Let’s help them in their home. Even if it’s not their home. As long as it’s not our home. In a nutshell, this is the British government’s plan to send illegal migrants – and therefore deport, accuse opposition and NGOs – to Rwanda. Initially, only adult males without children will be rejected, regardless of nationality: those who flee Afghanistan could find themselves on a flight to Kigali. More than externalizing the reception, it is about paying to wash one’s conscience. From London, Rwanda will immediately receive £ 120 million. Although more advanced than other African states, the republic led by Paul Kagame is criticized for its suppression of dissent.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has been fighting immigration, even regular immigration, since he was in Downing Street. He has made it more difficult for Europeans to obtain a visa with a points system. He paid France to patrol the Norman coast. He passed a law, the Nationality and Borders Bill, which provides for jail time for those arriving illegally. Landings by sea have increased: 28 thousand people in 2021, twenty thousand more than in 2020. This year’s numbers, with more than 5 thousand entries, have convinced the conservatives to the umpteenth squeeze. To give an idea of the order of magnitude, 67 thousand people arrived in Italy last year.
Those seeking salvation in our country come above all from other Mediterranean nations, in the lead Tunisia and Egypt. Most of the refugees headed to England, on the other hand, come from further afield. Iran, Iraq, Eritrea, Syria, Vietnam, Afghanistan. The Middle East is prevalent, not Africa, yet this is where asylum seekers will be sent.
The criterion for relocation to Rwanda, spared women and children, is that men single they have first passed through France or other “safe countries”. It’s hard not to pass by to set sail on a makeshift boat or risk your life hidden in the back of a truck.
Johnson has promised the first transfers will be in May. Migrants who have arrived since the beginning of January will be boarded. Downing Street expects to be able to relocate “tens of thousands” in the coming years – the terminology of the Tories is more suited to goods than to humans. The government will pay for the airline tickets and the first three months of stay in Rwanda, where asylum can be sought as long as the application in the United Kingdom is renounced. The Times has estimated that spending will range from 20 to 30 thousand pounds per person.
What happens next? In London he doesn’t care too much, he no longer considers it a problem with him. The three months covered by the UK funds are those in which, in theory, the African republic will examine asylum applications. If so, a five-year residence permit will be granted. In the event of refusal, for example for a criminal record, de facto repatriation to the country of origin is triggered. If the bureaucratic process gets flooded, this triangulation risks transforming Rwanda into the last stop on the journey of hope.
The UK not only outsources reception, as the European Union did with Turkey, but pays a third country to shoulder the responsibilities. A kind of export of desperate people. There are serious distortions: a refugee who left Afghanistan or Iraq, according to the current legislation, can ask for asylum only from British soil, but reaching the island, according to the new criteria, is equivalent to making the application inadmissible. It is a dead end. As the crow flies, London is 6.591 kilometers from Kigali: a thousand more than Kabul, two thousand more than Tehran and twice as many as Aleppo.
Why Rwanda, then? The simplest answer is that it is the only country to have accepted. Priti Patel, minister of the Home Office of the right wing of the conservatives, negotiated the pact. The republic entered the Commonwealth in 2009, which it will host the summit in June, and you may want to please London. But the reasons are above all economic. Kigali is counting on stable cash inflows from a financial superpower. The figures are not yet public, but will be linked to the number of transfers and there is already a £ 120 million fund for educational projects.
“Rwanda resembles the Switzerland of Africa, but it is an extremely repressive and scary place,” Michela Wrong, author of a book on the country, told the BBC. There is the W-iFi, a vaccination coverage of the population at 60% and a parliament with a female majority, it is true, but the Youtubers who criticize President Kagame, in power since 2000, the end of the civil war, are also put in jail. With plebiscite percentages, he changed the constitution to run after his second term, which expired in 2017, and was duly re-elected.
Kagame’s supporters explain the results with the popular influence of a “statesman,” but analysts raise doubts about the functioning of Rwandan democracy. “Over the past decades – wrote for example Amnesty International – the political space and the electoral process in Rwanda have been characterized by restrictions on freedom of association and assembly, targeted attacks against opposition leaders, killings, disappearances and political trials. that have weakened society and the media ”.
One of the best-known figures in the country is Paul Rusesabagina, who saved more than a thousand people in the years of the Tutsi genocide. Hollywood in 2004 dedicated a film to him, Hotel Rwanda, with several Oscar nominations. In 2020, according to his family, Rusesabagina was kidnapped from Dubai and taken to Rwanda, where he was sentenced to 25 years in prison for allegedly supporting a rebel group. “Rwanda is a dictatorship, there is no freedom of speech, there is no democracy,” Carine Kanimba, his daughter, told the BBC.
“We are a safe place, we care about respect for human rights like any other nation,” the spokesman for Kigali assured the British media. The most densely populated African country, for now, has only 50 rooms for those landing from the UK. They can accommodate a maximum of one hundred people. A new building complex should triple this (poor) accommodation capacity. The paradox is that just last year the British government expressed its concerns before the UN about “the continuing limitations on civil and political rights and freedom of the press” in the country where it now intends to send migrants.
The UK is not the only, nor the first, to launch similar strategies. Denmark also tried, with Rwanda. “Xenophobic and unacceptable attempts” defined them by the African Union. The European Commission also protested. Thus the memorandum signed by the Social Democratic Minister Matthias Tesfaye has remained a dead letter: so far, zero transfers to Africa. Denmark, on the other hand, has revoked the residence permits of thousands of Syrians, claiming that they can return to Damascus, as it prepares to welcome 100,000 Ukrainian refugees.
Between pushbacks and detention centers, Australia has been leading the way in the last twenty years. These policies cost Camberra £ 460 million in 2021 alone, but only 239 people were moved. An average expense of nearly two million each. Israel also has an agreement with two countries: the names are classified, but according to the media, it is precisely Rwanda and Uganda. Those rejected from Tel Aviv can choose to return home or accept a payment of $ 3,500 and a plane ticket to Africa.
According to a YouGov poll, Johnson’s measure appeals to only 35% of voters and is opposed by 43% of them. The executive also split, if Patel had to use a mechanism that bypassed the opposition of Home Office officials to get him through. Conservatives may also allocate £ 50 million to arm the navy and intercept small boats on the Channel, but – according to an exclusive Telegraph projection – the party will collapse in local elections in May, losing more than 800 seats to Labor.
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