The Alhelis camp in Benghazi for displaced people from the town of Tawergha. Some Palestinians were specifically targeted - their homes were ransacked and people disappeared - in Benghazi and elsewhere, by both sides in the conflict (Photo: Heba Aly/ IRIN)

Among the migrants who found themselves caught up in Libya during last year’s war was a group of people whom one University of Oxford researcher calls “invisible”: refugees who travel to third countries for work or better education.

Wedged between violence, politics, overlapping identities and restrictive definitions, these “refugee-migrants” or “refugee-students” are often overlooked and under-protected, according to Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, a lecturer in forced migration at Oxford’s Refugee Studies Centre.

“Certain displaced populations have been hyper-visible whilst others have effectively been rendered invisible to (and by) the international community,” she writes in an article soon to be published by theInternational Journal of Refugee Law, called Invisible Refugees and/or Overlapping Refugeedom? Protecting Sahrawis and Palestinians Displaced by the 2011 Libyan Uprising. An earlier version of her paper was recently published by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) as part of its New Issues in Refugee Research Series.

The conflict in Libya has highlighted potential gaps in the protection of Palestinian refugees who have migrated to a third country and raised complex questions about who should protect them – and how – in the case of crisis. It is a question of increasing relevance as the situation in Syria,home to half a million Palestinian refugees, becomes more unstable.

Palestinians targeted
Though some estimates are as low as 30,000, the Palestinian Authority estimates there were up to 70,000 Palestinian migrants or refugees – the line between them is blurry – in Libya when hostilities broke out in February 2011 between supporters of Libya’s leader Muammar Gaddafi and armed rebels trying to oust him from power.

Some Palestinians were specifically targeted – their homes were ransacked and people disappeared – in the rebel capital Benghazi and elsewhere, by both sides in the conflict, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh said. Those working in the civil service or studying at military colleges were seen to be close to the regime.

Gaddafi’s use of Palestinian mercenaries in the 1970s and 1980s contributed to the perceived affiliation. Meanwhile, others were targeted because they refused to join pro-regime forces, according to news reports.

While sub-Saharan migrants left the country en masse during the hostilities, and other countries scrambled to get their citizens out, hundreds of Palestinians were unable to flee the violence in Libya - often turned back at the border because Egypt, Tunisia, and their former host countries did not recognize their travel documents, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh said. Many of those who “chose” to stay in Libya, she added, did not really have the choice.

“Where would we go?” asked Fatima, a Palestinian community leader who has lived in Libya for 30 years. “We have no place to go back to.”

After the fall of the capital Tripoli, many Palestinians were evicted by force from their homes, given to them by the former government, Fatima said. Hundreds of others displaced by heavy fighting in the Gaddafi strongholds of Sirte and Bani Walid came to Tripoli and are now homeless, she said. But Libya remained their best option: “We don’t have a country except Palestine, and we can’t go back there… Libya, with its war and difficulties, is still better than the other countries.”

“That notion of choice and the desire to stay in a context that is so insecure is essentially one of being between a rock and a hard place,” said Fiddian-Qasmiyeh.

Evacuations
According to UNHCR, only a few thousand Palestinians in pre-war Libya were registered as refugees under the 1951 Geneva Convention. Hundreds of others were offered “complimentary protection” by UNCHR – a recognition that they were stateless, could not be returned, and required humanitarian protection.

Still others came to study through Libyan scholarship programmes.

The vast majority, though, were migrants or skilled labourers who came from Gaza, the West Bank or other Palestinian refugee-hosting countries in the region – Syria, Lebanon and Jordan – with or without a contract and/or regular status. Many have lived in Libya for decades or were born there.

During the conflict, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) helped evacuate 179 Palestinians from dangerous cities to Benghazi, which was more stable. Many of them decided to stay in Libya either because they had relatives there, had found jobs, or had faith the economy would pick up once the situation in the country stabilized, IOM spokesperson Jean-Philippe Chauzy told IRIN.

But others went on to Salloum, a no man’s land along the Libyan-Egyptian border, where they waited to be resettled, he said.

