The State Department has suspended a humanitarian program to reunite thousands of African refugees with relatives in the U.S. after unprecedented DNA testing by the government revealed widespread fraud.
The freeze affects refugees in Kenya, Ethiopia, Uganda, Guinea and Ghana, many of whom have been waiting years to emigrate. The State Department says it began DNA testing with a pilot program launched in February to verify blood ties among African refugees. Tests found some applicants lied about belonging to the same family to gain a better chance at legal entry.
The U.S. has responded by halting refugee arrivals from East Africa, where hundreds of thousands of people have been stranded in precarious conditions since civil war erupted in the early 1990s. The temporary suspension has generated panic in African communities in the U.S., where thousands wait to be joined by relatives.
Typically, a refugee already living in the U.S., a so-called anchor, is entitled to apply for permission to bring a spouse, minor children, parents and siblings. The process requires interviews, medical examinations and security screening.
But suspicion has grown in recent years that unrelated Africans were posing as family members to gain entry. “This program is designed for people to reunify with family members” already in the U.S., says Barbara Strack, director of the refugee division at U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services. “We wanted to have empirical data” to confirm suspected fraud, she says.
In February, the State Department launched pilot testing in Kenya to verify family relationships, mainly among Somalis. When applicants arrived for a previously scheduled appointment, a U.S. official asked them to volunteer for a DNA test.
An expert then swabbed the cheek of those who claimed biological relationships, such as a mother and her purported children.
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The cell samples were sent to labs in the U.S. for analysis.
As word spread, some applicants began missing appointments, and others refused to cooperate.
Laboratory analysis of the samples indicated a large portion of applicants weren’t blood relations, as they claimed. “The results were dismaying,” says Ms. Strack. “This told us we had a problem with the program.”
The results prompted expansion of the testing to other countries. “We had high rates of fraud everywhere, except the Ivory Coast,” says a State Department official.
In late April, the government decided to temporarily halt the family reunification resettlement program for East Africans. A government official confirms that “many thousands of people” are affected by the suspension, particularly Somalis and Ethiopians.
Refugee resettlement agencies report that arrivals have slowed to a trickle.
In Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minn., home to the country’s largest East African population, Catholic Charities hasn’t handled a single family reunification case since March 19. The agency has resettled 35 East African families this year, compared with more than 450 last year and about 1,300 in 2006. “Everyone is calling or walking in here and asking what is going on,” says Angela Fox, a resettlement worker at Catholic Charities.
Some refugees received a notice from U.S. authorities advising them that their case is on hold because relatives didn’t show up for a scheduled interview or they refused to supply a DNA sample.
Those who agreed to take the test are also in limbo.
Abdirahman Dhunkal, who hails from Somalia, petitioned in early 2005 for his father, mother and six siblings who are in Kenya to join him in Minnesota.
Their case was approved in late 2006, but Mr. Dhunkal says that his family was asked to take a DNA test earlier this year. Since the cell samples were collected, “nothing has happened. We are still waiting,” says Mr. Dhunkal, 31, who hasn’t seen his family in 14 years.
The government testing has raised questions about using DNA as an immigration tool.
“No one condones people gaining entry by false means; the integrity of the program must be ensured,” says Bob Carey, chair of Refugee Council USA, a coalition of U.S. agencies that work on refugee issues, and vice president of resettlement for the International Rescue Committee. However, he adds, “DNA is not the only means to assess family relationships.”
Refugee advocates say the definition of family among Africans extends beyond blood relatives, especially when families fleeing persecution are scattered. “Some families are raising children who aren’t their own but whom they call son or daughter,” says Ms. Fox of Catholic Charities.
Refugee slots are precious. The world’s uprooted people are estimated to number 37 million; only about 1% are resettled. As the largest recipient, the U.S. absorbs about half of all refugees who are resettled.
Such demand “creates an incentive to get past the system,” says Ralston H. Deffenbaugh Jr., president of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Services. “Desperation makes people more susceptible to abuse or bribery.”
To be approved as a refugee, an applicant must establish that he or she has suffered persecution or has a well-founded fear of persecution on account of race, creed or origin.
