In Cape Town, hopes dim as progress lags

"The hardest part for me is to hear a refugee pouring out her story and feel my heart harden rather than break, to find myself dismissing her, thinking, 'Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before.' Those are my worst moments."

(Rodger Bosch photo for AFP/Getty Images)
Demonstrators outside the Provincial Government building in Cape Town, on June 25, 2008, protested against the provincial and local governments' response to the refugee crisis created by a wave of violence against foreigners. Mayor Helen Zille was singled out for criticism for not opening civic facilities, in what were called "white" areas.

Robert K. Silverman, a resident of Newton and a student at Yale Law School, is a summer intern with the South African Human Rights Commission in Cape Town. The commission, whose stated mission is to "entrench constitutional democracy through the promotion and protection of human rights," has been focusing on the crisis created by the recent outbreak of xenophobic violence.

By Robert K. Silverman

July 8, 2008

CAPETOWN, South Africa -- It’s been raining in Cape Town for the past six days. On Sunday I received a phone call at about noon that one of the refugee camps set up to house people fleeing the xenophobic violence had flooded. When I arrived at the camp with staff from the Human Rights Commission, we found rows of white marquee and green army tents sitting in four inches of brackish water and mud. Residents had made stepping stones of sandbags to enter and leave the tents. One tent had blown away entirely, another had collapsed from the weight of the rainwater on its roof. Most of the tents that remained had plyboard flooring, which kept the inside relatively dry -- islands of damp, carpeted plyboard in a sea of muck.

Inside the tents, children played with toys while women did laundry by hand. We stopped by one tent to visit a family with a new baby, born less than a week ago, who joined his three-year-old brother -- one of several babies born in the camps. We took a lot of photos, talked to the residents, inspected the showers and the toilets, and then left.

By one measure, the plight of those displaced by the xenophobic attacks in Cape Town has improved dramatically -- about 6,000 remain in camps and shelters, less than one-third of the number who initially fled the violence. Although we continue to hear reports of isolated xenophobic attacks, no widespread violence has erupted since late May. But somehow I find myself less optimistic now than after my first few harried weeks of work.

What happened to the thousands of non-nationals who fled initially but are now no longer in camps? No one knows for sure. Some seemed to have returned to their native countries, but most have simply melted away, deciding perhaps that life in their old communities was better than life in the camps.

Those who remain in the camps may be those hardest to serve, the most traumatized, the most fearful, with the fewest resources to rebuild their lives. And the camps are getting worse, not better. It’s mid-winter in Cape Town — rainy, windy, and cold. More than a dozen tents at the largest refugee camp blew away in gale force winds a little after midnight about three weeks ago, exposing the inhabitants to the cold and the rain. Mobile toilets, tent fragments, clothing, and debris all ended up in the sea. Women and children spent the night huddled in the concrete shower blocks; some are living there still. The government has attempted to move the residents, even pulling up buses, but the residents refused to get on. When we visited the camp last week, the residents told us that they don’t want to shuttle from one poorly provisioned seaside camp to another.

Food is always a concern. Residents of the camps typically receive one hot meal per day at suppertime, plus four slices of bread and a cup of either tea or juice at about 11 a.m. That’s it. Milk, infant formula, and diapers are in constant short supply. Children have diarrhea from unfamiliar food. Lactating mothers report their breastmilk is drying up.

Fears of sexual violence in the camps are widespread. At one camp, women and children have resorted to using buckets as makeshift toilets because they are afraid to walk to the porto-johns at the edge of the camp in the dark.

When I speak with the camp residents, however, they do not cite the poor material conditions as their biggest concern — it’s the lack of communication. To date, no government official has visited the camps to explain the rights non-nationals have under South African and international law. No efforts to consult with the residents about their options for the future. No attempt to communicate a plan, a vision, for closing the camps and moving forward. Six weeks later, there is still no light at the end of the tunnel. Time has merely compounded the feelings of isolation and uncertainty pervasive at the camps.

