U.S. Plans to Open Doors Wider to African Refugees

Rebecca Wani’s odyssey began in 1992 when raiders attacked her village in southern Sudan, killing her father. She fled in panic, beginning a life among people she barely knew. Six years later, the 27-year-old stands forlornly outside a U.N. office in suburban Cairo, hoping to be granted a status that she reckons she richly deserves: refugee.

For the tens of thousands of Sudanese in the Egyptian capital displaced by war in their homeland, to be called “refugee” by the United Nations is the key to gaining a small U.N. allowance and the possibility of resettlement in the United States or another Western country.

The good news for the Sudanese is that this year, the United States--due in part to a push by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Clinton administration’s heightened interest in Africa--is likely to significantly increase the number of African refugees allowed to resettle in the U.S.

The bad news is that even with the higher allotment, the vast majority of Sudanese who have been scattered across Egypt and East Africa by their country’s seemingly interminable civil war still will have little chance of being recognized as refugees and resettled.

For fiscal 1997 and ‘98, the ceiling on the number of African refugees admitted to the United States has been set at 7,000 a year, out of 75,000 refugees admitted annually from around the world. By comparison, in fiscal 1998 the United States is allowing in 51,000 Europeans, most from Bosnia-Herzegovina and the former Soviet Union.

But now, with major efforts to admit refugees from Southeast Asia and the former Soviet Union winding down, U.S. policymakers see an opportunity to increase the number of arrivals from troubled areas of Africa. Said one State Department official who requested anonymity: “There is a lot of interest in Congress, in the NGO [nongovernmental organizations] community and in the department in trying to expand the [African] program. . . . There is definitely a consensus that it is going up.”

A new ceiling will be set later this year by Congress and President Clinton. For the fiscal year beginning in October, it is expected that the number of African refugees allowed to settle in the U.S. will be increased to more than 10,000.

A beefed-up refugee staff at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo is gearing up to identify about 1,500 Sudanese who would qualify for resettlement. They will be selected after the Immigration and Naturalization Service holds interviews here with Sudanese referred by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees.

Elsewhere in Africa, refugees eligible for resettlement are selected by a “roadshow” of State Department caseworkers, immigration officers and medical personnel who, working out of Kenya, travel around the sub-Saharan region interviewing candidates.

Reliance on the U.N.

Some members of the Congressional Black Caucus believe that the system overlooks many candidates due to a lack of U.S. personnel on the ground and overreliance on the United Nations. They want U.S. embassies across the continent to get involved in identifying worthy refugees. “You don’t have to look for them,” said one congressional aide. “They’re all over.”

“One would expect to see refugee resettlement allocations roughly proportionate to the refugee burdens in the world,” Reps. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) and Melvin L. Watt (D-N.C.) noted in a letter to Clinton last year. “Instead, 59% of all slots go to Europeans, while only 9% go to Africans, notwithstanding the fact that there are more refugees in Africa than anywhere else in the world.” The two Democrats called the situation “unconscionable.”

Refugees selected for resettlement are lent money for one-way coach air fare to the United States. Once in the U.S., they are placed with social agencies that cover basic needs for 30 days, assist them in finding housing and work and try to help them settle in to their new environment. The refugees are encouraged to quickly become self-reliant. In time, most are expected to apply for U.S. citizenship.

Though prospects for African refugees to resettle in the United States may be improving, U.S. and U.N. officials have been cautious about publicizing changes for fear of spurring unrealistic hopes. One U.S. official said it could be a “disaster” if even larger numbers of refugees began flocking to Cairo with expectations of reaching the United States.

Refugees already are coming to Cairo by air, rail, ferry and even by camels across the desert--with and without visas. They are fleeing warfare, hunger, repression and military conscription in Sudan, where the Islamic, Arab-dominated government in the north is fighting mostly non-Muslim black rebels in the south. The conflict has dragged on 14 years; fighting and famine have killed an estimated 1.3 million people.

At the Anglican All Saints’ Cathedral in central Cairo, volunteer Bryan Kane of Richmond, Va., said about 20,000 people are registered with the ministry that helps war refugees from Sudan, with more files being opened each week. The cathedral is one of several centers, he said, that the displaced turn to for help.

These displaced people apply to the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees for refugee status. In most cases, applicants are turned down because they do not appear to qualify under a 1951 international agreement that requires refugees to show a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.” Simply fleeing hardship and danger is not enough.

The refugees are drawn by the relative safety and stability of Cairo, cramming into shabby apartments in the poorest sections of the city. But they cannot get work permits. Most lead a precarious existence, scraping by in illegal, low-skilled jobs as housekeepers and agricultural workers.

For the most part, they have nowhere else to go. According to the U.N. high commissioner’s office, only 380 refugees from Cairo were accepted for resettlement in Western countries in 1997.

A Coveted Status

The 1,500 Sudanese that U.S. officials hope to resettle next year represent a “drop in the bucket” compared with the need, but still would help psychologically, said Sudanese community leader Abdul Wahab Abdul Ghani. Sudanese groups here complain that the criteria for refugee status is too strict and arbitrary.

At the Cairo office of the Assn. of Victims of Torture in Southern Sudan, officers of the organization last week indignantly rolled up their shirt sleeves and pants to reveal burn marks that they say were inflicted with irons, cigarettes and heated steel rods during interrogations in Sudan. Next, they whipped out the form letters they had received from the high commissioner’s office rejecting their bids for refugee status.

“Some people not involved in politics and not exposed to harm get accepted. And there are other people heavily involved in politics and injured by the Sudanese government, they get rejected,” complained association President Abdul Ghani, who would prefer that the U.S. identify refugees rather than leave it to the U.N. office.

The U.N. refugee office in Cairo, which receives about 1,000 applications, or reapplications, for refugee status every month, defends its procedures. Each case is carefully evaluated and can be appealed or reconsidered if new information is brought forth, said Mohammed Boukry, the regional representative. Rejections occur for the most part, he said, because an individual’s claims do not seem credible to the commission staff.

Yet southern Sudanese who have fled to Egypt have a particularly strong case for being considered as refugees, argued Bronwyn Lance, a senior fellow at the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution, a Washington think tank. Not only do they have a reasonable fear of persecution due to their race, religion and political beliefs, she said, but “a lot of these people also escaped slavery.”

(Sudanese authorities dispute charges by humanitarian groups that slavery persists in Sudan and that southerners suffer persecution because of their race and beliefs.)

The Sudanese are not alone among African refugees who are large in numbers but few in gaining entry to the United States. The U.N. estimates that Africa accounts for 8 million refugees and internally displaced persons out of about 22 million worldwide. Yet only 31,000 refugees from Africa were admitted to the United States from 1993 through 1997, according to the State Department, compared with about 446,000 admitted from other parts of the world.

Voice for Africans

One reason the U.S. has not admitted more African refugees is that governments in Africa, in contrast to other regions of the world, have been more tolerant toward large numbers of refugees on their soil, the State Department official said.

A congressional staff member who has been working closely with leaders of the Black Caucus on the refugee issue dismissed that explanation in favor of another:

“Traditionally, the groups that get admitted to the United States are groups that have strong political voices in the United States,” she said. The State Department was able to ignore Africans because African Americans were silent on the issue.

“That has changed now,” she said.