Between Oct. 1, 2007, and Aug. 13 of this year, the U.S. admitted 45,644 refugees. For the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, 2008, the Bush administration set a ceiling for African refugees at 16,000. But by Aug. 13, only 6,780 Africans had been admitted.
Family unity has long been a pillar of U.S. refugee admissions, with relatives accorded priority. U.S. officials say the government must balance a need to ensure the integrity of the program with the desire to let in vulnerable refugees.
The government hasn’t decided whether to expand testing to compare the DNA of relatives in the U.S. with those abroad to verify kinship.
GENEVA (AFP) — The Red Cross on Wednesday revised its emergency appeal for Ethiopia to five million euros (7.9 million dollars) as the situation in the drought-hit south of the country got worse.
“Over the past two months the situation has worsened and living conditions have deteriorated. People have exhausted all their resources and are unable to feed themselves.
“We must step up our response,” said Lorenzo Violante, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies’ drought operations manager in Addis Ababa.
The funds would go towards helping over 76,000 people, including providing emergency food aid, as well as improving access to water and promoting hygiene, the IFRC said in a statement.
An aid operation had started in May to help 40,000 people in the southern Ethiopian village of Damot Pulasa, but it has now been expanded to help another 36,000 people in neighbouring Damot Gale.
Ethiopia was hit with severe floods last year which destroyed most of the food crops, while this year a drought has worsened the situation, leading to food prices that soared 330 percent.
Over 16,000 children in the two villages are acutely malnourished, said Fasika Kebede, Secretary General of the Ethiopian Red Cross.
“The situation can only deteriorate if we are not able to intervene efficiently,” he added.
The race by food-importing countries to secure farmland overseas to improve their food security risks creating a “neo-colonial” system, the United Nations’ top agriculture official has cautioned.
The warning by Jacques Diouf, director-general of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, comes as countries from Saudi Arabia to China plan to lease vast tracts of land in Africa and Asia to grow crops and ship them back to their markets.
“The risk is of creating a neo-colonial pact for the provision of non-value-added raw materials in the producing countries and unacceptable work conditions for agricultural workers,” Mr Diouf said.
Financial investors and food companies were also looking to invest in overseas farmland, raising some concerns, officials said.
The pursuit of foreign farm investments is the latest sign of how the global food crisis, which has seen record prices for commodities such as wheat and rice, is reshaping the politics of agriculture.
This year big providers of agriculture commodities – including India, Russia, Argentina and Vietnam – have restricted exports to keep local markets supplied.
Joachim von Braun, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute, said importing nations realised that dependence on the international market made them vulnerable – not only to surging prices but, crucially, also to an interruption in supplies. “They want to secure the supply lines of food,” he said.
The recent drop in agricultural commodity prices had not altered this view, as food prices remained well above historical levels, analysts said.
Middle Eastern and North African countries, which import most of their food, are leading the race to invest overseas. Countries such as Sudan, Ethiopia and Ukraine are opening their doors. Meles Zenawi, prime minister of Ethiopia, said recently its government was “very eager” to provide hundreds of thousands of hectares of agricultural land for investment.
Referring to recent investment, Mr Diouf said: “Some negotiations have led to unequal international relations and short-term mercantilist agriculture.” His warning is important as he has been a strong supporter of joint ventures between countries with money to invest and those with land and water resources. It reflects unease among diplomats about the race to lock in land and food supplies overseas.
The upward trend in leasing such farmland has also caused alarm among western agriculture officials, who worry about countries such as Sudan and Zimbabwe gaining more geopolitical leverage following investment in their agriculture.
The FAO has launched a task force to analyse potential problems connected to this, including land rights and the question of how much food would be left for the host country. Behind closed doors, UN officials are discussing whether a scheme similar to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative – the programme that helped the oil and minerals industry to tackle corruption and improve governance – could be useful.
A day after the women’s 5000m semi-finals, Ethiopia’s defending Olympic and world champion Meseret Defar and the country’s world record holder Tirunesh Dibaba both say they are still very tired. Dibaba has run two races in the space of four days–the first, the second-fastest 10000m race in history as she won her first Olympic gold–and the second, a pretty-fast 5000m to win her first round in that event and remain on course for a historic 5000m/10000m double. “The 10000m took a lot of energy out of me,” she said.
