Last update - 02:03 03/08/2007
MKs oppose deporting Darfur refugees to Egypt
By Mijal Grinberg
Dozens of legislators from across the political spectrum have urged the government to refrain from deporting to Egypt Sudanese refugees who enter Israel through the Sinai Peninsula. Channel 10 reported yesterday on Israeli soldiers who said they had witnessed Egyptian security officers executing several refugees.
"The refugees need protection and sanctuary, and the Jewish people's history as well as the values of democracy and humanity pose a moral imperative for us to give them that shelter," the MKs said in a petition.
The document has been signed by 63 MKs including Likud Chairman Benjamin Netanyahu, Labor's Amir Peretz, Hadash's Dov Khenin and the National Religious Party's Effi Eitam. The legislators propose to keep the refugees here until they are transferred to a safe haven abroad. MKs who signed the petition added suggestions such as building a high fence along the Egyptian border and stipulating quotas for the absorption of refugees.
The petition was further validated last night when Channel 10 produced testimonies from soldiers of the Israel Defense Forces serving near the Egyptian border. The soldiers said they had recently witnessed three refugees trying to cross the border into Israel.
As documented by IDF security cameras, Egyptian soldiers rushed to the scene and shot several asylum-seekers dead. One of them jumped on the wire fence in an attempt to make it over to the Israeli side, but was reportedly dragged back and bludgeoned to death by the Egyptians.
The petition against deporting Sudanese asylum-seekers back to Egypt is the initiative of a group of students from Jerusalem and Ben Gurion University in Be'er Sheva. Many of the students first encountered the refugees up close in the capital. The Sudanese refugees were housed there in tents after they had entered Israel through Egypt, after escaping the genocide in the Western Sudan region of Darfur.
In conversations with refugees, the students became convinced that deportation to Egypt was tantamount to a death sentence.
"Our student group was concerned with raising the public's awareness to the refugees' plight," activist Na'ama Katz said. "When they arrived in Wohl Rose Park in Jerusalem, we got a chance to actually see what shape they were in. We began gathering testimonies and interviewing them. They told us they had been persecuted in Egypt, and we understood what going back there meant for them."
According to Katz, many of the refugees told the students that they had suffered persecution and physical abuse in Egypt. One of them who wished to remain anonymous told Haaretz that at some point during his stay in Egypt, he and his family were afraid to leave home for fear of being beaten.
"After Sudanese refugees took to demonstrating in Egypt in 2005, it was no longer safe for us to go out on the street. We couldn't go to the police because they were part of it. The Egyptian police joined in on harassing us refugees," he said.
According to an inter-ministerial committee on refugees crossing into Israel from Sinai, about 1,400 such illegal immigrants are currently in Israel. The committee was headed by Interior Minister Roni Bar-On.
In talks last month on the African refugees, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert said that any refugee caught crossing into Israel from Egypt would be returned to that country through an official crossing. Olmert said the matter had been finalized in discussions with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.