Last update - 02:15 20/08/2007
PM aide: AG Mazuz okayed deportation of African refugees
By Barak Ravid, Mijal Grinberg and Yoav Stern
Israel yesterday deported 50 Africans to Egypt, for the first time since Prime Minister Ehud Olmert obtained Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's consent to such a move last month. According to the Israel Defense Forces, most of the deportees were from Sudan's war-torn Darfur region.
Human rights organizations blasted the deportations, saying that the Africans should have first been given the chance to request asylum in Israel. But Olmert's office insisted the deportations were legal and had been approved by Attorney General Menachem Mazuz.
All of the deportees had been caught by army patrols over the weekend and held on IDF bases in the South. Before dawn yesterday, they were bused to Egypt via the Nitzana crossing.
According to government sources, the deportations were in line with the internationally accepted legal principle of "hot return," under which infiltrators can be returned to the country from which they crossed the border shortly after they are caught. Olmert's office added that the only reason the procedure had not been used before was foot-dragging on the part of Israeli agencies that were supposed to coordinate the deportations with the Egyptians.
Sudanese genocide
However, human rights organizations did not buy the government's argument. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel, for instance, noted that the deportees included "refugees from Sudan, where genocide is occurring," yet the government made no effort to determine whether they ought to be given asylum. MK Dov Khenin (Hadash), who has submitted a bill to regulate the treatment of refugees, charged that the deportations violated international law, because Israel has no guarantee that Egypt will not return them to Sudan. Eitan Schwartz, who chairs the nonprofit Committee for the Darfur Refugees, said: "It is inconceivable that refugees who fled atrocities and genocide and sought the protection of the Jewish people should be returned just as they came."
In response, a senior official in Olmert's office said: "Anyone who has reservations about the legality of the process is invited to apply to the attorney general, who participated in all the discussions and gave all the legal authorizations."
According to the Prime Minister's Office, there are currently 2,500 infiltrators from Africa in Israel, including some 500 refugees from Darfur. Olmert ordered the Absorption Ministry yesterday to prepare a plan for absorbing the existing Darfur refugees, but said that any Darfurians who arrived in the future would be sent back to Egypt. The other 2,000 infiltrators will also soon be sent back to Egypt.
Olmert also thanked Mubarak for honoring the agreement they reached last month. About 10 days ago, the Egyptian Foreign Ministry announced it would not allow the return of any non-Egyptian infiltrators, raising doubts about whether Olmert's plan to deport the infiltrators could in fact be carried out.