The persecution of Tutsi Banyamulenges is far from over, especially for a family that has been tortured and harassed in a number of African countries, even at the hands of their protectors, writes Shannon Ebrahim.
Pretoria - James Biamungu’s only crime was that he was born a Tutsi Banyamulenge in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
With a Tutsi Rwandan mother and a Congolese father, Baimangu (not his real name) had every right to live in the Uvira environs of South Kivu near the border with the DRC.
But the Banyamulenge, who have lived in South Kivu since the 17th century, have endured endless persecution since colonial times when they suffered discrimination and exclusion as “immigrants from Rwanda” and endured massacres by other ethnic groups supported by the state.
Mobutu Sese Seko, the military dictator and president of the DRC from 1965 to 1997, did nothing to halt these massacres, and between 1995 and 1996, the Banyamulenge were tortured, jailed and killed by government soldiers.
In 1996, the governor of South Kivu asked the Banyamulenge to leave the DRC within six days or “be killed by fire”, which resulted in a massacre of 4 000 people. At the time, the state-run media asked people to kill the Banyamulenge, who were depicted as snakes.
By 2004, the Congolese military were routinely killing Banyamulenge in the vicinity of Uvira; many fled to Rwanda and Burundi as refugees.
This history of genocide against the Banyamulenge is important in the case of James Biamungu, as on August 30, 2005, government soldiers broke into his home in a village in South Kivu, shouting that Tutsis must go back to Rwanda, attacked him with rifle butts, sticks and boots and sliced open his back.
His sister-in-law was raped; his pregnant wife managed to escape. His in-laws had already been slaughtered in 2002.
Biamungu and his wife fled their home, finding a transit boat to take them to Zambia, and then boarded a truck to Zimbabwe, arriving on August 9, 2005.
They immediately applied for asylum and were granted refugee status and sent to Tongogara refugee camp.
This is where a new series of nightmares began.
The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) placed them in a camp full of Rwandan Hutus, many of whom had been involved in the 1994 genocide against Tutsis in Rwanda. Other Tutsi refugees who had been placed in the camp had fled to Harare and never returned.
Biamungu and his family were the only Tutsi family in the camp and were constantly harassed by the Hutus in the camp and accused of being Tutsi spies.
Biamungu described the living conditions in the camp as fine, and was accommodated in a house, but over the course of the next few years his house was repeatedly stoned at night and his 2-year-old daughter poisoned. She was saved due to the timely intervention of the camp’s clinic.
Biamungu claims there was collusion between the Zimbabwean intelligence (the CIO) and the Hutus in the camps in the persecution of his family. He says two members of the camp administration were “known members” of the CIO.
Biamungu says it was when he uncovered “a Hutu-CIO plot” to kill his wife that the camp administration asked the police in the area to protect the family. He claims they refused.
A year later, in 2009, Biamungu says Hutus in the camp “colluded” with the CIO officials in attacking the family in their house.
The camp’s head administrator and the head of the UNHCR based in the camp were shocked by the developments.
The UNHCR official sent Biamungu to lodge a complaint at the UNHCR head office in Harare, where he was met by a UNHCR protection officer - whose name is known to Independent Media, but who could not be contacted for comment - who, Biamungu claims, was “reluctant” to pursue the case or provide the family with any protection.
This man, he says, merely said: “Sue them.”
Biamungu then proceeded to seek the assistance of lawyers at the Zimbabwe firm Gill, Godlonton & Gerrans, which approached the UNHCR protection officer, asserting that it was the UNHCR which had the responsibility to protect the family in the refugee camp.
Biamungu also sought the assistance of the NGO Human Rights Forum in Harare, at which point one of the lawyers in the firm explained to him that he knew the protection officer personally, and that he was allegedly the nephew of President Robert Mugabe.
This, it is claimed, might have explained why the protection officer ostensibly refused to act on the case, and possibly why the numerous requests to the police for protection were seemingly ignored.
At certain points following this incident, Biamungu and his family sought refuge in Harare, but without money they inevitably had to return to the refugee camp. On the night of July 9, 2010, Biamungu was kidnapped by armed men and taken to the bushes.
While the men were busy discussing his fate, Biamungu managed to escape his captors and rushed back to the camp to take his wife and three children and flee the area for good.
