Recently more than 400 legally documented refugees that were chased out of their homes were forced to live and sleep out on the pavement in front of the Home Affairs Refugee reception centre in Che Guevara Road in Durban.
JUNE 30 has come and gone, and left in its wake a number of harsh realities that we are now faced with as a nation.
The first is that a humanitarian crisis has been unfolding across the country with tens of thousands of internally displaced persons, many of them undocumented foreign nationals and others legal refugees, gathering at various sites either having been chased from where they were staying by a bunch of vigilante mobs or they left on their own, afraid for their lives, grabbing whatever little they could.
Several media reports have indicated that foreign nationals, both documented and undocumented, have been targeted in various ways - their homes damaged, their belongings stolen and in some cases, they were attacked directly, sustaining severe injuries or even losing their lives.
This has been going on for several weeks and has increased in the aftermath of June 30 as people escape to try to get to a place of safety. This has resulted in people gathering in open spaces without shelter, often forced to sleep out in the cold without food, water and sanitation until civil society groups and humanitarian relief organisations step in to try and provide these basic things which are necessary for human survival.