The nine-month war between rebels and troops loyal to former Libyan leader Muammar Qaddafi badly damaged the streets of cities like Sirte. When Palestinians tried to escape during heavy fighting, they ran into problems (Photo: Heba Aly/ IRIN)

UNHCR assisted 1,581 Palestinians stranded at Salloum to travel to Gaza, through the Rafah border crossing, the agency’s deputy regional representative in Egypt, Elizabeth Tan, told IRIN. Only those with valid travel documentation could cross, she said.

Still, entry into Egypt was difficult, even for those Palestinians who carried ID, due to long-standing restrictive policies towards Palestinian mobility, another humanitarian official said.

Palestinians attempting to leave Libya through Tunisia also faced complications, though they were often resolved once brought to UNHCR’s attention, the official said. More than a dozen of those Palestinians who made it across are currently living in Choucha Camp on the Tunisian side of the border, said Emmanuel Gignac, current UNHCR representative in Libya.

“The options and potential durable solutions available to Palestinians in Libya and the region seem to be very strained, to say the least,” Fiddian-Qasmiyeh wrote in her paper. Here are some of the reasons why:

Refugees versus migrants
Palestinians suffer from “overlapping refugeedoms”, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh argues. They are refugees to begin with, having fled or been expelled from their land after the birth of Israel in 1948, or in the subsequent war of 1967, settling in Gaza, the West Bank, Syria, Jordan or Lebanon, before eventually travelling to Libya.

But most Palestinians in Libya are not considered refugees there, as they would be in Syria, Jordan or Lebanon, both because they came as skilled labourers, but also because the Libyan government historically welcomed them as “brothers” – considering them “Arab citizens residing in Libya” rather than as refugees.

So when conflict broke out in 2011, they found themselves in a tricky position.

They could not return to their country of origin (Palestine) nor to their country of habitual residence (for example, Syria) in order to flee the violence and insecurity in Libya. And yet they were not registered as refugees inside the country either.

“Their `voluntary’ presence there problematizes mainstream conceptualizations of ‘refugeehood’,” Fiddian-Qasmiyeh wrote. Even if the vast majority of Palestinians in Libya have not applied for asylum, many of them are de-facto refugees because they meet the definition’s criteria, she said.

Thus, she argues, they should be considered “internally stuck refugees” or “internally displaced refugees” within Libya, and if they are able to get out, as “double refugees”.

She says a more appropriate model is one of overlapping and multiple refugeehoods, where refugees who use their sponsoring agency (e.g. UNHCR or UNRWA – the UN agency tasked with providing assistance, protection and advocacy for registered Palestine refugees) to find jobs or better education are not at risk of losing their refugee label, and the international protection that accompanies it.

But UNHCR says the distinction has little practical importance.

Palestinians who do not register as refugees in Libya would nevertheless receive assistance from UNHCR if they were in need, said Arafat Jamal, deputy representative of UNHCR in Jordan, who led a three-month emergency team in Libya during the hostilities.

“Palestinians remain refugees whether they come here for economic reasons or not,” Gignac told IRIN. “You [only] lose [your refugee status] the day you return home for good or you get integrated and get citizenship from another country.”

Politicization
Palestinians in Libya were often used as political pawns, with Gaddafi threatening to, or indeed expelling, thousands of Palestinians over the years as a means of protesting against peace initiatives with which he disagreed and drawing attention to the Palestinians’ inability to return to their homeland. In 1995, many Palestinians were forcibly taken to the border, and then stuck in a camp Gaddafi named “The Return Camp” to make his point.

“He would campaign for increased access for a group and then expel them when it was in his interest,” said Emanuela Paoletti, a researcher on migration in Libya and author of The Migration of Power and North-South Inequalities: The Case of Italy and Libya.

Gaddafi’s ad-hoc recruitment of migrants, including Palestinians, into the country, meant that their status was often irregular. Depending on their classification, Palestinians fall under different jurisdictions – UNHCR; UNRWA; IOM; host governments; the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO, the recognized representative organization of the Palestinian people) – or none at all, sometimes leaving them without a guarantor.

“Who will give me my rights?” asked Fatima, the Palestinian in Libya.