As time passes, the residents of the camps are growing increasingly despondent and increasingly frustrated with volunteers like me who come into the camp, ask them dozens of questions, dutifully record their answers, and then leave, without producing any noticeable change in their lives. It is getting harder and harder being asked the same simple questions — how long will the camps remain open? when will my children be able to go to school? what is the plan for my future? — without being able to give a good answer.

When we go into the camps, we are swarmed with refugees aching to have someone listen to their stories. We spend hours listening and still have to turn people away. The hardest part for me is to hear a refugee pouring out her story and feel my heart harden rather than break, to find myself dismissing her, thinking, “Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it all before.” Those are my worst moments.

(Schalk van Zuydam photo for AP)
A child negotiates a puddle outside his house in the township off Khayelitsha in Cape Town, on July 8. Flooding from a week of heavy rain worsened conditions for those living in refugee camps as well.

Our monitoring visits have produced some concrete changes. A couple stand out. We draft reports highlighting the residents’ concerns once we return to the office. We then distribute the reports to government officials, the press, and the non-nationals themselves. It’s rare that we receive a formal response. But on a return visit to a particularly isolated camp, nicknamed the “Lost City” by residents, the camp manager surprised us by pulling out his own copy of our report that he had carefully underlined. “Very negative, very negative,” he said, shaking his head. But the camp had improved — the showers had hot water, more residents had mattresses, the food had gotten a little bit better.

We also secured donations of newspapers to the non-nationals. We happened to be at a camp the first day the papers were delivered. Residents devoured them, hungry for news of the outside world, particularly news that would affect them.

Unfortunately, that news is often bad. NGO workers here believe that the political crisis in Zimbabwe will drive thousands more refugees across South Africa’s border. There is also a great fear that South Africa will experience another wave of xenophobic violence in the future, and the country still will not be ready to respond. The refugee camps are not the result of a flood or an earthquake. This disaster was man-made. Most of the non-nationals who left the camps did not undergo any formal reintegration process into the communities they fled in fear weeks before. They simply returned, tired of sitting in the camps all day with no jobs and no education for their children.

The root causes of the xenophobia remain unaddressed. Widespread poverty, huge income inequality, and the deep psychological scars of apartheid. As commentators here were quick to point out, it’s not foreign white students from Boston that the mobs attacked. Xenophobia primarily meant poor black people attacking other poor black people.

Not only do these deep issues remain, the aftermath of the xenophobia crisis has exposed the government’s poor ability to deliver services to those in need. Six weeks later, different government entities continue to battle one another over the housing of the non-nationals and the provision of aid. Effective coordination is stymied by political tensions. NGOs and civil society rail against the bureaucracy and spend hours in meetings debating how to break through governmental inaction. Legal strategies, media outreach, more meetings. But the problems on the ground remain. Churches, mosques, and other faith groups housed and fed thousands of displaced non-nationals; many continue to do so. But after weeks of unanswered questions and broken promises, some religious leaders are questioning whether they will be able to respond in the same open-handed manner should another wave of xenophobia strike South Africa in the near future.

(Rodger Bosch photo for AFP/Getty Images)
Immigrants displaced by xenophobic attacks set up temporary plastic shelters behind the Magistrates Court in Cape Town on June 27, 2008, to protest against what they said was an inadequate government response to the plight of the refugees.

This is scary stuff. Aid workers here fear the next crisis even as this one is unresolved. Concerns about human dignity are lost in endless meetings about the inability to provide infants with formula.

I get a knot in my stomach every time we drive up to one of the camps. For me, the saving grace is that every time we return to the camps there are fewer and fewer residents to greet us. The non-nationals fully understand the gravity of their situation and the political impasse that is blocking the realization of their future in South Africa. Some respond by lashing out, but most have taken matters into their own hands and resumed their lives as best they can. Perhaps that, and not the multiple failures to provide effective aid, is the real lesson in human dignity.

For more information on the South African Human Rights Commission, visit their website at www.sahrc.org.za. For information on how you can contribute to the Passport blog, please contact the Globe's assistant foreign editor, Kenneth Kaplan, at K_Kaplan@globe.com.