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Two young Burundian refugees disembark the MV Liemba in Kigoma, Tanzania. The ship has been ferrying 1,200 refugees each day from Kagunga, a remote Tanzanian fishing village close to the Burundian border, to Kigoma. PHOTO | IRIN
By By The Citizen Reporter and Agencies
Two young Burundian refugees disembark the MV Liemba in Kigoma, Tanzania. The ship has been ferrying 1,200 refugees each day from Kagunga, a remote Tanzanian fishing village close to the Burundian border, to Kigoma. PHOTO | IRIN
By By The Citizen Reporter and Agencies
Kigoma. If you ask a Burundian refugee who has recently arrived in Tanzania when they plan to return home, there’s a good chance that the answer will be, “I don’t.” Now a cholera outbreak on the border has made the journey all the more dangerous.
Many of the 65,000 who fled there in recent days amid protests against President Pierre Nkurunziza’s plan to run for a third term and a related attempted coup d’etat have made the same hasty journey before. Tumultuous events in Burundi have prompted several huge waves of refugees: in 1972 mass killings of Hutus led 150,000 people to flee the country; 20 years later the assassination of Burundi’s first Hutu president sparked an exodus of half a million people and ignited a civil war that lasted until 2005; and amid the current political crisis, marked by a harsh police crackdown, more than 105,000 have left to neighbouring states, including Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). Many of those now leaving were born and grew up in refugee camps.
“I’ve been running my whole life,” said Moise Ntiranyibagira, one of 60 passengers on a bus heading to a transit centre in the Tanzanian lake port of Kigoma. He has lived in Burundi for less than half of his 35 years.
“There are a lot of us who want to stop running. We want to settle somewhere else – not in Burundi,” he told IRIN, explaining there was more to his problems than the current political unrest.
“I’m a farmer. Yet I can’t farm. The land is small and the people are many.”
As well as people, the bus is packed with luggage a kind that shows people are planning to be away for a while: solar panels, mattresses, bicycles, stoves.
Cholera deaths
The current exodus has prompted a major public health crisis because of the cholera outbreak which has claimed 27 lives, according to Unicef. Some 50,000 people are crowded into Kagunga, a Tanzanian village bordered by mountains on one side and Lake Tanganyika on the other.
“Overcrowding and poor sanitation have resulted in a surge of confirmed or suspected cases of cholera and acute watery diarrhoea among the refugees…without a cholera treatment centre on site in Kagunga, mortality rates may become extremely high,” UNICEF warned in a statement.
The only easy way out of Kigunga is by boat. Around 1,500 a day are being ferried to the lakeside port of Kigoma. Refugees line the beach scores deep, sheltering under shade cloth and palm trees. From Kagunga they are transferred by boat, at a rate of 1,500 a day to the port-town of Kigoma, where the Tanzanian government has made the Lake Tanganyika Stadium available as a transit centre.
Inside the stadium, makeshift clinics are treating rows and rows of patients with acute watery diarrhoea. Kahindo Maina, a senior public health officer with the UN’s refugee agancy, says, “hundreds of cases are here – we think all the cases are cholera.”
The World Health Organisation has warned of a “severe humanita
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