One week before the first arrivals, the workers put the finishing touches on a small wooden shed next to the hostel’s restaurant. “This will be a store where they can buy what they need here instead of going out,” explained its chief executive, Ismail Bakina. Two covered areas in the gardens will serve as smoking areas and a tent further away will double as an interview room and play area.
There is an airport-type security check before reception, with a luggage scanner and security guards with metal detectors. They are polite, professional and meticulous. “As you can see, we are ready for immigrants, even today,” Bakina told CNN hours before the first round of deportation lawsuits in the UK began last week. Legal anti-policy cases have so far been unsuccessful and the first flight from the UK to Rwanda is set to take off on Tuesday.
Each time they arrive, two immigrants will share each room, with shared bathrooms and laundry facilities on each floor. They will also have two red-carpeted places of worship overlooking the Kigali hills, free Wi-Fi and computers to monitor their legal affairs. The Rwandan authorities point to the relative privilege that immigrants will have here, compared to being provided to British detention facilities.
“We want them to have safe, decent accommodation and there is also a package they will receive so that they can acquire the skills to receive any training, maybe even start a business,” Rwandan government spokeswoman Yoland Makolo told CNN.
The United Kingdom says it will pay Rwanda 120 120 million ($ 145 million) over the next five years to fund the project. In addition, the UK also promised to pay for processing and integration costs for each relocated person, covering the costs of legal advice, case officers, translators, accommodation, food and health care. According to a parliamentary inquiry, the British government has said it expects these to be similar to the cost of asylum processing in the UK, which is around .000 12,000 per person.
The United Kingdom has refused to disclose the cost of chartering flights to transport the deportees to Rwanda. The Home Office said in its latest annual report that it paid ,6 8.6 million to charter 47 expulsion flights carrying 883 people in 2020. While the cost of individual flights varied by destination, the figures mean that on average, Home Office spent 3 183,000 per flight or 7 9,700 per person.
As there is no ceiling on the number of immigrants, thousands could potentially enter Kigali within the first five years of the project.
Rwanda’s alleged security has been challenged by international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch (HRW), which argues that the country “cannot be considered a safe third country for sending asylum seekers”.
HRW has been monitoring and investigating the human rights situation in Rwanda for decades and has documented violations ranging from “repression of freedom of speech, arbitrary detention, ill-treatment and torture by the Rwandan authorities”.
The group blamed Rwandan authorities for killing at least 12 refugees and arresting more than 60 in 2018 after police opened fire on a group of protesters protesting food cuts. The Rwandan National Commission for Human Rights investigated the incident and said police “had to resort to violence after all peaceful people had failed”, but described the tragedy as an isolated incident.
The UK plan has also been criticized by the only opposition party running against Rwandan President Paul Kagame in the last election, the Democratic Green Party of Rwanda, which the country says it can not afford. “Rwanda is the most populous country in Africa. Do you think it will be easy for Rwanda to help these people?” Secretary-General Jean Claude Ntezimana told CNN.
Rwanda is about one-tenth the size of the United Kingdom, but it hosts almost 13 million people, almost one-fifth of the UK population.
The Green Party accuses the United Kingdom of violating its international obligations by sending its undesirable migrants 4,000 miles away to Rwanda. “When it is not a refugee choice, it is inhumane and illegal,” Desimana said.
The Rwandan government claims that it is perfectly legal.
“Laws are not being violated with this co-operation,” Makolo told CNN. “There is nothing in the Refugee Convention that prevents asylum seekers from relocating to another safe country.”
Makolo admits that a similar program with Israel did not work and Rwanda abandoned it “very quickly”. But, he says, the UK agreement on migrants is completely different and will succeed. In fact, he said, Rwanda could soon accept immigrants from Denmark as well, with negotiations coming to an end.
More recently, Rwanda has partnered with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to receive vulnerable asylum seekers evacuated from Libya. Just over 1,000 migrants have passed through the Gashora Emergency Transit Center in the three years the program has been active. Immigrants stay between four and eight months on average before being resettled abroad, according to the center’s director. Immigrants have three options: resettlement elsewhere, voluntary repatriation or local integration into Rwandan society. No one has chosen the latter two, according to Fares Ruyumbu, the camp director.
“You can not compare it (Libya and Rwanda),” said Zemen Fesacha, a 26-year-old refugee from Eritrea at the Gashora crossing. He spent four years in what he described as horrific conditions in Libya as he repeatedly but unsuccessfully tried to cross the Mediterranean to reach Europe. “It’s like going from hell to heaven.”
Although the 11 months he spent in Rwanda in the camp were safer and easier, he is determined to leave.
And Zemen is not alone in this. None of the refugees at the CNN emergency center wanted to stay in Rwanda.
Nyalada Gatluak Jany, 26, from South Sudan, dreams of moving to Finland with her one-and-a-half-year-old son. “What I want is not here, it is there,” he said.