Evacuated where? And by whom?

“Where Palestinian refugees should, could, or might want to be safely evacuated to, and by whom is a… complex issue,” Fiddian-Qasmiyeh writes. “Can the international community either expect, or indeed responsibly allow, Palestinians to `return’ to Gaza, the refugee camps in Lebanon, or the explosive situation in Syria?”

Despite vulnerability for Palestinians across the region, Arab states have resisted permanent resettlement solutions outside of the Middle East out of a fear that they would jeopardize the Palestinian right to return to their original homeland, putting the collective goal to return at loggerheads with the individual’s best interests of safety.

But resettlement remains an option, current UNHCR representative in Libya Gignac said, albeit a sensitive one. Palestinian refugees in Iraq who tried to flee the violence there after the 2003 US invasion and were refused entry at the Jordanian border were eventually resettled in Brazil after being stranded in the Rweished border camp for years.

“Technically, there is no protection gap,” he said. “If you’re a Palestinian in Libya, you do fall under UNHCR. It shouldn’t be an issue mandate-wise or legal-wise. But in practice, Palestinians being so political and all these sensitivities being around them, if we apply our mandate which includes [certain] solutions, there are issues. They are not always wanted…Palestinians themselves have internalized this notion and feel guilty about integrating in countries because they feel they lose the right of return… that they have somehow betrayed the cause,” Gignac added.

As far as UNHCR is concerned, a refugee never loses the right to return to his or her homeland, even if citizenship in another country is acquired. Still, Fiddian-Qasmiyeh told IRIN the Libyan example shows that theory and practice can diverge, raising many questions about the real options available to Palestinian “refugee-migrants”.

“We do need to take the protection needs seriously. That requires that conversation [about gaps and solutions] takes place.”

ha/cb

This is a summary of what was said by UNHCR spokesperson Sybella Wilkes – to whom quoted text may be attributed – at the press briefing, on 31 January 2012, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

According to UNHCR estimates, more than 1,500 people drowned or went missing while attempting to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe in 2011. This makes 2011 the deadliest year for this region since UNHCR started to record these statistics in 2006. The previous high was in 2007 when 630 people were reported dead or missing.

Last year is also a record in terms of the massive number of arrivals in Europe via the Mediterranean, with more than 58,000 people arriving. The previous high was in 2008 when 54,000 people reached Greece, Italy and Malta. During 2009 and 2010, border control measures sharply reduced arrivals in Europe. The frequency of boat arrivals increased in early 2011 as the regimes in Tunisia and Libya collapsed.

Our teams in Greece, Italy, Libya and Malta, warn that the actual number of deaths at sea may be even higher. Our estimates are based on interviews with people who reached Europe on boats, telephone calls and e-mails from relatives, as well as reports from Libya and Tunisia from survivors whose boats either sank or were in distress in the early stages of the journey.

Survivors told UNHCR staff harrowing stories of being forced onboard by armed guards, particularly during April and May in Libya. The actual journey took place on unseaworthy vessels with refugee and migrant passengers often forced into having to skipper boats themselves. In addition, some survivors told UNHCR that fellow passengers beat and tortured them. Judicial investigations are ongoing in Italy following these reports.

The majority of last year’s arrivals by sea landed in Italy (56,000, of whom 28,000 were Tunisian) while Malta and Greece received 1,574 and 1,030 respectively. The vast majority arrived in the first half of the year. Most were migrants, not asylum-seekers. Only three boats landed from mid-August to the end of the year. In addition, according to Greek government figures, some 55,000 irregular migrants crossed the Greek-Turkish land border at Evros.

We are disturbed that since the beginning of 2012, despite high seas and poor weather conditions, three boats have attempted this perilous journey from Libya, with one going missing at sea. This boat, carrying at least 55 people raised the alarm on 14 January, warning of engine failure. Libyan coast guards informed UNHCR that 15 dead bodies, all identified as Somali, were found washed up on the beaches last week, including 12 women, two men and a baby girl. On Sunday, three more bodies were recovered. It was confirmed later that all those that perished were Somali residents of the makeshift site in Tripoli known as the Railway Project.