Defar on the other hand arrived in Beijing just three days ago and says she is exhausted. She reckons her body is finding it difficult to cope with jet lag and the time difference (5hrs between Addis Ababa and Beijing). But when the pair toe the start line for the final on Friday evening Beijing time, they will need little reminding of the importance of their meeting once again.
There is after all that little bit of history that dates back to 2006. During that season, the pair met seven times as Dibaba edged out Defar with four victories (Defar leads the overall head-to-head 12 to 10). But in the all important meeting at the end of the Golden League jackpot chase, Defar beat Dibaba to thwart her in Berlin. Dibaba lost around USD 125,000 that afternoon and although she beat Defar a week later, it was never the same.
It was an incredible time for Ethiopian athletics. Their rivalry had reignited huge public interest in the sport reserved only during the time of the world championships or the Olympics. Every Friday night, diners and restaurants would be filled with people glued to their television sets to watch the battle of the Ethiopians.
For many Ethiopian fans, it is an awkward place to be. Before those epic seven races in 2006, Ethiopians would root for their compatriots in a race no matter where they ran– in big-money European meets or major championships. It mattered little who came first as long as it was a green-vested Ethiopian.
But in the Golden League races, it was either Dibaba or Defar. Everyone knew that no one was capable of beating the two Ethiopians. They were each other’s biggest rivals. Perhaps for the first time in Ethiopian athletics, there was a Dibaba fan against a Defar fan.
The demographics of the fan group fit perfectly with the contrasting attitudes of the athletes. The hippies rooted for Defar, the Addis Ababa city-born who is perhaps the first one in her generation to prove that city girls can take up running as a serious profession. The purists and nature lovers idolized Dibaba, an athlete who is perhaps the most naturally talented athlete in the world. Unlike Defar, who is more open and a relative public figure, Dibaba shuns the media and is also carefree and withdrawn in her demeanor.
For many strange reasons, the pair has not met since those epic races in 2006. The following year, Dibaba pulled out of the 5000m due to abdominal pains aggravated during the women’s 10000m final. That year, Defar went on to dominate the scene with another world record, a world championship 5000m title, an All-African Games title, and the coveted IAAF World Athlete of the Year crown.
This year has been all about Dibaba. Not that Defar is having a particularly bad year, but Dibaba has just been better. She sliced four-and-half seconds off Defar’s world 5000m record in Oslo this year extending her unbeaten streak to one year in all events. Meanwhile Defar went down to Meselech Melkamu, the third Ethiopian in the women’s 5000m final at the African Championships on home soil in May.
But Defar is fighting back. She was just one second off Dibaba’s record (14:12.86) in Stockholm in July and says she is now in the best form of her life.
It will be the most important meeting for the duo, and a slice of history is on the line. Defar seeks an Olympic title defense to give her the first back to back 5000m golds in Olympic history, while Dibaba is hoping for a historic 5000m/10000m title in Beijing, the first such achievement since Miruts Yifter did it 28 years ago in Moscow. A mouth-watering clash awaits!
It’s official: one of the fiercest rivalries in the sport will take centre stage when the guns sound the start of the women’s 5000m on Friday evening, August 22. Tirunesh Dibaba, the recently minted Olympic 10,000m champion will square off against Meseret Defar, the reigning 5000m champion.
On Tuesday, both Tirunesh and Meseret easily won their semi-final rounds and are set to face off Friday. Watch videos of round one here: Tirunesh, Meseret
Since the 2002 World Junior Championships, when Defar took the title over Dibaba, the Ethiopian duo have met 22 times in the 5000m, with Defar holding a narrow 12-10 lead while building up her resume as arguably the world’s finest 5000m runner. But in June, Dibaba, who has dominated the 10,000m in recent years, took the World record from Defar in Oslo clocking 14:11.15. Defar tried to reclaim it in Stockholm a month later, but came up just a few metres short, clocking 14:12.88. The two are that close.
