victims of the raids

February 8, 2016 by 3 Comments

Susana Arévalo Hernández and her two children have left the South Texas Family Residential Center, that special hell the United States paid Texas to build in Dilley. Arévalo was one of a number of women and children picked up in raids in early January, picked up, thrown around, and dumped into cages like so much trash. Since her imprisonment, Arévalo has suffered seven epileptic seizures. Her six-year-old son lives with a learning disability. What happened to Susana Arévalo Hernández is the ordinary torture of women who seek asylum.

Susana Arévalo Hernández fled gang violence in El Salvador to run straight into State violence in the United States. According to various reports, ICE agents lied to gain access to her home, and herself and her children. Doctors report that her condition in detention imperils her health and life. Lawyers report that every day in prison is a further violation of her and her children’s human rights and rights to due process. None of this matters. While Arévalo walked, other women and children remain in Dilley detention.

Here’s what should matter: “Every time I have a seizure, I think I’m not coming back. I don’t want my children to see that.” A mother’s concern for her children should matter. It doesn’t.

Susana Arévalo Hernández was one of seven women who wrote a letter to President Obama, which reads, in part: “We are the mothers, victims of the raids … We would like to ask you for our freedom from this unjust detention … We complied with everything that was asked of us, but the system that failed us, just because we came to this country to seek protection, because we couldn’t go back to our countries of origin due to being exposed to so much violence and threats against us and our children. That’s why we came to this country to request asylum … We are not criminals who you have to keep locked up. We have not committed any crime and it is unjust that our children, at such an early age, know what it’s like to be in a jail under guard 24 hours, when at this moment they should be in school living life with dignity like every child deserves to … We need to be free as human beings to be able to fight our cases outside with dignity.”

Ana Silvia Orellana, Dominga Rivas, Elsy Monge López, Gloria Díaz Rivas, Isamar Sanchez Chicas, Marta María Hernández and Susana Arévalo Hernández signed that letter. They represented 12 families imprisoned in Dilley and Berks County, in Pennsylvania. The twelve families add up to 33 women and children. This is the arithmetics of asylum in the United States today: lies, violence, indignity, criminalization, and more intense violence. Why must a Central American woman be on death’s door to get a hearing? Why must Central American children and their mothers live in an atmosphere of fear and a reign of terror? What sort of democracy is that?

Dear President Obama … We are the mothers

(Image Credit: El Pais)

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Australia’s Flotilla of the Damned

November 25, 2015 by Leave a Comment

Australian navy intercepts asylum seeker boat within 200m of Christmas Island on 20 November.

Today’s headline reads, “Christmas Island asylum seeker boat ‘disappeared’ after being towed by navy.” There was no disappearance but rather a death sentence, pure and simple and ordinary. The only news perhaps would be the “disappearance,” except that it’s not news because it’s so ordinary. Australia has learned to disappear whole boatloads of women, children, and men asylum seekers. This is just one more incidence.

The story, such as it is, is short. “A boat carrying asylum seekers was intercepted close to Christmas Island on Friday, the first to reach Australian waters since June 2014. The boat made it within 200m of Flying Fish Cove before it was boarded by Australian officials, sources on the island told Guardian Australia. It is unclear whether the boat was intercepted by Australian navy or Border Force staff. Those on board were given life jackets. The boat was moved further away from the island and covered in a tarpaulin so the arrivals cannot be counted or identified, the sources said. The boat was towed out to sea by an Australian navy patrol boat. After that, thus far, all is silence. The government won’t discuss “operational matters”, and so the boat has “disappeared.”

In 1939, the MS St. Louis famously traveled the Atlantic and Caribbean, seeking a safe haven for 908 German Jewish refugees fleeing State violence. Having been rejected by Cuba, the United States and Canada, the refugees returned to Europe, where they moved to England, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. In the ensuing violence, it’s estimated that anywhere from 400 to 700 survived the war. What also survived was the shame of those nation States that refused entry, in particular the United States and Canada. Of course, apologies, both State and personal, have since been extended, but the shame is there. This was the Voyage of the Damned.

But the boat never disappeared, nor was it meant to. There was no policy, on the part of so-called democratic States, of forced mass disappearance of refugees and asylum seekers. Now, in Australia, there is. Disappearance is so much more efficient than detention centers and offshore penal colonies. Someday, someone might apologize, but for now there’s simply Australia’s Flotilla of the Damned: women, children, men seeking asylum, set adrift in the silence and the fog of “operational matters.” Because for the state, #OperationsMatter … not women and children.

 

(Photo Credit: The Guardian)

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On BBC News, amnesia passes for history, and the refugees are doomed

September 4, 2015 by 3 Comments

Young girl returning from the store with a pot of soup and a bottle of milk, Lodz

On BBC News today, Dariusz Rosiak from Polish National Radio concludes an interview with an afterthought, “You also have to understand that there is a cultural gap which is important and it has to be taken into consideration … Poland is a one-religion, one-ethnic country, and has been like that for the last 50 years. People, they have to understand the necessity to accept people of different color, of different creed, of different culture. You can’t expect them to be able to do it just like that.” And the interview ends.

For the last 50 years.