The other two boats that made it to Malta and Italy in January required rescuing. The first rescue of 72 Somali nationals by the Italian coast guard took place on 13 January. Those rescued included a pregnant woman and 29 children.

The second boat was rescued by the Maltese Armed Forces on 15 January with the support of the US Navy and a commercial vessel. In total 68 people were rescued from a dinghy found drifting some 56 nautical miles from Malta. A baby girl was born on one of the rescue vessels. Another woman reported a miscarriage during the voyage.

UNHCR welcomes the ongoing efforts of the Italian, Maltese and Libyan authorities to rescue boats in distress in the Mediterranean. We renew our call to all shipmasters in the Mediterranean, one of the busiest stretches of water in the world, to remain vigilant and to carry out their duty of rescuing vessels in distress.

For further information on this topic, please contact:

• In Rome: Laura Boldrini on mobile +39 33 55 403 194
• In Valetta: Fabrizio Ellul on mobile +356 99 69 0081
• In Geneva: Sybella Wilkes on mobile +41 79 557 91 38

By Abdulaziz Al-Hiajem

The ongoing clashes between Yemeni forces and al-Qaeda have left thousands homeless and created a refugee crisis in the south of the country, said official sources. (Reuters)

The ongoing clashes between Yemeni forces and al-Qaeda have left thousands homeless and created a refugee crisis in the south of the country, said official sources.

“Around 100,000 Yemenis left the southern governorate of Abyan to the neighboring governorates of Aden and Lahij,” Mohamed Saeid Omran, head of the Abyan Refugees Committee, told Al Arabiya.

The mass exodus, he added, was due to the security forces’ clampdown on al-Qaeda operatives, which has been taking place for the past few months.

Brigadier General Saleh al-Zoarim, governor of Abyan, said that the capital Zinjibar and other neighboring areas are still under the control of al-Qaeda militants.

By Hereward Holland

Conflict and food shortages could push up to half a million Sudanese refugees to flee to South Sudan in the next couple months if Khartoum does not allow aid agencies more access to its restive border regions, the World Food Programme said.

South Sudan seceded in July under a 2005 peace deal that ended a decades-long civil war with the north, but fighting has continued on both sides of the poorly drawn border.

The United States has pressed Khartoum to allow more aid in the South Kordofan and Blue Nile states, citing expert reports that said more than a quarter of a million people could be on the brink of famine there by March.

Sudan’s ambassador to the United Nations this month dismissed concerns of a looming crisis in the two states, saying the situation there was “normal”.

World Food Programme deputy executive director Ramiro Lopes Da Silva said more than 1,000 people per day have crossed into South Sudan over the last week, as many people as were crossing into Kenya from Somalia at the peak of the famine in the Horn of Africa last year.

“In a couple of months it is what is typically the hunger season both in Sudan and South Sudan and obviously the potential impact on those populations is very serious,” Da Silva told reporters.

“There is a sense of urgency that the window for an effective intervention with the populations where they are is narrowing.”

Fighting broke out in June between government forces and South Kordofan rebels who sided with the southern army during the civil war. The conflict spread to Blue Nile in September.

In South Sudan, aid agencies are already helping 83,000 Sudanese who have fled aerial bombardment and ground attacks in the two states.

The Sudanese government accuses South Sudan of continuing to support the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Army North (SPLM-N) in South Kordofan and Blue Nile, charges Juba denies.

WFP says they are already planning to feed 2.7 million South Sudanese this year, and are seeking donations to plug a cereal deficit which, according to preliminary estimates, could amount up to 500,000 tonnes.

Da Silva said WFP is lobbying Khartoum to allow more humanitarian access to Blue Nile and South Kordofan, but the government is worried the assistance may fall into the hands of combatants.

By Natalie O’Brien

This is a summary of what was said by UNHCR spokesperson Andrej Mahecic – to whom quoted text may be attributed – at the press briefing, on 27 January 2012, at the Palais des Nations in Geneva.

In an effort to maintain operations despite prevailing insecurity and reduced humanitarian access at Kenya’s Dadaab refugee camps, UNHCR has been exploring ways to ensure uninterrupted assistance and services in the world’s largest refugee settlement.

