This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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Rwanda and the refugee crisis – the West is partly to blame

By:   []

Date: 2022-06 

“There are good people out there,” messaged an Eritrean refugee I know, after I told him about the scenes in the UK last Tuesday. Activists had laid on the street, blocking a road outside a detention centre where some of the asylum seekers due to be sent to Rwanda were being held. Protesters had also gathered outside the Home Office and the Royal Courts of Justice in London.

My contact has personal experience of Rwanda. He was sent there as part of an EU-funded evacuation scheme after he tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, was intercepted by the EU-funded Libyan coastguard and spent years locked up in war-torn Libya.

Since 2019, Rwanda has been used as a transit country for Libya’s evacuees, in a deal signed by UNHCR (the UN Refugee Agency) and the African Union. Hundreds of people have spent time there before being moved on to new lives in North America or Europe.

I visited Rwanda twice – in 2019 and 2020 – to report on refugee-related issues. Officials said I was only granted accreditation because they believed I would write positive things. Even then, I was not allowed to access the camp I wanted to visit. It became clear quite quickly that Rwanda is a police state – a dictatorship where proper scrutiny is not possible.

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“Rwanda is a poor country, it's like survival of the fittest to them. They would also host dinosaurs if they offered money,” my Eritrean contact said, who spent about a year there.

Turning his attention to the West, he added: “I would say what goes around comes around […] All the flow of refugees is because of their mess they [created] back in Africa and the Middle East.”

The wrong kind of ‘shared history’?

The concept of ‘shared history’ has been invoked frequently as a reason why European countries are willing to be more open to refugees from Ukraine than to people coming from other regions.

But Britain has a shared history with much of the rest of the world too. Around 30% of Africans were at one point living in British colonies and many of the repressive systems or exploitative structures that still exist now can be traced back to the colonial era.

This shared history extends beyond Africa, of course, and is not restricted to previous centuries.
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