For whatever reasons, they haven’t met since the World Athletics Final nearly two years ago – won by Defar – but their paths will finally, and dramatically cross here as Dibaba aims to win her second medal of the Games while Defar hopes to hold on to a title she considers hers.
Each won their respective heats tonight with relative ease, Dibaba the slower first in 15:09.89 and Defar the faster second in 14:56.32. Their victories were remarkably similar as both were content to sit back in the pack and let others do the leading. Dibaba moved to the front just beyond the bell and held on, while Defar chose to wait until about 200 metres remained.
If either can be considered to have a slight edge, it would be Defar, who raced for the first time in these Games. The biggest question mark hanging over Dibaba will be how she’ll recover from her phenomenal victory in the 10,000m, where her stunning 29:54.66 performance was the second fastest in history.
Neither of the first round heats produced much drama for the remaining five automatic spots behind the Ethiopian pair, with the slots already more or less determined as the fields approached their respective bell laps.
Just a little more than a second separated spots two through five in the first race, with Kenyan Sylvia Kibet (15:10.37), Alemitu Bekele (15:10.92) of Turkey, Ethiopia’s African Champion Meselech Melkamu (15:11.21) and Gulnara Galkina-Samitova (15:11.46) of Russia moving on easily. Behind them, American Jenn Rhines, who ran with the leaders through much of the race, nabbed the sixth automatic spot, clocking 15:15.12.
The significantly quicker pace over the final kilometre in the second race would guarantee that the next three over the line behind the top six automatic qualifiers would also advance.
With Vivian Cheruiyot (14:57.27) and Priscah Jepleting (14:58.07) advancing, Kenya will have three women in the final, as will the United States, led by Shalane Flanagan, the 10,000m bronze medallist, and Kara Goucher.
Also advancing were Russian Liliya Shobukhova (14:57.77), who broke the European record last month, and former 5000m World record holder Elvan Abeylegesse of Turkey.
While the Defar-Dibaba show will take the spotlight, behind them several other notable double attempts will be undertaken. Galkina-Samitova won the first Olympic gold medal in the 3000m Steeplechase on Sunday, clocking a World record of 8:58.81. Abeylegesse won silver in the 10,000m on Friday with a European record 29:56.34 (the third fastest performance in history) in what very well might have been the finest ever women’s contest over the distance.
It was at a railway crossing near Dire Dawa, the provincial capital in the Ethiopian Ogaden desert, that I saw them: small children’s hands, blackened by sun, clutching at the slats of a cattle truck dumped on a siding. The year was 1984, the height of the Ethiopian famine that claimed about a million lives. These young things must have expired, hours later, of heat and thirst in temperatures peaking at about 48C, in the truck where they had deliberately been left to die.
I know it was deliberate because I took quick photographs, muttered a few words they couldn’t understand, and headed in to Dire Dawa to get help. The famine relief office officials shrugged and directed me to the military police commander. He cut me short: yes, he knew where they were. They were ethnic Somali kids — Somalis, the majority population of the Ogaden, had been in rebellion against Ethiopian rule for years — and they had been caught throwing stones at a train.
But they would die, I persisted. He lit a cigarette. “So what: they knew the risks and they must pay the price.”
You did not have to be caught throwing stones to “pay the price” in 1984. That famine in the Ogaden, the worst-affected region in Ethiopia, was far deadlier than it need have been because, until the international outcry forced it somewhat to relent, the Marxist Mengistu dictatorship blocked food aid to rebel areas, using it as a weapon of war.
What the world saw back then they are seeing again: heart-rending photographs of wide-eyed famished Ethiopian children. What the world did not hear much about then was the criminal exploitation of suffering. What the world will not see clearly, even now, is that disasters like drought can cause crops to fail, but should never, in a half-decently run country, lead to mass deaths from malnutrition. Famines in this day and age are man-made, if not by the sins of commission perpetrated by the thuggish Mengistu regime (and by North Korea’s) then by culpable omission coupled with lousy policies.