The new measures include stronger and deeper involvement of the refugee communities in the day-to-day running of the camps, by reaching out to different groups within the refugee population, such as elders, the business community, and youth. Complementing this, UNHCR is organizing additional training, mentoring and capacity building for refugee workers and volunteers.

Refugees have always had a role in making camps work. However at Dadaab that role is being expanded. Hospitals, for example, have remained open throughout this difficult period, staffed by refugees, nationals, and a limited number of international staff. Furthermore, in situations when international or national staff cannot get to camps the health posts are managed by refugee staff who have been trained over the years to provide basic medical services and refer more serious cases to the camp hospitals. Refugee staff are also getting refresher courses on management of sensitive cases of sexual or gender based violence.

Together with our partners we are working to control outbreaks of measles and cholera. Monitoring is conducted on a weekly basis and the number of reported cases is now on the decline in all camps – from some 150 suspected cases at the end of 2011 to about 50 suspected cases in the first weeks of this year.

In addition, refugee leaders and refugees working for partner agencies are being trained to identify individuals and families who require immediate protection or life-saving assistance. This is especially important for people with severe disabilities, who cannot access help and services on their own, as well as for unaccompanied children and victims of rape or other types of violence. Since the beginning of this year UNHCR, partner agencies, and refugees have worked together to identify over 150 vulnerable people and families who have be have been brought to UNHCR offices in Dadaab for protection interviews and psycho-social, medical or legal follow-up.

In the area of water and sanitation, refugees are building new latrines on sandy and rocky ground and are collecting and transporting solid waste by donkey carts to allocated waste disposal sites. The water and sanitation committees, a network of volunteers that control the water delivery and sanitation services on household level, have also received additional resources and responsibilities for overall coordination and monitoring of these activities, running like a help desk in the camps.

In parallel, we are also engaging refugee youth in livelihood possibilities to develop and enhance their skills and work experience. Some have already volunteered to help collect garbage and oversee activities at water points.

More than 30 camp schools remain open and are run by refugee teachers. Despite insecurity, the Kenyan National Exams took place in the camps at the end of last year and the results were an improvement in the average score in comparison to last year. The exams were made possible because the community patrolled the schools and guarded the gates.

We are identifying other specific groups in the community for further outreach, such as the business community and the religious leaders and strengthening awareness and communications through radio. Together with the NGO Film Aid International we are about to launch a newly established SMS system that allows refugees to receive mobile text messages and respond for free.

Dadaab refugee complex presently shelters more than 460,000 refugees. A third of this refugee population arrived in 2011 alone, fleeing the conflict, drought, famine and human rights abuses in Somalia. The camps in Dadaab opened two decades ago and were originally designed to host some 90,000 refugees.

A child miner in Lagos, Nigeria (Photo: ILO)

Forced child labour remains rampant in Central Africa, where poverty fuels the trafficking of children from poorer countries to oil-rich states such as Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of Congo, according to experts.

“Trafficking in children is real,” said Gabon’s social affairs director-general, Mélanie Mbadinga Matsanga. “Gabon, for example, is considered an Eldorado and draws a lot of West African immigrants who traffic children.”

Matsanga was speaking at a conference on preventing child trafficking held in Congo’s southern city of Pointe Noire. The meeting was attended by delegates from Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Equatorial Guinea and Gabon.

Gabon is primarily a destination and transit country for children and women, who are subjected to forced labour and sex trafficking; boys are forced to work as street hawkers or mechanics, states the US State Department’s human trafficking report for 2011.

Child trafficking is defined by the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children as the recruitment, transportation, transfer, harbouring or receipt of children for the purpose of exploitation.  This definition is especially important in West and Central Africa where it often occurs with the consent of the parents and sometimes, of the children themselves, notes a UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) report.

But a “near total absence of data” on the scope of the problem prevents media coverage of the issue, which is essential in influencing public opinion, noted the 2002 UNICEF report. A decade later, the problem persists. “It is hard to count the number of children [affected]. It is even difficult to talk [about them] because their attitude shows that [the children] themselves are convinced that the work they are forced to do is not normal,” Marianne Flach, UNICEF’s representative in the Congo, told IRIN.

