Hundreds of thousands of people trapped in the misery of statelessness in Zimbabwe have been forced to the margins of society, and struggle to access education, healthcare and housing, Amnesty International said today in a new report. The organization interviewed descendants of migrant workers who settled in Zimbabwe pre-independence, as well as survivors of the Gukurahundi massacres of the 1980s; two groups locked out of citizenship by a cruel combination of discrimination and bureaucracy.

The report, We are like “stray animals”, details how Zimbabwe’s discriminatory and arbitrary nationality laws have left generations of migrant workers and their families marginalized in the only country they have ever called home. Meanwhile, thousands of survivors of the horrific Gukurahundi massacres, one of the bloodiest episodes of Robert Mugabe’s rule, are denied citizenship because they cannot provide the death certificates of relatives, which are required to prove Zimbabwean nationality.

Report by Amnesty International