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Refugees Magazine Issue 132: (Protection) – Resettlement: "I feel like I was a blind man who can now see"
Resettlement offers a fresh start to life, but the system is under pressure
"I can't believe people want me here," Mohamed Muktar said through an interpreter as he stepped from the aircraft in Syracuse, New York. "It was God's plan to come to America."
It also took more than 10 years of temporal heartbreak and planning before the African could embark on an improbable journey which whisked him from a lifetime of semi-slavery and years living in a mud hut in a sprawling refugee camp on the Horn of Africa to the undreamed of delights and headaches of urban America.
Muktar is one of an estimated 12,000 people known as Somali Bantu who will make similar trips from eastern Africa to some 50 American communities in the coming months.
High Commissioner Ruud Lubbers would like to expand the number of refugees who are annually accepted for permanent resettlement in 17 traditional host countries such as the United States, Canada and Australia as part of an overall drive to improve protection for the more than 20 million people the agency currently cares for.
But while the movement of the Somali Bantu was the most ambitious resettlement programme ever undertaken out of Africa and the successful culmination of more than a decade of work by the refugee agency to find them a new home, it also vividly underlined the problems facing refugees in a period of increased apprehension towards foreigners.
UNHCR reported that in 2002, in the wake of terror attacks on the United States, the number of successful resettlements directly under the auspices of the agency plunged by 56 percent.
Though Washington agreed to accept 70,000 refugees that year, because of increased security measures, only 26,300 were actually resettled.
And while some American communities warmly welcomed the Bantu, others, voicing economic and social concerns, were not at all eager to greet strangers in their midst.
The group's ancestors had originally been seized by Arab slavers in the 18th and 19th centuries from what is today Tanzania and Mozambique and shipped via Zanzibar's great slave market to the Persian Gulf, Middle East and some to Somalia on Africa's Horn.
When that country collapsed in the early 1990s in an orgy of civil war and bloodletting, thousands of Bantu, still living lives of feudal slaves, together with tens of thousands of Somalis, fled to neighbouring countries, the majority to Kenya.
A NEW BEGINNING
Life in a sun-baked refugee camp was in many ways even harsher than their old existence, but the Bantu made clear to UNHCR officials the majority would never return to Somalia even if peace was restored there. During their decade-long exile, both Tanzania and Mozambique, their ancestral homes, refused to accept the Bantu. The Americans finally did.
There were inevitable delays and hiccups in the operation. Families became separated. Other refugees who were not involved in the operation were hostile. The Bantu were transferred from one camp to a safer location in northern Kenya where they not only underwent official vetting but learned about life in their newly adopted country – and how to turn on an electric switch, use a shower or an elevator – things they had never done or seen before.
In DuPage County, Illinois, residents there showered the first arrivals with food, clothing and toys. In Phoenix, Arizona, 42-year-old Hassan Mberwa and his nine-member family moved into a huge apartment. On his first visit to a supermarket he was so overwhelmed by its size and choice he could only whisper, "It's as big as Kakuma" – the refugee camp in northern Kenya which houses 40,000 people. Unused to travelling by car, his 14-year-old daughter Arbai vomited every few minutes into a plastic bag.
Other communities expressed apprehension about their new guests. In the town of Cayce, South Carolina, residents said the test scores of Bantu children, who cannot read or write English, would lower overall school rankings. The influx might put pressure on the police department and depress housing values.
In Burlington, Vermont, former state legislator Barbara Kehaya warned, "If we are having trouble educating the students we've got, the refugees place too much of a burden on the community."
The city council of Holyoke, Massachusetts, passed a symbolic resolution several months ago asking the federal government not to locate any Bantu there.
But these refugees are nothing if not tenacious and optimistic. Like Mohamed Muktar when he first landed in the United States, Abdullahi Hussein Abdi also invoked a miracle.
"I feel like I was a blind man who can now see," this Somali Bantu said shortly before boarding his own flight to a new life.
Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 132: "The Changing Face of Protection" (September 2003). Download the complete issue in pdf format: low-resolution (620Kb) here or high-resolution (1.8Mb) here