“The parents in the countries of origin do not even know what happens to their children in the countries of destination,” added Flach.

Children and their families are ensnared by the empty promises of a better life, leading to the smuggling across borders every year of hundreds of thousands of children, denying them education, health, the right to grow up within a family and to protection from exploitation and abuse, say experts.

Kidnapping on the rise
In Cameroon, says the State Department report, trafficking operations usually target two or three children, such as when rural parents hand over their children to a middleman promising education or a better life in the city. But traffickers there are increasingly kidnapping their victims, as heightened public awareness means parents are giving away fewer of their children to middlemen.

“Trafficking is nothing but abuse,” Marcelline Pambou Loubondo of the NGO Movement of Mothers for Peace, Solidarity and Development, told IRIN.

“The traffickers are looking for a better life. They want to get rich very fast, which is why they employ children.”

The children are often forced to engage in petty trade day and night, lest they are beaten up, added Loubondo.

The presence of local and foreign armed groups also poses a threat to children’s rights, as do burgeoning oil and mineral sectors. In the DRC, for example, armed groups continue to abduct and forcibly recruit men, women and children as combatants, labourers and sex slaves.

A significant number of unlicensed Congolese artisanal miners – men and boys – are also exploited in situations of debt bondage by businessmen and supply dealers from whom they acquire cash advances, tools, food, and other provisions at inflated prices, and to whom they must sell the mined minerals at below-market prices, notes the State Department report.

In Equatorial Guinea, children “…are believed to be exploited in Malabo and Bata where a burgeoning oil industry creates demand for cheap labour and commercial sexual exploitation”.

According to delegates at the conference, source and destination countries need to form bilateral accords given the trans-border nature of trafficking.

Weak law enforcement 
At present, those involved in human trafficking are not systematically targeted by law enforcement officials even as trafficking seems to undergo a “seemingly uncontrollable rapid expansion”, noted Congo’s Social Affairs Minister, Emilienne Raoul.

In Gabon too, according to the US State Department report, the lack of enforcement of counter-trafficking laws has meant there have been no convictions, despite the arrest of more than 68 suspected trafficking offenders between 2003 and 2010.

While trafficking is often associated with clandestine migration, the merging of these two issues has serious consequences, with trafficked children seen as young offenders rather than victims in need of special protection measures, notes the International Organization for Migration.

“Human trafficking is a form of migration particularly detrimental to human rights,” added Robert Kotchani, a UN human rights official.

But, “in the same manner that slavery ended, human trafficking can equally end”, said Viviane Tchignoumba Mouanza, a magistrate and president of the association of female jurists in the Congo. “It is a problem with the mentality, sensitization and reach of the law.”

lmm/aw/mw

By Rania Spooner

A moving encounter with a young girl who called a detention centre home may have touched the West Australian Premier, but it has not changed his position on offshore processing.

Premier Colin Barnett told the story of a meeting with a girl who when asked where she was from told him the name of a detention centre, rather than her nationality, at citizenship ceremony in Perth today.

“It was just one of those experiences that came along, I thought this little girl was very vulnerable, very shy, I imagine had a very troubled childhood,” he said.

“I felt sorry for her but I genuinely felt very proud of our country, Australia, and that a little girl like that has a second chance and a chance at a full life.”

Mr Barnett has previously called on the Australian Prime Minister to reconsider John Howard’s Pacific Solution to process asylum seekers on Nauru.

Today he said he didn’t care where they were processed as long as it was not on Australian soil.

“I don’t see why we have a political standoff about whether it’s Nauru or Malaysia or anywhere else,” he said.

“It does seem sensible to me that people wanting to come to Australia can have their requested at least processed and assessed before they come onto Australian soil.”

However, he said his encounter with the refugee had opened his eyes to the “harsh reality of one child’s experience”.

“Australia does have a very proud record of accepting refugees, asylum seekers and of humanitarian aid,” he said.

“It’s something I believe Australians support and if you look at our history 7 million of us were born overseas.”

