Refugee crisis in the eyes of a humanitarian worker

US President Donald Trump, by all recent accounts, is not that a fan of the United Nations system and so are a good number of people out there. In Trump’s words, which are probably still ricocheting inside the headquarters in New York, the UN is a “club” for people to “have a good time.”
It is, until one visits any crisis-stricken zone around the world, that they may strongly feel otherwise. The ongoing political crisis spiked by ethnic undercurrents in South Sudan, is one of those that can make any heart bleed.
However, Rudacogora has seen many of such and the only question that keeps lingering in her mind is, “how can normal human beings be brutal to this extent: how can they hate one another, leading to this?”

Fortunately, research proves it every day that not each one among us is normal. Others say it is primitive cultures causing conflicts. But that notwithstanding, one still wonders why groups of people, from South Sudan, Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Central African Republic to Iraq, can fervently hate another (group) to near extent of wishing them extinction.
“I honestly don’t understand and it is an answer I may never find,” Rudacogora, herself a Rwandan born and raised as a refugee in neighbouring DR Congo (then Zaire), told Saturday Monitor on a recent field visit to Bidi Bidi refugee settlement camp in Yumbe District.

It is indeed a ‘very tough’ life, she says, in juxtaposition of her own experience to the life lived by children, mothers, husbands and everyone else here, and in refugee camps.
But even as a grown-up, life has remained ‘tough’ for her in the essence of being a humanitarian worker on refugees with the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR); people who ideally have to clean every mess left behind by politicians, sometimes fuelling conflicts as a result of their egos clashing. The result is the catastrophy covered widely in the news every other day.

Hard life
Rudacogora has been witness to the human desolation in among other countries Rwanda, Chad, South Sudan, Liberia, Greece, and Burundi. It is one of those jobs, she says, where you don’t have a weekday or a weekend: all days are working days, because when dealing with a specific crisis situation, the flow doesn’t stop.
Take for example the South Sudan crisis; aid agencies are receiving about 1,000 refugees every day in the West Nile districts of Arua, Moyo, Yumbe, Adjumani and Lamwo. “How do you tell them that today is a Sunday, come back on Monday. That doesn’t happen in this line of work.”
The work mainly involves being in the field now and then, spending long hours in walking boots, and traveling on rugged bumpy roads.

Change is what matters
For Rudacogora, going an extra step – or an extra mile – to help those who are suffering is what counts as a contribution to humanity. However, she says: “…this obviously has an impact on us people who work through such situations left and right. And remember, every situation is unique on its own.”
The South Sudan refugee influx is worse, she says, but she says she remembers during the time in Greece; the European Union had closed off its borders, and yet Turkey had allowed the refugees to leave.
“Remember, Greece had its own problems and wasn’t ready by any measure, to tell you that this was a catastrophe you had to witness it by yourself. So is the current Sudan crisis.”

So, she quipped, how can anyone claim “we are a group having a good time?” And indeed it’s not, because her first marriage in which she got four children ended up on the rocks, with her husband complaining about “a wife who is never home.”
“My children are now young adults but if there is anything to happen to them in future and they say, it’s because they did not get enough mother’s love: I will never forgive myself. I clearly knew the nature of the assignment and it was a matter of making a sacrifice, my own children but then again, how many children don’t have both parents living here [in Bidi Bidi refugee camp, currently believed to be the largest settlement in the world with more than 300,000 refugees]?”

Trump wrong
What is for sure is that much as president Trump hates the UN for over peddling of bureaucracy, there are a bunch of people who are working and not really having a good time. “The UN is really trying but it’s the same agencies everywhere in the world where there is Ebola, genocide, hunger, natural disasters and working with the same resources.”
Rudacogora has already received her share but she is not satisfied.
“I surely know I cannot heal the world nor make a world a better place, but nothing gets me going like putting a smile on the face of at least one hopeless person every day. Perhaps these will be my credentials on judgment day.”
The battle for life for many refugees is as well a battle for nearly all humanitarian workers given what they see and experience every day.

Working with UNHCR

The 48-year-old Monique Rudacogora started working with UNHCR in 1994 at the time of genocide in her motherland, Rwanda, in which an estimated 1 million people were butchered in a space of 100 days.
Her family fled Rwanda and settled in Zaire after the first genocide in 1959, but later repatriated after the second genocide, although she rarely saw her parents given her nomadic existence.
“I cannot even recount the suffering I saw during that period. It just brought out the darkest of humanity.”
She remained stationed in the region handling refugee crises in Burundi and DR Congo in the early 2000s until 2004 when she was transferred to Sudan’s Darfur region.

The war in Darfur had started a year earlier when two rebel outfits, the Sudan Liberation Movement and the Justice and Equality Movement, waged a war against Khartoum accusing it of oppressing Darfur’s non-Arab population.
As the dust settled on Darfur, Rudacogora was in 2008 posted to [now] South Sudan’s Yei region dealing with the DR Congolese refugees who had fled the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) two years earlier.
The Ugandan government had launched an offensive and driven the LRA and its leader Joseph Kony and his men out of northern Uganda through DRC en route to Central African Republic (CAR).

In 2010, she was posted to Chad where she dealt with victims of the Chadian civil war, which erupted in 2005 between president Idris Deby’s government and several Chadian rebel groups. In 2013, she was moved to CAR after the country went up in flames after the Islamist Seleka rebels overran the capital, Bangui, and seized power from President Francois Bozize, forcing him to flee to neighbouring Cameroon.
In 2014, she was transferred to Liberia as UNHCR dealt with the massive displacements as a result of the Ebola scourge that ravaged the country, from where she was relocated to Ethiopia to help with the South Sudanese refugees fleeing fresh fighting that started in December 2013, then to Greece to deal with the refugee crisis escaping from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq. She was posted to Uganda early this year to deal with South Sudanese refugees again.

The Refugee issue in Uganda

How it started. Uganda’s long and illustrious hospitality to people in pursuit of [temporary] sanctuary from either war or other forms of persecution goes 77 years back during World War II, when the British colonial administration offered haven to about 4,000 Polish nationals and Jews who had been marked for death by the Nazis in Europe. These, after the war in 1945, were repatriated.

Along came Rwandan asylum seekers fleeing the political heat that culminated in the 1959 blood bath following independence from Belgium and general elections won by Party for the Emancipation of the Hutu, that brought to end the Tutsi minority rule dominion.
The refugees. Then came refugees, fleeing deadly conflicts from Burundi, Zaire (DR Congo) and the rest is history. A 2016 study by the World Bank titled ‘An Assessment of Uganda’s Progressive Approach to Refugee Management’ showed that Uganda hosts refugees from 13 countries, from among others Somalia, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Pakistan, Chad, Central African Republic and Sudan.

The influx. As of June 2017, the UN agency for refugees (UNHCR) put the total population of refugees and asylum seekers in the country at 1.277 million up from 600,000 last year. They are hosted in nine districts across the country.
By the end of the year, the number will have shot to 1.5 million, Charles Bafaki, the senior resettlement officer in Directorate of Refugees in Office of the Prime Minister, warned at the World Refugee Day media breakfast panel discussion in Kampala early this month.