2016 will go down as a year in which the refugee crisis reached a tipping point for Africa and the West.
From the killing fields of South Sudan to the humanitarian relief and response crisis in Uganda, on to the Dadaab refugee settlement in eastern Kenya, and thousands of immigrants drowning in the Mediterranean sea, 2016 will go down as a year in which the refugee crisis reached a tipping point for Africa and the West.
Yet these events also present a crisis of direction for the continent, where all forms of violence occur — from armed conflict to sexual and gender-based violence to political persecution and economic deprivation. For example, in 2016, hundreds of thousands of Africans fled the continent to seek better prospects in Europe, and nearly 5,000 died in the process.
In the same year, Kenya cited security threats from the Somali terrorist group Al Shabaab, and announced it was closing Dadaab, the world’s largest refugee settlement. The camp has a population of more than 320,000 asylum seekers.
But throughout this time, Uganda kept its borders open. Refugees with harrowing accounts of the scale of violence in South Sudan arrived in their numbers to settle in the small village of Bidi Bidi in the West Nile region.
Having the largest refugee influx in history has presented Kampala with challenges that require humanitarian agencies to respond to the crisis, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).
Only 36 per cent of the $251 million needed to cater for the needs of the refugees in 2016 has been received because major donors of the UNHCR from the developed north have a growing problem of immigrants on their hands and must also deal with other conflict areas with equally serious humanitarian situations. A lot more funding is required next year as the numbers swell.
“This is creating significant gaps in the response which threatens to compromise the abilities of humanitarian organisations to provide life-saving assistance and basic services,” said Charles Yaxley UNHCR spokesman in Kampala.
Conflicted nature of the crisis
Yet this shortage of resources for the swelling refugee numbers presents the conflicted nature of this crisis — broken families and a desire to flee the violence back home only to find malaria and a shortage of basic necessities in the refugee camp.
For example, 37-year-old Rose Roba last saw her husband — a soldier in South Sudan’s government army — three years ago. He was taken to Malakal in 2013 when the war started, and she has not heard from him since.
Ms Roba, a mother of five, was forced to flee her home in Greater Equatoria region three days after her neighbours were dragged from their home by men, in October.
“They kidnapped my next door neighbour’s husband and took him away. They chopped him into pieces. Then they cut up his wife and threw the body into a channel of water near our village. They also slit their child’s throat and cut his head and placed his body next to his mother’s in the water,” she told international relief agency Medecins Sans Frontieres.
“This filled me with fear. I was worried I would be next and I knew I had to take off,” she said.
Settling in Uganda
However, dire as the situation is at Bidi Bidi, the refugees see their future in Uganda, where they hope to settle and till the land they are offered to supplement the food rations supplied by the humanitarian agencies.
But experts say both sets of refugees in Dadaab and Bidi Bidi are lucky to be alive to tell their ordeal as an even bigger crisis of immigrants either fleeing violence, political repression and poverty in Africa, was taking place throughout the year.
The UNHCR reported that up to 3,800 refugees had drowned in the Mediterranean sea as they attempted to cross into Europe, by end of October.
“We’re receiving more reports of deaths in the Mediterranean sea. We can now confirm that at least 3,800 people have died, making 2016 the deadliest year ever,” the UNHCR spokesman William Spindler tweeted on October 26.
This came a day after the refugee agency had discovered 25 bodies in an inflatable dinghy in the south of the Mediterranean Sea. In 2015, UNHCR recorded 3,771 deaths.
But data from the International Organisation for Migration shows that in November 2016, the death toll reached over 4,600, with the top eight African nationalities being Nigeria, Eritrea, Sudan, Gambia, Cote d'Ivoire, Guinea, Somalia and Mali.
While at least 1.02 million made the crossing in 2015, the agency reported that in 2016 the number had declined significantly and that some 343,589 had arrived by sea in Europe. As such, the developed nations are facing a growing population of immigrants, a situation that has put a strain on their capacity to respond to UNHCR funding requests for refugee crises in Africa.
In Uganda, the agencies dealing with the crisis sent out an appeal on December 15 to end the suffering of South Sudanese.
The appeal crafted by the government of Uganda’s Office of the Prime Minister, six UN agencies and 11 humanitarian organisations was timed to coincide with the third anniversary of the outbreak of violence in South Sudan. In the three years, refugees have fled the world’s youngest nation, leaving behind them tales of horrific violence.
According to the appeal, the new arrivals report that unless the conflict in South Sudan stops, “in the coming weeks and months ahead, they expect thousands more to follow them to Uganda.”