Foreign students stuck at Ukraine border complain of racism

Shegyni. Jean-Jacques Kabeya is furious: like thousands of foreign students in Ukraine -- from Africa, Asia and the Middle East -- he has been stopped from leaving the country by its border guards.

He and several other foreigners alleged racist treatment by both the border guards and ordinary Ukrainians in interviews to AFP.

Two days after fleeing the bombing around the eastern city of Kharkiv, Kabeya reached the checkpoint at Shegyni, at the border with Poland, on Sunday evening.

But the soldiers and security guards there turned him back, said the 30-year-old student studying to become a pharmacist.

"They told me 'You're going to stay here, you're fleeing the war, stay here; you are going to fight with us -- you're not leaving, least of all you blacks'," he said.

Now, after 36 hours waiting in vain to get through, he was back at the train station in the western city of Lviv.

There he found some compatriots from the Democratic Republic of Congo, who took him under their wing.

"It's a catastrophe!" said Kabeya, adding that he was still trying to find a way out.

Ukraine is a popular destination for foreign students, with tens of thousandths heading there to study.

But other foreign students in Lviv had similar stories to tell, and the governments of Nigeria and South Africa have already called for better treatment for their citizens.

The African Union issued a statement Monday expressing concern at what appeared to be "shockingly racist" treatment of foreign students.

Some countries did however report that a few dozen of their citizens had managed to leave the country.

Separate lines
At Shegyni border post on Tuesday morning, there were still several hundred people, muffled up against the cold, queueing patiently to make the crossing.

They were from Pakistan, India, Algeria, DR Congo, Cameroon, Ghana and Algeria. Some said they had spent four nights there, with temperatures dropping as low as -10° (14 degrees Fahrenheit), in a desperate bid to leave.

On the other side of the road was another queue, reserved for Ukrainians -- mainly women and children as most men had stayed behind to fight.

That line was moving more quickly.

"All of us, we've got our papers," said Mesum Ahmed, a 23-year-old computer student from Pakistan. "Because we're foreigners, they are treating us like dogs.