Mengistu was overthrown in 1991, fleeing Addis Ababa to retire in the congenial climate of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe. Because Meles Zenawi, the Tigrayan rebel leader who ousted him, shed some of his Albanian-model Stalinist baggage, he was fêted by Westerners as a moderniser and showered with development aid.
A spot of election-rigging in 2005, followed by the shooting of up to 200 pro-democracy demonstrators, caused some temporary tut-tutting, after which aid quietly resumed and, in Britain’s case, doubled. Not so quietly, the Ethiopian Woyanne Army is again cracking heads in the Ogaden, burning villages and, according to Human Rights Watch, torturing and publicly executing not only rebels of the resurgent Ogaden National Liberation Front but also civilians sympathising with them. In the Ogaden, famine looms. Plus ça change.
Still, Meles and Mengistu are not la même chose. Meles is a bit of a thug, but he has introduced some judicial and commercial reforms, devolved powers from Addis Ababa to the regions, improved education, curbed child mortality through anti-poverty programmes and, importantly, advocated greater equality for women. He has also ploughed 17 per cent of government spending into agriculture, three to four times as much as most other African governments. He claims that farm production is growing by 10 per cent a year, and boasts that, two years ago, the country actually exported maize (odd, that, when in a “good” year millions of Ethiopians rely on foreign food aid).
After the last big drought, in 2003, the Ethiopian Woyanne government worked with donors to create a system designed to make famine history. It includes a Productive Safety Net, a public works programme providing seven million poor Ethiopians – nearly a tenth of the population – with food or cash, and a Famine Early Warning System that measures rainfall, livestock prices, household spending and signs of malnutrition.
Textbook stuff, and in stark contrast with the junta’s attempt to hide the 1984 famine from the world. And yet… how, then, has the failure of the “little rains” this spring, and the consequent loss of a single harvest, translated into a huge emergency affecting ten million people, by the aid industry’s probably inflated account, and 4.6 million by the government’s defensively conservative assessment?
Why are its emergency grain reserves so depleted that food rations have been reduced by a third, at least 75,000 children are already severely malnourished and hunger affects two thirds of the country and has, this time, spread to the towns? Why is Ethiopia, a country with lush two-crop breadbaskets as well as deserts and eroded hill farms, still so vulnerable that, as Meles himself admits, “one unexpected weather event can push us over the precipice”?
There are two big causes, and drought is not one of them. They are within the power of politicians to tackle, and tackled they must finally be, with the requisite sense of urgency. The first is Ethiopia’s population explosion; with families averaging 5.4 children, it has soared from 33.5 million in the 1984 famine to 77 million now. In a country where 85 per cent of the people rely on farming for a living, this means that, per head, food production has actually fallen since 1984 – by more than a third – and farm plots get smaller and smaller. A fifth of Ethiopian farmers try to survive on areas no more than 20 metres by 40 metres per person, yielding no more than half their cereal needs.
The second is Meles’s purblind refusal to reverse the Marxist folly of his 1995 law that put all land under state ownership. “Land holding certificates” graciously permit farmers to till land that their forebears have farmed for generations; but surveys show that 46 per cent still expect to lose their farms.
The policy is a disaster. It discourages careful land management; it deprives farmers of collateral to raise bank loans to buy fertiliser and agricultural tools; and they cling to plots too small to feed their families because, with nothing to sell, they have no alternative. The coffee and infant rose-growing sectors apart, most Ethiopians farm as their ancestors did, with hoes, wooden ploughs, oxen and an anxious eye on the skies.
Enough food aid is once more pouring in to stave off serious famine; but it will not remedy Ethiopia’s deepening aid dependency and rural despair. With a smaller – because more mobile – landowning rural population, able to access loans to invest in higher-yield seeds, tractors and drip irrigation, Ethiopia could feed itself. But will donor governments champion the farmers’ right to get back their land? On past experience, pigs will fly. And the next famine will be a matter of time.
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Rosemary Righter is an associate editor of The Times
It’s official: one of the fiercest rivalries in the sport will take centre stage when the guns sound the start of the women’s 5000m on Friday evening, August 22. Tirunesh Dibaba, the recently minted Olympic 10,000m champion will square off against Meseret Defar, the reigning 5000m champion.