South Africa Evicts Refugees From Church

Hundreds of refugees protested the South African government and UNHCR's failure to protect migrants from xenophobia in Greenmarket Square, Cape Town. (Wikimedia Commons)

South African police forcibly removed hundreds of refugees from a busy market center in Cape Town on March 1. The migrants had been living outside the Central Methodist Mission Church in Greenmarket Square, a major tourist site, since October 2019.

The Cape Town High Court granted the city broad authority to evict the refugees on February 17 after a two-month-long legal battle. High Court Judge Daniel Thulari ruled that the city may remove the refugees currently living in the Central Methodist Mission Church but that the city must also provide a sustainable alternative facility. The city and the Department of Home Affairs were allowed seven days to process the migrants according to South Africa’s Immigration Act, after which the city will resume enforcement of its local laws, including the prohibition on sleeping, washing, cooking, or urinating in the streets. 

The court’s decision follows nearly six months of tension between the city’s local government and a group of several hundred refugees housed at the church. Last October, the group staged a sit-in at the United Nations High Commission for Refugees’ (UNHRC) offices in Cape Town’s Waldorf Arcade to demand that they be resettled in a different country. The group had been subject to severe xenophobia in South Africa, they said.

Shema Nahiman, a refugee who sought asylum in South Africa after fleeing from violence in Burundi, faced hatred and continued conflict in her new destination. In an interview with Al Jazeera, Nahiman explained, “I am so disappointed in South Africa. People burned my shop to the ground because I am a foreigner. We are not safe here. I do not trust the state to protect us. We want to leave this country to find a better place to live.”

At the end of last October, the city government obtained a sheriff’s order to use water cannons, stun grenades, and other demonstrations of force to compel the group of approximately seven hundred refugees, primarily from the Democratic Republic of Congo and Burundi, to vacate Waldorf Avenue.

The Central Methodist Church took them in, allowing the refugees to live inside and around the church after the city refused to offer them emergency shelter.

However, their continued encampment in Greenmarket Square sparked numerous complaints from local business owners. Nearly one-third of businesses in and around the square have been forced to shut down since the refugees moved in. 

These complaints led the courts to vote in favor of the city government, which sided with the business owners.

While the majority of refugees left peacefully, still many expressed severe disappointment at the lack of alternative accommodation and continued xenophobia. 

Nadine Nkurikiye, a migrant from Burundi, explained that all she was asking for was that “the UNHCR help [migrants], to give a path where they could be safe and secure.” 

The refugee group’s leader, Jean-Pierre Balous, accused the UNHCR and the South African government of corruption. More recently, Balous has gone further to claim that the South African government wanted to kill refugees.