Repatriation, or refoulement? The long shadow cast by Tanzania’s refugee resettlement policy

Mishamo Refugee Camp in Western Tanzania, housing over 62,000 Burundian refugees (2015). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

By Briggs Collins Murray

Long-term, durable solutions to refugee resettlement are hard to come by.  And yet, after thirty years of gradual bilateral diplomacy—in conjunction with the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR), which governs and regulates global refugee movements—the governments of Tanzania and Burundi claimed to arrive at exactly that.  

In Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, at the 26th meeting of the Tripartite Commission on the Voluntary Repatriation of Burundian Refugees, Tanzania, Burundi, and the UNHCR announced a deal to accelerate voluntary repatriation of Burundian refugees from Tanzania to Burundi, in line with standards protected by international law.  For the 145,000 Burundian refugees living in Tanzania, this deal inspired hope anew: many had been domiciled in refugee camps for decades, and were ready for a permanent solution.  

One of the UNHCR’s preferred solutions is voluntary repatriation, or the process of returning to one’s home country by choice, since it places decisionmaking in the hands of individual refugees while reducing the number of refugees in encampments.  This is different from refoulement, when a refugee is forcibly deported to a place where their life or freedom is in jeopardy.  Refoulement is illegal under international refugee law, and one of the UNHCR’s main roles is protecting refugees against it. 

In December 2025, Tanzania, Burundi, and the UNHCR set a goal to voluntarily repatriate 3,000 refugees from Tanzania to Burundi per week.  Yet, by the early months of 2026, Tanzania had well exceeded the weekly target, having recorded around 8,000 repatriations per week.  At the same time, UNHCR reports documented the demolition of hospitals, schools, and shelters in Nduta and Nyarugusu, the two largest refugee camps in Tanzania.  Various independent news organizations like SOS Médias Burundi have denounced “alarming” conditions in the camps, with reports detailing “overcrowded departure centres”, “arbitrary arrests”, and even abductions “by unidentified men in civilian clothes”.  

In its pursuit of a long-term solution, Tanzania’s aggressive posture has called into question the legality of its actions.  However, the current refugee policy of camp internment had not always been the case.  In fact, these camps are relatively new, having been constructed in the mid-1990s.  So, what had Tanzania’s policy towards refugees looked like before the camps?  Taking full stock of Tanzania’s postcolonial history reveals how refugee resettlement has changed since the country’s independence in 1964, from immediate local integration to reactive, stopgap solutions.

The tenure of the first President, Mwalimu Julius Kambarage Nyerere (1964-84), was remarkable for the revolutionary restructuring of Tanzanian society.  An avowed Pan-Africanist and anti-colonialist, Nyerere fought fiercely against any semblance of neo-colonial control by British industrialists.  His signature policy, Ujamaa, or African socialism, is highly contentious among historians for its murky results: although resulting in a sclerotic economy, Ujamaa is credited with molding a national identity that has prevented ethnic conflict in a colonially-drawn state where 120 ethnic groups are located.  Such a national identity was imposed through forced displacement to “socialist villages”, where ethnic groups formerly living only among their own peoples were forcibly moved to multiethnic towns and villages, thereby mandating integration.  During this time period, refugee crises in neighboring countries—all of whose borders were arbitrarily fabricated by colonial cartographers, priming these states for ethnic infighting—led to many wakimbizi (lit. “runners” or people forced to flee) entering into Tanzania.  However, in the spirit of Pan-African and socialist solidarity, Nyerere made it a point to resettle wakimbizi into socialist villages, supporting them with land, education, and health services—a resettlement approach that integrates refugees into local communities immediately, altogether rejecting temporary camps.

After a cascade of crises led to the resignation of President Nyerere in 1984, his successor, Ali Hassan Mwinyi, spearheaded privatization and market liberalization efforts.  Gradually, the economy transformed from a state-led command economy to a capitalist system, leading to substantial annual growth in gross domestic product.  Simultaneously, the Great Lakes Refugee Crises of the mid-1990s—where over 2 million Rwandans fled arguably the most horrific genocide in modern history—sparked a change in refugee policy.  In the span of a mere 100 days in mid-1994, militant extremists slaughtered around 800,000 ethnic minority Rwandans, often using household machetes to inflict fatal blows.  In that summer alone, over half a million Rwandans fled into Tanzania.  To manage this unprecedented refugee crisis, it had been decided that wakimbizi entering into Tanzania would no longer be resettled and integrated into local communities.  Rather, they would be interned in refugee camps, managed by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR).  These refugee camps soon ballooned to the size of cities.  The most notorious, Nyarugusu Camp, is currently home to around 150,000 wakimbizi.  In total, Tanzania hosts over 210,000 refugees and asylum-seekers, almost all of whom reside in these camps.  

Although the scale of the Great Lakes Refugee Crisis can certainly be understood to warrant a novel policy towards refugee resettlement, it also must be noted that the change in Tanzania’s political economy—away from Ujamaa, and towards privatization and the free-market—had contributed to the abandonment of Ujamaa’s integrative resettlement approach.  As the government relinquished its power to centrally plan communities, it also lost its administrative capacity to integrate refugees therein.  Though the Tanzanian economy is indisputably more prosperous, it is also clear that refugees have bore the brunt of this policy shift.  

Refugee advocates and governmental authorities have long recognized that domiciling refugees in camps for an indefinite period of time is politically untenable.  Recently, the Tanzanian government has become creative in its search for durable solutions.  In 2007, having at this point lost the political and administrative expertise for local resettlement, Tanzania partnered with the UNHCR and Burundi to implement the Tanzanian Comprehensive Solutions Strategy (TANCOSS), giving a certain subset of Burundian wakimbizi a binary choice: assent to Tanzanian naturalization, or be repatriated to Burundi.  Although 79% of the over 200,000 wakimbizi ultimately chose Tanzanian citizenship—representing the largest one-time naturalization in human history—there still had been no plan in place to successfully resettle and integrate them.  One elder described his naturalization as a “marriage with no certificate” since the camp was still a closed-off space in 2018, over one decade after TANCOSS’s implementation.  

In the past few years, the government has become even more aggressive in its attempts to repatriate refugees.  Despite TANCOSS, in November 2025 over 140,000 Burundian wakimbizi remained inside Tanzania.  The second-largest refugee camp, Nduta, was shuttered in March 2026, forcing those residing there to relocate to Nyarugusu.  The UNHCR has publicly warned that “refugee shelters have been demolished, forcing people to take temporary refuge in already overcrowded departure centres”.  This is but one reason why the UNHCR has shared concerns about “forced returns and coercive measures” in Tanzanian refugee policy.  One can’t help but wonder whether maintaining Nyerere’s policy of intentional integration during and after the Great Lakes Crisis would have prevented the quagmire into which the government has now stumbled.  Now, in its dereliction of durable resettlement solutions like those from the Ujamaa era, Tanzania finds itself blurring the line between repatriation and refoulement.