The only place the family could go to seek protection as refugees was the UNHCR head office in Harare. But instead of receiving the protection that UNHCR was obligated by international law to provide them, the UNHCR protection officer allegedly ensured that they were “brutalised”.
When the officer apparently ordered them to leave and go back to the camp they had just fled, the family refused, at which point two Zimbabwean policemen and a Zimbabwean security guard were ushered into the waiting room of the UNHCR offices.
According to Biamungu, the children were held up against the wall while the policemen proceeded to handcuff the parents, and “beat, kick and the lash” Biamungu and his pregnant wife in full view of their children. Once the alleged torture session had ended, Biamungu claims, a more senior appointee of the UNHCR - a man whose name is also known to Independent Media, but who could also not be contacted for comment - was called down from his office to witness their bloodied bodies.
Biamungu says this man then stuck $50 in Biamungu’s pocket and told him to return to the refugee camp.
The nightmare did not end there. The protection officer allegedly drove the family from police station to police station, instructing the police to arrest them. The police consistently refused as the family could prove they had Zimbabwean refugee status. Finally, by 8pm, they were dropped at a transit centre for refugees in Waterfalls, from where Biamungu used the $50 to take his wife to the nearest hospital.
Having been beaten while three months pregnant, Biamungu’s wife ultimately had a miscarriage. The medical report from the Parirenyatwa hospital in Harare, which Independent Media has seen, states that the “ultrasonic appearance is highly suggestive of a blighted ovum”.
The family then sought refuge at the counselling services unit of Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights which accommodated them for a month before insisting that they go back to UNHCR.
When UNHCR allegedly refused the family entry into the building, Zimbabwe Lawyers for Human Rights advised the family their only recourse was to get to South Africa and seek the protection of the UNHCR regional office here.
On August 25, 2010, Biamungu and his family arrived at Musina and immediately sought protection from the UNHCR.
But instead of the UNHCR taking responsibility for the family, Maureen McBrien, head of UNHCR Musina, allegedly approached the department of home affairs to give the family temporary asylum “until their claim was evaluated”.
According to Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Fatima Chohan this is something which should never have happened as the family was the responsibility of UNHCR, not South Africa. The family’s South African nightmare commenced from this time, and continues up to today.
It took almost a year for the Department of Home Affairs to evaluate the family’s claim for refugee status, only for the Refugee Appeal Board to reject the claim in July 2011 as they had already been given refugee status in Zimbabwe.
UNHCR was, however, instructed to provide the family with appropriate protection. And so, the Biamungu family then lived in a shelter run by the Jesuit Services Agency - a partner of the UNHCR - from June 2012 to June 2013.
In November 2012, the UNCHR conducted a protection interview and promised to help the family, and the family completed a UNHCR resettlement interview in February 2013, where they were told they were successful and were asked to sign a document accepting the protection of the UNHCR.
They were also told they would be resettled in either Australia, the US or Canada. But Biamungu says he at no point demanded to be resettled in the US which the UNHCR is, apparently, now trying to claim. As a result of the Jesuit Services Agency ostensibly running out of funds to look after the Biamungu family, and the UNHCR seemingly failing to provide them with alternative accommodation, the Biamungu family has spent most of the past two years sleeping with their five children on the pavement outside the UNHCR offices in Pretoria awaiting their resettlement.
It is nothing less than criminal that a child as young as 3, and four siblings, had to endure being exposed to the elements in such a manner through the winter months. It appears the UNHCR did nothing to assist them.
Biamungu was detained and sent to Lindela for four months earlier this year, only to be released and to again sleep on the pavement outside the UN building.
He and his wife also spent over a month in Pretoria Central Prison in June this year, only to be released and rearrested this past Monday and told by Home Affairs that they would be sent to Lindela and deported.
Independent Media’s intervention has brought about a re-examination of the injustices that this family has endured.
Chohan remains categorical that this family was the responsibility of the UNHCR, which, it is believed, hasn’t lived up to its responsibilities to protect them.
* Shannon Ebrahim is Foreign Editor of Independent Media. Ebrahim contacted the UNHCR for comment on the allegations made by Biamungu, but the organisation said it did not comment on individual cases.