An amazing story is told here in the NY Times about the Somali Bantu.
They are members of Africa’s lost tribe, the Somali Bantu, who were stolen from the shores of Mozambique, Malawi and Tanzania and carried on Arab slave ships to Somalia two centuries ago. They were enslaved and persecuted until Somalia’s civil war scattered them to refugee camps in the 1990’s.
[…] Over the next two years, nearly all of the Somali Bantu refugees in Kenya — about 12,000 people — are to be flown to the United States. This is one of the largest refugee groups to receive blanket permission for resettlement since the mid-1990’s, State Department officials say.
The UN has been trying for a decade to find these folks a home, since they have been essentially outcast within Somalia.
The Bantu, who were often denied access to education and jobs in Somalia, are mostly illiterate and almost completely untouched by modern life. They measure time by watching the sun rise and fall over their green fields and mud huts.
As refugees, they have worked the soil, cooked, cleaned and labored in backbreaking construction jobs, filling about 90 percent of the unskilled jobs in the camp in Dadaab, Kenya, where most Bantu people lived until they were transferred here last year.
[…]In Somalia, the lighter-skinned majority rejected the Bantu, for their slave origins and dark skin and wide features. Even after they were freed from bondage, the Bantu were denied meaningful political representation and rights to land ownership. During the Somali civil war, they were disproportionately victims of rapes and killings.
The discrimination and violence continues in the barren camps today — even here — where the Bantu are often attacked and dismissed as Mushungulis, which means slave people.
After the original countries from which they were taken, Tanzania and Mozambique, pulled back from a commitment to take them in, the US in 1999 was willing to identify them as a persecuted group, eligible for resettlement.
Let me just sum up here, for those not quite following along: the US government is willing to take in 12,000 persecuted refugees, who are, notably, black and Muslim, and resettle them in the US, away from their persecuting hosts, away from the slavers who originally brought their people there, away from the other countries not willing or able to take them in.
That’s something I can be proud of. That’s something a lot different from the “US rapes world/US mongers war/US oppresses the innocent/US hates blacks/US hates Muslims” rhetoric that seems to dominate international headlines these days.
The Times can’t avoid getting in a few digs, of course.
Refugee officials here fear that the Bantu’s battle to adjust to a high-tech world will only be complicated by American ambivalence about immigrants since the terrorist attacks in the United States.
Yeah, such ambivalence that we’re still taking these folks in, and even accelerating the process.
In Somalia, they were in a predominantly Muslim country often described as a breeding ground for terrorists. The American government requires refugees from such hot spots to undergo a new series of security clearances before they can be resettled in the United States. The new system has delayed the arrival of thousands of refugees, leaving them to languish in camps where children often die of malnutrition.
We’re still taking them in. Yes, the delays have undoubtedly led to further deaths. Was anyone else going in and helping these people, or offering to take them in instead while the US government went through such (implied) unnecessary bureaucratic paranoia?
And then there’s this little gem of a paragraph (bolding mine):
The refugees watch snippets of American life on videos in class, and they marvel at the images of supermarkets filled with peppers and tomatoes and of tall buildings that reach for the clouds. But they know little about racism, poverty, the bone-chilling cold or the cities that will be chosen for them by refugee resettlement agencies.
Yeah, all that poverty and racism in the US will be a total, outrageous shock for people — well, people who have been enslaved, persecuted, rejected, targeted for rapes and killings, and forced to live in dismal and violent refugee camps where their children die of malnutrition.
I suppose a story that simply talked about how eager these folks are to leave Somalia, or how remarkable it is that the US is willing to help here, would have seem … unbalanced.
(via Andrea and Instapundit, among others)