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In Africa, a desperate stampede
Paul Salopek, Chicago Tribune
June 12, 2007

http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-border_salopekjun12,1,1213507.story?track=rss

Musina - The greasy brown river sliding past this African border town might seem eerily familiar to Americans. First, there are the concrete international bridges that span its waters, linking a relatively affluent community on one side - tidy, well-paved, replete with American franchises such as Kentucky Fried Chicken - with a dustier, much poorer town on the other. Then there are the illegal immigrants. They hunker by the hundreds in the riverside brush, waiting for nightfall to crawl under a porous border fence. Grim-faced law-enforcement agents hunt them down in trucks equipped with flashing police lights. So do posses of angry civilians, most of them white, many of them armed, and all of them outraged by what they see as a dangerous lapse in border controls.

Squint, and the scene could pass for the banks of the Rio Grande between the United States and Mexico - except, that is, for the jaded baboons ambling among the human pedestrians on the bridges and a sign identifying this muddy waterway as the Limpopo River, the troubled frontier between Zimbabwe and South Africa, and the finish line for one of the largest illicit migrations in the world. "They get robbed and raped by criminals, extorted by our cops, and eaten by crocodiles," Jacob Matakanye, a South African human-rights advocate, said of the tens of thousands of undocumented Zimbabweans who have stampeded past this remote port of entry. "That doesn't stop them. Nothing does." As Americans continue to recriminate, argue and agonize over illegal immigration, they might spare a kind thought for Africa's youngest democracy, where the same vexing problems - flimsy borders, xenophobia and questions of national identity - are roiling the public mood just 13 years after the end of white rule.

On the surface, the two countries couldn't be more different in their public stance on illegal immigration. In the United States, even liberals who support granting citizenship rights to undocumented immigrants - and President Bush finds himself awkwardly in their camp - must frame their arguments in terms of national security and promise future border crackdowns. By contrast, in South Africa, which prides itself as a beacon of ethnic tolerance in the world, a grudging acceptance of illegal immigration is the unofficial rule. Not that it has much choice. Some immigration experts here say that 10 percent or more of South Africa's 43 million people may be in the country illegally, the majority of them impoverished Africans seeking a better life in the continent's economic powerhouse.

With South Africa unable to afford more patrols along its 2,500 miles of land border, and realizing that illegal immigration keeps feeble neighbor Zimbabwe from total collapse, South African President Thabo Mbeki conceded last month that the enormous human influx "is something we have to live with." Yet coexistence hardly describes life on the Limpopo River. A level of misery and desperation hangs over this border that south Texas can never know. Hundreds of people - some walking 3,000 miles from Somalia with only the clothes on their backs - filter every day through the backcountry around Musina on well-beaten trails. At the approach of vehicles, they melt into bushes where the amagumaguma - local slang for the gangs of smugglers, thieves and rapists who prey on the migrants - also skulk. "If you don't have money, they will beat you and strip your clothes," said Bernard Sibanda, 25, a Zimbabwean toiling on a border farm. "People walk naked into town."

Sibanda carried a slingshot to defend himself. He smiled bleakly at the impotent toy. Nearby, a Somali almost lost his hands recently when border thugs tried to hack them off, according to the International Organization for Migration, a United Nations agency that helps deported migrants return home. And such brutality isn't limited to criminals. In 2004 a South African army captain and four soldiers were convicted of systematically raping and robbing Zimbabwean "border jumpers" - one of many instances of violent abuse by South African authorities on the border, human-rights groups claim. Last month a soldier on patrol shot and killed an unarmed Zimbabwean man. Illegal immigrants interviewed in Musina also accused the South African police of constant shakedowns. The price of freedom after being arrested: as little as 100 rand, or about $14. The South African government has acknowledged problems with petty corruption. The agency responsible for immigration, the Ministry of Home Affairs, is being overhauled.

