And, news flash!  We are taking some too!

By definition refugees are people who claim persecution, leave their home country (where the persecution occurred) and seek asylum in a safe country.  They are not supposed to use “safe countries” as hopping off places to a better deal somewhere else, and that is what is happening with increased frequency worldwide.   (Search ‘Malta’ here at RRW to learn more about how that came to be.)

Nothing steams me more than the fact that we and other western countries are now taking black AFRICAN “refugees” from South Africa who claim that the Rainbow Nation is not safe for them.  Yet, heaven help the truly persecuted whites in South Africa.

I’ve written many posts over the years trying to expose the Rainbow Nation multicultural nirvana myth, but it seems that no one in the media is willing to face the reality of what the Rainbow Nation is!  Here is how wikipedia describes the term Rainbow Nation.  What a joke!

Rainbow Nation is a term coined by Archbishop Desmond Tutu to describe post-apartheid South Africa, after South Africa’s first fully democratic election in 1994.

The phrase was elaborated upon by President Nelson Mandela in his first month of office, when he proclaimed: “Each of us is as intimately attached to the soil of this beautiful country as are the famous jacaranda trees of Pretoria and the mimosa trees of the bushveld – a rainbow nation at peace with itself and the world.”

The term was intended to encapsulate the unity of multi-culturalism and the coming-together of people of many different nations, in a country once identified with the strict division of white and black.

Surprise!  Tribalism is alive and well in South Africa and diversity does not bring strength!

Here is the story that caught my attention about Australia (and other western countries) taking “refugees” from South Africa.  It begins and ends with the story of Congolese “asylum seekers” who have lived in South Africa for a decade (five of those years have been spent trying to get out).

After five years of hoping and waiting, Marie*, her husband Simeon* and their three children, refugees from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, finally received a phone call telling them to pack their bags as they would be leaving South Africa for Australia at the end of the month.

Simeon was unconcerned by the short notice. “We’ve been ready for so long,” he told IRIN from the UN Refugee Agency’s (UNHCR) offices in Pretoria, where the family had just found out the name of the city they would be restarting their lives in. “Brisbane,” said Marie, testing the word on her lips for the first time. “Do you know where that is?”

The xenophobic violence that South Africa is experiencing is not coming from the white population but in many cases is leveled at whites as well as black African “foreigners.”  Of course, news reports never make that clear.  They can’t bring themselves to say that the blacks of Nelson Mandela’s supposedly victimized South Africa are now persecuting others!

Until a wave of xenophobic violence against foreigners erupted in South Africa in 2008, the country was considered fairly progressive in its treatment of refugees and asylum seekers, and as having little need for resettlement. Since that time, most of the cases that UNHCR refers for resettlement are victims of continued xenophobic attacks, many of them Somalis attempting to run businesses in low-income areas where their presence is viewed as a threat by local traders.

The Congolese family was rejected by the US and Canada before being “welcomed” by Australia (see previous post about Australia increasing its refugee numbers).  The UN went shopping for a country which would take them.

For a refugee desperate to escape an intolerable situation and make a fresh start, the process can feel endless, particularly if it concludes with a rejection. Dermegerditchian said more than 90% of the cases that UNHCR submits for resettlement in the southern Africa region are accepted, but Marie and her family were rejected by both the US and Canada before Australia agreed to take them.

Marie is convinced that they were rejected because two of their children suffer from haemophilia, a genetic disorder that impairs the body’s ability to control bleeding, but Dermegerditchian was reluctant to speculate. “Resettlement countries have their own criteria; they only inform us of the reasons for denial in general terms,” he said. “In some cases UNHCR needs to reinterview the refugee to make sure their stories are consistent. If we can’t find a problem, we resubmit their case to another country.”

After years of joblessness, denial of medical treatment for their children, and what they describe as constant xenophobia from their neighbours, Marie and Simeon’s relief to be leaving their home of the past decade is palpable. “The fact that they’re welcoming us [in Australia] – it frees you psychologically,” said Simeon.

Hundreds of supposed “refugees” from South Africa are already coming to the US!  That is news to me!

The Guardian article also informs us:

…. the US introduced a new security procedure*** last year, which delayed many cases, particularly those of Somalis and Iraqis, and saw the number of refugees resettled from South Africa drop from 387 in 2010 to 81 last year. “This year, things are moving much better and we’ve already had 220 departures,” he said.

Read the whole Guardian article, there is a lot in it.

If you check the numbers and nationalities of refugees arriving in the US here, you will note that there is no mention of those who came in from “safe” countries like South Africa and Malta to name just two.  Are we going to learn next that we are taking “refugees” from Greece, or the UK, or Italy?

For more on what we’ve said about South Africa and its multicultural nirvana myth, type “rainbow nation” into our search function.

* Marie and Simeon are not their real names and they don’t look like the kind of refugees who have caused crime rates to rise in Melbourne, here.

*** The new security procedures were instituted after the arrests of Iraqi refugees in Kentucky, one of whom plead guilty just this week of conspiring to help Al-Qaeda in Iraq, here.