UK offers cash incentives for return

The UK Home Office has announced that cash and aid repatriation packages worth up to £6,000 are to be offered to failed asylum seekers to go home voluntarily to Zimbabwe.

Phil Woolas, immigration minister, indicated at the same time that the first steps would be taken this fall towards forcibly returning more than 10 000 failed asylum seekers who fled President Mugabe’s regime.

Last Thursday the UK government said it was reviewing its moratorium on the removal of failed asylum seekers to Zimbabwe because “indiscriminate violence which marred the elections of 2008 has abated.”

Sarah Harland from the Zimbabwe Association, a charity working for Zimbabwean asylum seekers and refugees in the UK, said the present precarious situation in Zimbabwe meant there is increased anxiety about returning home.

In the past few weeks there have been increasing incidents of violence and intimidation against NGOs, rights activists and MDC supporters, and there are widespread fears of more attacks as the political crisis unravels.

Harland explained that some Zimbabweans who have voluntarily returned to the country this year have ‘regretted their decisions’, which came after Prime Minister Morgan Tsvangirai earlier this year appealed for Zimbabweans to return home.