After welcoming 2100 new Australian citizens today Mr Barnett said he wanted to see the Federal Government and Opposition working together on a solution.

“It’s not an issue that’s going to go away,” he said.

“We are on the edge of a very vulnerable, very disruptive part of the world,” he said.

People have started returning to Angola under the relaunched voluntary repatriation programme. These people were on the first convoy from Bas-Congo province to northern Angola last November. (Photo: G.Dubourthoumieu/ UNHCR)

Pedro is the kind of urban professional that Angola needs to help build stability and a viable future after years of devastating conflict.

But he was born in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and has mixed memories of the short time that he stayed in the land of his parents after Angola gained independence from Portugal in 1975. Recalling his life, Pedro went from the depths of losing his parents as a boy, and having to fend for himself, to the high of graduating from university.

He shared his tears and laughter with this UNHCR writer and also explained his difficult decision to return to Angola with his Congolese wife and his four children. “I want to go back to Angola because I want to participate in the development of my country. I want to help develop my country in the field of education,” said Pedro, who teaches Latin and French at a secondary school in Kinshasa.

The whole family has registered to go to Angola under a voluntary repatriation programme that was relaunched late last year by UNHCR and the governments of Angola and the DRC. Some 15,000 people have gone back to date, while an estimated 120,000 returned with or without assistance from 2003-2008.

Pedro was not ready to return earlier, but now says that with peace restored in Angola he wants to complete a journey that has taken him on an at times rocky and unpredictable path. “They want to see their country [too],” the 45-year-old added of his children.

His own journey began in DRC’s Bas-Congo province west of Kinshasa, where he was born not long after his parents fled across the border in the mid-1960s. In 1975, when Pedro was eight years old, Angola gained independence from Portugal and his proud mother decided to go back.

“My mother was always telling people that she returned to Angola with her children because she wanted them to know their country,” said Pedro, recalling a brief period of plenty and of happiness. That bright memory has stayed with him. But a year later, civil war broke out, and they were on the run again.

“We fled into the forest, but we could not survive there and we had to return to our village. When there were problems in the village, we lived in the forest. We were staying one month in the forest and then one month back in the village. I was scared.”

In 1978, his mother realized that their lives were in great danger and they had to make a run for the border. It ended up as an arduous and dangerous month-long journey. “We were hiding in caves. My legs were swollen,” said Pedro, who remembered it all like yesterday. And one day they ran into an ambush.

“We were attacked between two hills and some women had to leave their children behind. My mother told me that I should follow her and if she was hit by a bullet, I should follow the people going to Zaire [as the DRC was then known].” But she made it through and they crossed the border a few days later, after surviving on cassava roots scavenged from the abandoned fields they passed.

The warm reception they received from the local people in Bas-Congo, including gifts of clothing, made a lasting impression on Pedro. And he had his first contact with UNHCR, when the family were registered as refugees at the agency’s field office in the Bas-Congo town of Kimpese and given food.

It was a very tough childhood, an emotional Pedro reflected, almost breaking down when telling UNHCR about his struggle to survive on his own after the death of his beloved parents when he was just 12 years old. “I lived alone with my little sister and worked in the fields. My older sister was working in a nearby town and one day she came to pick up my sister, but she did not take me. She said that I should stay where I was and continue working in the fields.”

The bright and resourceful boy decided to walk to Kimpese and seek help from UNHCR. The journey took two days, but it was the right decision. “UNHCR supported me and helped me to go to school in Lukala. I went to secondary school in Ntuadisi. When I finished secondary school, UNHCR gave me a scholarship and I went to university, where I studied French and Latin.”

Pedro graduated from Kinshasa’s Université Pédagogique Nationale in 2010 and found a job at Saint Antoine’s school. He had a rosy future. But something was missing. Although immensely grateful for the opportunities he received in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, he decided that the best way to fulfill his potential, thank UNHCR and help others in need, was to go and build a life in Angola’s Uige province, where his mother came from.

“My parents used to tell us about Angola. I do the same with my children,” Pedro revealed. “And now they don’t stop asking me when we will go to Angola.”

By Celine Schmitt in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of the Congo