Finally, as if the human gantlet weren't enough, there is the random cruelty of nature. The crocodile-gnawed bodies of immigrants wash up occasionally on the banks of the Limpopo, said activist Matakanye, who works with Zimbabwean farm workers at the Musina Legal Advice Center. And every year during the rainy season, the river itself kills scores of men and women seeking low-paying jobs in South Africa's bustling farms and cities. In February, 45 Zimbabweans drowned as they held hands trying to cross the river, the police reported. Another group of 60 swimmers died the same way last year. Such tragedies are routine enough that they barely register in the South African media. "If you stay in Zimbabwe, you starve," said Kenneth Marara, 28, an unemployed factory hand from Zimbabwe's capital, Harare, who was sleeping with a crowd of other undocumented migrants at a bus stop in Musina. "It is better to die here."

Once an African breadbasket, Zimbabwe has been hollowed out by years of drought and the ruinous economic policies of strongman Robert Mugabe. Its inflation rate was calculated in May at 3,700 percent - the highest in the world. In Musina, immigrants said the Zimbabwean government couldn't even afford the paper to print its passports anymore, so almost nobody carried one. The U.N. World Food Program estimated last week that more than a third of Zimbabwe's 11.8 million people will face food shortages this year. Nobody knows how many Zimbabweans have ducked into South Africa. Immigration analysts say 2.5 million to 3.5 million - roughly a quarter of Zimbabwe's population. Even the lower figure equals the number of refugees displaced by the war in Darfur.

"There is a real backlash taking place against Zimbabweans now," said Sally Peberdy, a researcher at the Southern African Migration Project, an immigration think tank in Johannesburg. "Xenophobia is definitely on the rise." In fact, anti-foreigner sentiment has been smoldering - and sometimes exploding - in South Africa for years. Despite the country's reputation for cultural tolerance, decades of isolation under apartheid have predisposed many South Africans - black and white - to distrust immigrants, Peberdy said. One survey conducted in 1997 revealed a degree of paranoia about strangers that was exceeded only in Russia. Resentful South Africans are torching Somali shops and beating up Zimbabweans, human-rights groups say. Increasingly, Zimbabweans are also blamed in the media for South Africa's notoriously high crime rate.

The government is responding by quietly ramping up deportations. Buses, police vans and dusty trains ease through Musina, disgorging thousands of bedraggled Zimbabweans at the border bridges. The number of Zimbabweans expelled from South Africa has rocketed tenfold since 1994, to more than 127,000 last year. South Africa is also sending its law-enforcement agents to the U.S. for border security training. Others are getting U.S. Border Patrol training at an American-run law-enforcement academy in neighboring Botswana, officials said. For some South Africans, though, that still isn't enough. "I can't even jog on my own property anymore because of the numbers of Zimbabweans coming through - it's a safety risk," said Gideon Meiring, a game rancher whose land sprawls over one of the main immigrant routes south of the Limpopo River. "There have been terrible murders of farmers up here, and it's 99 percent certain that it was Zim people who did it."

Meiring heads a watchdog group of white farmers who help patrol South Africa's border region. Like the controversial Minutemen sentries in the United States, they are making a largely political point: Illegal immigration threatens South Africa's prosperity and stability. But their robust methods would raise eyebrows even among anti-immigrant groups across the Atlantic. Last month Meiring and 14 other farmers mobilized to intercept a truckload of undocumented Zimbabweans speeding down a local highway. With removable police lights flashing atop their cars, they ran the driver off the road and detained 11 migrants. Others scattered into the fields. "These people use our hospitals, our schools, our government housing," Meiring said, echoing familiar sentiments from the immigration debate in the United States. "We've somehow got to make it more difficult for them to cross."

Loveness Khumbula, a 25-year-old Zimbabwean mother, has reached her private threshold of difficulty. On May 28 the petite illegal immigrant was charged by a wild buffalo while trudging through the bush east of Musina. The beast chased her off a small cliff. She sprained her leg, and the 9-month-old daughter strapped to her back suffered a severe concussion. About the only thing extraordinary about her story on the raw Limpopo frontier was that she wanted to go home. "My mission here is finished," Khumbula said softly in the local South African hospital where she and her baby were recovering. "I will not stay in this place."

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