I’d get on a boat again, I had no choice: Refugees eye escape at any price

Gashora, Rwanda: Zemen Fesaha still has nightmares about the seven hours he spent in the water hearing the screams of hundreds of fellow boat passengers – adults and children – as they drowned.

No rescuers came. He was one of a few to make it back to Libya’s shore.

Zemen Fesaha, from Eritrea, tried to get to Italy on a boat from Libya but his vessel sank. His refugee claim was successfully processed in Rwanda and he will resettle in Canada.Credit:Latika Bourke

Like thousands, he was held captive by people smugglers, and ended up weighed just 38 kilograms. Over the course of four years, he paid smugglers $US20,000 for passage. He had seen a fellow asylum seeker being shot point-blank when their family would or could not pay up.

At age 21, Fesaha fled. His destination was Italy via boat across the Mediterranean Sea. It sank.

“No-one rescued us, we swam back to shore to Libya,” he told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

“It’s horrible, life in Libya. I faced many problems. I saw horrible things, no humanity.

“My friends are still there, suffering. I’m happier now but when I think about them – they’re suffering many things in prison.”

Next week, the 26-year-old’s dreams of a better life will finally start to take form.

The avid Nicholas Sparks reader will board a flight for Canada where he wants to finish school and train to become a social worker. It’s a calling he could never have hoped to realise in his native Eritrea, a country often described as the “North Korea of Africa” where he faced indefinite military conscription, likely coupled with torture.

Eritrea has been ruled by Isaias Afwerki since 1993. It has not held national elections since, its parliament and judiciary have no power and is ranked by Human Rights Watch as having one of the world’s worst human rights records.

Reporters Without Borders says press freedom there is worse than in North Korea.

Fesaha’s people-smuggled journey is one both sides of Australian politics say they are proud to have stopped and now an envious Britain is attempting to copy. The British government has engineered a migrant deportation plan with Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, a known human-rights abuser.

Kagame’s government is at pains to show the world Rwanda’s maturation from a developing nation into the “Singapore of Africa” in less than three decades since Hutu extremists slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and Hutu moderates in the 1994 genocide.

The president points to Gashora, one of Rwanda’s poorer, rural villages.

Sign for the transit centre in Gashora, Rwanda. Credit:Latika Bourke

It is here that we meet Fesaha who arrived on a flight from Libya last year and, around eight months ago, applied to resettle in Canada.

The Gashora Transit Centre, run by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, has received about 1000 African asylum seekers and refugees from Sudan, South Somalia, Chad, Cameroon, Nigeria, Ethiopia and Eritrea since September 2019.

“We saved this situation where thousands of young Africans were caught up in Libya, [because] they are trying to get to Europe, they are not getting there. They got stuck, they were imprisoned. They were even slaved, there were people coming to buy them as slaves,” Kagame said at the recent Commonwealth Heads of Government summit he hosted.

“So we offered something to the international community. We told them ‘look, instead of having these people suffering in Libya, can we have them in Rwanda?’”

Houses for asylum seekers while their claims are processed by the UNHCR at Rwanda’s Emergency Mechanism Transit Centre in Gashora.Credit:Latika Bourke

So far, 644 people have been resettled; 442 are waiting for their refugee claims to be processed; 14 babies have been born and the centre has been expanded to accommodate hundreds more refugees, who are all invited to choose Rwanda as their resettlement country.

But none have, opting instead for Norway, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Finland, Belgium and, like Fesaha, Canada.

“I would prefer to go Canada,” Fesaha said. “I came here to Rwanda for transitioning to another country.”

When asked if he would advise his friends in Libya to come to Rwanda for processing, his response was immediate: “Yes, of course, compared to Libya there is freedom”.

But his reluctance to call Rwanda home is critical.

Zemen Fesaha, right, tried to get to Italy by boat from Libya but his vessel sank. Credit:Latika Bourke

The UK has made much of the fact that Rwanda will welcome its unwanted migrants who arrive in Britain by boat, should their asylum claims prove invalid. It has invested £120 million ($213 million) on the transfer deal. But judging by the experience of those in Gashora, it appears unlikely, that many will want to stay in Africa.

Australia’s inspiration is writ large. The objective of the UK policy is familiar – to deprive the people-smugglers on the French shores of the English Channel of the valuable opportunity to sell dangerous boat journeys to those fleeing persecution or wanting a better life.

Asked, while in Rwanda, if he is proud to see the UK adopting Australia’s model in a country with a dubious human rights record, Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles said: “Having a firm border which means that governments are in power and the UNHCR is empowered, and people smugglers are disempowered, is the best human rights outcome that you can have in this space”.

Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles at the Commonwealth Heads of Government summit in Kigali, Rwanda.Credit:Latika Bourke

He declined to endorse or criticise the UK’s adoption of Australia’s approach, which while effective, has also been widely criticised for its human rights costs.

“It’s a matter for them and they can answer for their own policies,” he said.

The UK’s first deportation was held up by the European Court of Human Rights.

Kagame said he would be happy if none ever made it to Rwanda.

“If they don’t come, we won’t complain. It’s not like we are dying to have people come to us,” he said.

But he defended the objective of the policy.

“The criminal networks are known in Africa and Europe and if countries are trying to say we are trying to have orderly migration, what’s wrong with that?” the president said.

But Fesaha says nothing, not even the threat of losing his own life, would have stopped him from getting on a boat and that if he were in the same situation, he would do it again.

“We don’t have any option in Eritrea to be free so we try to cross the sea. I lost my friends on the sea but we don’t have any choice.

“Especially in Libya, no one is afraid to cross the sea, we don’t care, even my friends try five times, how can they live in Libya?”

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