TANZANIA June 2007 - Bertrand Blanc, a French national, has been working as an ICMC deployee for UNHCR in a refugee camp in Kasulu, North-West of Tanzania, since 2007.

People working closely with asylum seekers and refugees in Europe, witnessing their human distress on a daily basis know how difficult it is to keep faith and morale. You can thus imagine how challenging it is to keep yourself together while working in western Tanzania in a UNHCR camp populated with thousands of refugees. ICMC has provided me with the opportunity to share some of the best human experience I have ever known in my professional life.

My mission as a resettlement expert for UNHCR brought me to Mtabila, a refugee camp in the amazing and fascinating Northwest of Tanzania where I worked as part of the ‘Deferral Team'. Honestly, I had never heard of a Deferral Teamand had no clue what it was about, when ICMC first approached me with the deployment position. It was only after I arrived in Tanzania that I fully understood how the process operated and saw its effectiveness in assessing and processing cases for resettlement. The Deferral Team is an administrative structure set up to organize group resettlement processing of the so-called ‘72 Burundians Group' for referral to the United States Refugee Program, among other tasks.

The ‘72 Burundians Group'
The ‘72 Burundians Group' consists of Burundian refugees who fled Burundi in 1972 to Tanzania or other countries in the Great Lakes Region. They are primarily of Hutu ethnicity and fled the widespread ethnic violence and government-sponsored ethnic cleansing that took place in Burundi between May and August 1972. Often called the first genocide in the Great Lakes Region, the events of 1972 killed some 200,000 Burundians and caused approximately 150,000 refugees to flee to Rwanda, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), formerly known as Zaire.

They have been given a "group" determination because almost all of the individual refugees share four major characteristics with one another: they all fled the widespread ethnic killings largely perpetrated by the Tutsi-dominated Government against the Hutu population in 1972; many of them have been subject to multiple displacements in the Great Lakes Region (flight from Rwanda during the 1993 genocide and from DRC in 1996/7 during the ethnic conflict there) and sought refuge in Tanzania for a second time; a large majority of the refugees have spent their entire life in exile and many of these have never lived in Burundi; and they are unwilling and unable to return to Burundi and cannot settle permanently in Tanzania.

The 1972 Burundians represent one of the most protracted refugee situations in the world and resettlement has been determined the only durable solution for the great majority of them. At present, the group is dispersed mainly over three refugee camps in the North-west of Tanzania: Ngara, in the north close to Rwanda, and Kibondo and Kasulu, approaching the area of Lake Tanganyika.

The group has been referred by UNHCR for resettlement consideration to the Unites States. The U.S. was previously involved in the group resettlement of the Somali Bantus from Kenya.

Deferral Team and the Group
The Deferral Team is located throughout the North-western region of Tanzania, reflecting the physical location of the "72 Burundians Group." The team is responsible for a variety of issues related to the group. Specifically with regards to the group resettlement, the team has to deal with all the administrative, logistic, legal and humanitarian issues. As one of the team resettlement experts, I am counselling and advising US Government officials and US NGO staff working on the group resettlement in the field. On the other hand, I am dealing with complex issues of the Burundian refugees themselves; conducting Best Interest of the child Determination assessments in cases of a divorce; finding care agreements for woman-at-risk, isolated elderly or minor refugee cases; and bringing vulnerable refugees of to the attention of the UNHCR protection unit. Based on the claim presented I advocate for acceptance of individual refugee cases, by the USRP, as well.

The Deferral Team serves as a unifying link between the refugees in the group, and all the actors involved in their resettlement, including the US Government, US NGOs, the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), and the Tanzanian Government. This makes the work extremely interesting and stimulating. We are working on the whole process from the refugees' registration in the beginning, to the final US resettlement decision on the refugee submission and the travel to the US. This structure allows for a better response and larger efficiency in terms of rapidity, anti-fraud and transparency, which benefits first and foremost the refugees but also the US Government. During the last month of July 2007 only, we arranged the departure of over a thousand refugees to the departure centre in Kibondo where they received a cultural orientation course and a medical check-up before getting on a plane for the US.

From Paris to Kasulu: a European perspective
Before my departure to Tanzania in June 2007, I had been working as a protection officer for four years in the ‘Office Français de Protection de Réfugiés et Apatrides' (OFPRA) (Ministry of Foreign Affairs), which is the public institution responsible for the individual determination of refugee status for asylum seekers in France. OFPRA operations are based primarily in Paris, and include several overseas missions in America and Africa. Working with this agency offers a great human and professional satisfaction but raises at the same time a number of questions on refugee affairs. Working in such an exceptional resettlement operation is a totally new experience for me, which places into perspective my past professional experience. And if the French Government would decide to establish a resettlement programme, I would definitely be willing to join such an effort! But for now, I am enjoying work and life in the field and soaking up whatever I can...

It is certainly true that European countries have hosted thousands of refugees. Nevertheless, the majority of them still remain in refugee camps or urban settings in countries of first asylum on the African or Asian continent, far from Europe...

The ‘72 Burundians Group' is emblematic of Europe's absence regarding to the issue of group resettlement. I wonder why it is that such a group with close historical and developed links to Europe and more specifically to countries such as France and Belgium is only resettled to the US? These refugees know about France and Belgium. They know more about the French language than the English language. Coming from France myself, I have been asked many times directly in French by Burundian refugees: "Can we go to Europe?"; "Is the US like Europe and France?"; "Do you think I could study French there?". The US' attraction on the refugees here in Tanzania is certain and real but Europe's is too...

Last July, the Deferral Team organised a special meeting in a pleasant but deprived secondary school of Mtabila refugee camp with 300 heads of family all belonging to the ‘72 Burundians Group' who represent more than 1300 refugees. My coordinator gave me the opportunity to announce officially to all these refugees that they have been successfully admitted by US Government. Just one second after this magic sentence "Congratulations! You have been accepted to the US" the audience started to applaud, cry and laugh. At last, some happiness and hope in the refugee camp!

I will definitely keep in my mind this day in July. I just hope that one day, I would have the opportunity to call for another such meeting and declare to the refugees gathered, who have suffered greatly for decades, suffered too much: "Bienvenue en Europe!".