May 21, 2003

DENVER, CO & PHOENIX, AZ - Global humanitarian agency Church World Service and its partner agencies will welcome the first two families of Somali Bantu refugees to be resettled in the U.S. on May 22 in Denver, Colorado, and Phoenix, Arizona. The Bantu families' arrival marks a new chapter in the life of a people who have lived in constant oppression for almost two centuries.

The two families are the first of a group of approximately 12,000 Somali Bantu that the U.S. State Department has approved for resettlement in nearly 50 U.S. cities over the next two years.

One Bantu family of five will arrive in Denver on Thursday, where they will be settled by Ecumenical Refugee Services (ERS) of Denver, working in coordination with CWS Immigration and Refugee Program (IRP) coordinators and the Denver church that has agreed to co-sponsor the family, St. Francis Cabrini Catholic Church.

In Phoenix on that same day, Church World Service partner the Lutheran Social Ministry of the Southwest will greet another family of nine Somali Bantu, along with a welcoming community interfaith group including the city's new Somali Association and the refugees' host churches in Phoenix, the Congregational Church of Tempe and The Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque of Tempe.

After almost two centuries of slavery, persecution, and dispersion across Africa and the Middle East – and, more recently, a decade of life in refugee camps – "the Somali Bantu come to us as a very special group of people," says Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program Director Joe Roberson.

"The Bantu have proved their adaptability under all circumstances, but in their early days in the U.S., they will need solid support as they adapt to their new lives and a vastly different culture."

"That's the strength of CWS' network of faith-based and other community organizations," Roberson adds. "It's the capacity and willingness of CWS' affiliate agencies and local communities of faith who become hosts to the refugees that help guide even the least acculturated through the system's processes, then into the education, training and employment they need to become contributing people in their communities."

CWS expects to resettle more than 900 Somali Bantu by the end of the program, with about 500 over the next 12 months, and the first hundred arriving in the next few months.

Up to 12,000 Somali Bantu were approved by the U.S. State Department in 1999 for resettlement in about 50 U.S. cities. However, following 9/11 and tightened U.S. security, refugee admissions dropped from 85,000 in 1999 to a trickling10,500 in mid-2002.

Caught in the squeeze, the Somali Bantu remained in suspension, living in Kakuma Refugee Camp in Kenya during the past year. Many Somali Bantu young people have never known anything but life within a refugee camp.

With a history of oppression and slavery since the 1800s, the Somali Bantu - a rural, agricultural people denied education – have lived at the lowest levels of African society. From their home in East Africa, the Bantu were traded on the Zanzibar slave market and scattered across Africa and the Middle East. After slavery was abolished, the Bantu in Somalia continued to be persecuted and work in subservient jobs.

During the 1990 Somali civil war, most Somali Bantu fled to Kenya, where they remained in Dadaab Refugee camp for a decade – along with Somali refugees who had been the Bantu's oppressors – while the United Nations High Commission on Refugees unsuccessfully sought a home for them.

In 1999, the U.S. agreed to accept 12,000 of the Somali Bantu, moving them from Dadaab to Kakuma Camp some 900 miles away. Considered one of the best run refugee camps, Kakuma is home to about 80,000 people from various African countries, cultures and ethnicity.

But the Bantu's arrival in the U.S., expected in mid-2002, was delayed due to continued homeland security pressures on immigration. Now the U.S. State Department has assured the first 1,200 entry and resettlement over the next year, beginning this month.

Church World Service Executive Director Rev. John L. McCullough says the global humanitarian agency is "pleased and relieved that the doors are finally opening on the possibility of a better life for the Bantu."

But he notes, "We're still deeply concerned over the rapid decline in numbers of refugees that the U.S. is admitting." McCullough says that "admitting 12,000 of Africa's most profoundly and historically deprived people" doesn't let the U.S. off the hook for maintaining its foundational role as a place of hope and asylum for the world's oppressed."

There are currently 19.8 million refugees, 941,000 asylum seekers, and 20 to 25 million internally displaced people worldwide. And less than one percent of the world's uprooted are addressed by resettlement programs.

Present in more than 80 countries, Church World Service administers refugee processing programs in Nairobi, Kenya, and Accra, Ghana, through an agreement with the U.S. Department of State.

A global humanitarian agency of 36 Protestant, Orthodox and Anglican denominations, CWS works with indigenous organizations supporting sustainable self-help development, meeting emergency needs, aiding refugees, and advocating to address the root causes of poverty and powerlessness.

For more information about the Somali Bantu, the Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program, or its partner agencies in Denver and Phoenix, visit:

www.churchworldservice.org; www.culturalorientation.net/bantu/; www.ERSden.org; www.lsmsaz.org.

Church World Service