On Sunday 28 August 2005 refugees from neighbouring African countries gathered in the boardroom of the South African Red Cross Society (SARCS) to be addressed by delegates from the ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross.
Mr Pierre Luc Chevaux, representative for Harare and the Pretoria regions of the ICRC, and Ms Henrietta Nthathe, tracing officer of the Pretoria Delegation, flew to Cape Town to meet 14 spiritual and community leaders from the refugee communities – mainly Congolese, but also Ugandan, Somali and Rwandan refugees.
SARCS’s tracing department coordinates the Restoring of Family Links programme, which is a core programme of the international Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement (the Movement) from its National Office in Green Point, Cape Town. The Red Cross assists victims of war and the tracing department strives to reach all refugees and asylum seekers in order to communicate to them its services, which are to re‑establish contact between family members who have been separated due to conflict.
The Red Cross Message system is an important part of the programme. It also deals with tracing enquiries and in some cases facilitates family reunification, especially where the well‑being of vulnerable children is at stake.
However, due to ongoing conflict in other parts of Africa, SARCS’s tracing department deals mainly with refugees and asylum seekers in South Africa. As one of 181 National Societies globally, the South African Red Cross is part of the international communication network of the Movement and therefore receives many tracing enquiries from other National Societies.
These tracing enquiries are not all due to conflict situations; SARCS also helps family members who have been separated for other compassionate reasons that fall within the ambit of its tracing policy. The tracing department assists the ICRC in times of conflict and the International Federation of the Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (the Federation) – the umbrella body of National Societies – during disasters.
Communicating our humanitarian message of the restoring of family links to the urban refugee poses an enormous challenge for the South African Red Cross.
As opposed to refugees who live in refugee camps in countries such as Tanzania, Malawi and Botswana and are registered by the UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), urban refugees live in ‘pockets’ in the cities and their environs – even in smaller towns in lesser numbers – often grouped together, not only according to the country of origin, but also the areas from which they come.
SARCS therefore took the initiative of enlisting the help of a few carefully selected refugees to assist in the distribution/delivery and collection of new RCMs, as well as replies to messages already delivered.
These refugees, who are mostly well-educated but, sadly, unemployed, are eager to assist us to help their people. They go into areas which are not as accessible to the staff or volunteers of the Society – also to shopping mall parking areas where many refugees work as car guards – and they do this without any compensation, other than reimbursement of transport expenses. Some of them, through their own experience in refugee camps, working for the Red Cross, have good basic knowledge of the Movement’s humanitarian work among refugees.
SARCS further trains them to assist with the filling out of RCMs and how to answer basic questions coming from their fellow refugees. For example, these messages must contain strictly family or personal news – nothing of a political nature because of the Red Cross’s neutral and independent stance.
by Estelle Neethling, South African Red Cross
Photographs by Joe Neethling