‘I thought maybe it would be better for me in Rwanda than in prison, but it has become like a prison for me here,’ says an asylum seeker who left Israel. It’s been four years since the life of Goitom, 28, from Eritrea changed dramatically. When he came to renew his residency visa in Israel, an immigration official told him he had to report to the Holot detention facility. At that time, people were being kept there indefinitely. Goitom did not agree to give up his freedom and preferred to accept the offer from the Population, Immigration and Border Authority to become one of the first African asylum seekers to leave for Rwanda.
“I didn’t want to go to the prison. I thought maybe it would be better for me in Rwanda than in prison, but it has become like a prison for me here,” he said this week in a video interview with Haaretz from Kigali, Rwanda’s capital. The despair is evident on his face.
For more than two months now he has been living in the street. “Things are so bad. I am living very badly. I have no home, there is no work,” he says. “Before, there were a few people who helped me. The United Nations also helped – they gave me money for lodging and food. But they stopped.”
He describes a daily fight for survival.’”Sometimes I eat with friends, sometimes I ask for help from people who have a restaurant, sometimes I go to sleep without eating.” In the four years he has been living in Rwanda he has not been employed for a single day, though he says he has invested a lot of effort in looking for work. He opened a small shop for selling basic items but it failed and had to shut down within a few months. “When I opened the business I didn’t know the language and therefore I lost money,” he explains.
He had crossed the Egyptian border into Israel in 2008. He says he left Eritrea because of “political problems.” After six years in Israel he boarded the flight to Rwanda together with two other asylum seekers. At first he received a visa that allowed him to stay for three months but then it was denied him.
“For more than a year I lived without any documentation,” Goitom says. Then the authorities in Rwanda gave him a visa that he was required to renew every three months. After a year, they refused to renew it again and sent him to the local office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. There he received a UNHCR document stating that he is an asylum seeker. Last year he left the document at the place where he was living, was stopped and arrested and sent to prison for two days.
Like the other asylum seekers who left Israel, he received a grant of $3,500. He says the money lasted for two years. At first he says he was cheated and charged exorbitant amount rent, but later he learned the market rates. When the money ran out he found himself in the street. He wants to leave Rwanda but doesn’t see any practical possibility of doing this.
“It’s very hard to cross the border without documents,” he says. Going back to Eritrea is out of the question. “How can I go back?” he says. “If I go back there now they will put me in prison for 10 to 20 years. It’s impossible.”
Only nine former sojourners in Israel left in Rwanda
His story reflects the situation of the few asylum seekers who left Israel for Rwanda and have remained there. The UNHCR office in Kigali knows about only nine them. All the rest have left; most have been smuggled into Uganda. Six of those who remain in Rwanda agreed to share their stories with Haaretz. The interviews with four of them were conducted in English and the other two in Arabic, with the help of an interpreter. All six live a meager existence in Kigali, struggling to survive. Some have lost all hope. The luckier ones have a roof over their heads and money for food. Others depend on the generosity and kindness of friends and local people and the limited help from the UN.
The authorities in Rwanda do not recognize their right to be there and refuse to grant them residency permits. Lacking official documents, they have frequently been arrested and jailed. They are not fluent in the local language, the culture is foreign to them and finding work is nearly impossible. Though they arrived in Rwanda at different times, they all tell a similar story that raises concern for the fate of those who will be deported from Israel in the near future. All the people interviewed regret their decision to leave for Rwanda and urge the asylum seekers in Israel not to follow their example.
“The prison in Israel is preferable,” they declare.
‘I hope Israel won’t send my children to Rwanda’
The confiscation of their documents recurs in all the testimonies. “When I arrived here they took my documents. They said to me that if you want to, you can go to Uganda, if want to, you can stay in Rwanda. I told them that my country is at war and I want to remain in Rwanda,” recounts “Jacob,” (not his real name), 42, from South Sudan, who left a wife and four children behind in Israel. His wife, a citizen of Sudan, was permitted to remain in Israel with the children while he was required to leave after his country declared its independence.
At first he refused to leave Israel and was held in Saharonim Prison in the Negev. The population authority offered him the option of leaving for Rwanda or Uganda. After a year in Saharonim he gave up and chose Rwanda. “The situation here is very bad. I am suffering. I have no work and I have no home. I have nothing. The UN gives us hospital [care], clothing and shoes, not food,” he says.
Ilan Lior
https://www.haaretz.com
