African Unification Front
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THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF AFRICAN CONFLICT
Africans seeking political asylum outside of the African Union number in the tens of thousands per year. The conflict zones afflicted by civil strife and war contribute the vast majority of the asylum seekers. The European Union, Scandinavia, Canada, Australia and the USA recieve most of the asylum seekers from the African Union.
The vast majority of politically oppressed asylum seekers from Africa forego the process of seeking asylum and chose to immigrate under different procedures, using student visas or foreign worker statutes. Moreover, the US has a rotary for supplying green cards, in addition to certain other less restrictive methods of applying for immigration.
The AU territory with the highest number of asylum seekers in the last decade is Somalia with 5,020 people seeking refugee status in the UK alone in 2001. This number is less than in 2000 which had a record number of 7,495 Somali applicants (for the UK).
Of all the AU republics Uganda has the highest number of asylum seekers relative to its population size. The number of Ugandans seeking political asylum in the UK in 2000 was the largest figure in the last ten years, according to a new Home Office statistical report released in the UK (3rd week of sept 2001).
The AU republic with the biggest percentage increase in the number of asylum seekers was Zimbabwe. In 1998, before the current political turmoil, the figure was very low, only 80 people sought asylum in the UK, the country with the biggest number of Zimbabwean refugees outside the African Union.
The number of resettlement applications to countries such as the United States and Australia number in the hundred of thousands annually. Very few are been accepted. For many asylum seekers life is bound by the live fencing that surrounds the several dozen refugee camps scattered across the African Union.
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