My father’s family came from Piotrków Trybunalski, near Łódź, and, apart from my father, they were all killed during the German occupation. My father, Charles Moshenberg, was born in 1926, in the midst of the Second Polish Republic, which ended with the September 1939 invasion of Poland. My own family’s history and that of Second Polish Republic haunt Rosiak’s comments as well as his historical amnesia.

When the Germans and their Soviet allies invaded Poland, the country was a patchwork of national minorities. While the 1921 Polish census listed 30.8 percent of the population as “national minorities”, the 1931 Polish census put that figure at 31.1 percent. During this period, Poland was also undergoing intense urbanization.

Who were the national minorities? Ukrainians, Jews, Belarusians, Germans followed by much smaller communities of Lithuanians, Czechs, Armenians, Russians, and Roma. Along with Jews, Poland also boasted, or not, an array of religions, from Roman Catholics to Greek Orthodox to Protestant.

By 1931, Poland had the second largest national Jewish population in the world: “At the time of the population census of December 9, 1931, there were about 3,136,000 Jews in Poland, i.e. 9.8% of the population, making them the second largest Jewish community in the world. In 1931 more than a fifth of all Jews lived in Poland.” At the time of the 1939 invasion, the number of Jews who claimed Polish as their first language was rising, as it had been for the past decade.

And then they were gone: the Jews, the Roma, the “national minorities”, the others, dead in the ghettoes and camps or fled.

Fairly quickly, Poland became used to the story of being one religion, one ethne. By letting the story stand, unquestioned, the BBC colluded in this myth making. Interwar Poland was not a model of diversity, but it was a thriving, growing multinational, multiethnic, multi-religious nation-State. The loss of that multi haunts more than Poland. Now more than ever, that history should be invoked. Rather than circulating naturalizing alibis for murderous inaction, open the doors to the refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants, around the world.

 

 

(Photo Credit: Roman Vishniac Collection, International Center of Photography)

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South Africa built a special hell for asylum seekers: Refugee Reception Offices

July 23, 2015 by 14 Comments

A report released yesterday in Johannesburg reveals “shocking levels of corruption and serial abuse” at South African refugee centers. Of the five Refugee Reception Offices, Marabastad, in Pretoria, wins the Most Corrupt Award … again. The report, while dismaying, is no shock.

According to the report’s introduction, “Established in 1998, South Africa’s asylum system was designed to identify those individuals in need of protection in accordance with the country’s international obligations and democratic character.” By 1998, the South African government had traded in the Reconstruction and Development Programme, or RDP, for the Growth, Employment and Redistribution, or GEAR, strategy, which traded any promise of social justice for something called “growth.” Asylum seekers and refugees didn’t fall into the GEAR strategy, and so by the time South Africa decided it was time for asylum, it was already too late: “The current state of affairs is the product of a deliberate government choice to avoid addressing fundamental issues in the asylum system.”

Here’s Marabastad in 2008: “Asylum applicants at Marabastad have taken to sleeping outside the office, in the hope that this will improve their chances of getting inside. There are regularly between eighty and three hundred people sleeping outside. At night armed criminals visit the site. Incidents of theft are common. There have been several reports of rape. There is no shelter in the vicinity of the office and people often endure rain and very cold conditions. Many women sleep with babies by their side. On some occasions the police have visited during the night and arrested asylum seekers or extorted them for bribes. Fights about places in the queue are common, sometimes degenerating into the throwing of bricks and stones and leading to several cases of hospitalisation. On at least one occasion metropolitan officials arrived in the morning to clear all temporary shelters, bedding, and belongings of people gathered outside the office.” In 2011, “the conditions at Marabastad … still are, to most objective onlookers, appalling.”

And now, in 2015, Marabastad is the most corrupt, and this in South Africa, which had one of the highest asylum and refugee rejection rates in the world last year, rejecting between 90% and 100% of all asylum applications processed from Mozambique, Lesotho, Malawi, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Pakistan, Ghana, India, Zimbabwe, Cameroon, Burundi and Uganda. South Africa is the land where all roads lead to rejection.

To the toxic brew of incompetence, underfunding, and xenophobic and sexist violence, yesterday’s report adds corruption. One has to pay to play, and many are the ways: pay to cross the border, move up the line, renew a permit, pay spurious fines, avoid arrest, and generally improve `service.’

Women figure in this variously. First, the researchers interviewed mostly men because there were more men than women outside the reception centers and because “women were generally less willing to participate.”

Second, in discussing the Department of Home Affairs, or DHA, tepid response to corruption, the report tells a story, “In July 2014, an asylum seeker told Lawyers for Human Rights that a refugee status determination officer (RSDO) at the Marabastad refugee reception office had asked her for R2500 in exchange for refugee status. LHR contacted the counter-corruption unit, which agreed to set up a sting operation.” What followed was a nightmare of bungling and general lack of concern on the part of the DHA, so that, in the end, all the weight falls on the most vulnerable and least able: “Asylum seekers must be willing to come forward, despite fear of reprisals, and must be able to provide … details. The DHA does not target the wider processes outside of these individual complaints.”

Finally, one asylum seeker in Cape Town reports: “People ask for money. Officials don’t help you or tell you what is happening. They play on their phones. Security guards ask for money but not openly. It is a previously made deal. Then they grab the people and take them to the front of the queue. Never women. People from Zim only get a one month extension and other people from other countries get 3 to 6 months.”

Never women.

 

(Photo Credit: Kristy Siegfried / IRIN)

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