Last update - 00:00 14/03/2008
Tel Aviv accuses state of breaking pledge to aid refugees
By Yigal Hai, Haaretz Correspondent
The Tel Aviv municipality on Thursday accused the Prime Minister's Office
of breaking its promise to transfer a state grant to finance apartments for African refugees in the city.
The refugees are now housed in dire conditions in shelters in the south of the city.
Deputy Mayor Yael Dayan, who is in charge of the refugees, said the PMO had undertaken several weeks ago to transfer a NIS 2,000 "adjustment fee" to each of some 400 refugees. So far not a single refugee has received the grant.
Dayan says the government also promised to provide work permits for the
refugees but failed to do so.
"We thought the agreements were binding but apparently we were wrong. The city was even willing to finance advances, assuming the government would pay it back, but the government did not. Nobody got a penny and the ministries are simply ignoring the situation," Dayan said.
Dayan wrote to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week that the African refugees' situation in Tel Aviv had reached the proportions of "a humanitarian disaster. Hundreds of refugees who fled from Africa, men, women, sick, hungry, exhausted people have gathered here. The situation in the shelters is beyond despair. Without government help and responsibility we are unable to cope and the consequences will be disastrous."
The PMO confirmed to Haaretz two weeks ago that it had agreed to transfer the grants.
The Tel Aviv officials said the grants would enable a number of refugees to rent an apartment together for a few months, during which they would try to find work.
Some 200 of the African refugees in the city have no housing or way to obtain food. The city is demanding immediate, albeit temporary, work permits from the government for refugees from Eritrea and southern Sudan some 700 people.
"Once the permits are granted we can close down the shelters and the workers will be absorbed in the community, either in Tel Aviv or other places," Dayan wrote to Olmert.
Some 60 refugees moved to Tel Aviv's Independence Park on Tuesday, where they are staying in deplorable conditions with no roof over their heads. Most of them had been staying in a building on Motzkin street in the city's Old North over the past three weeks until they were turned out on Monday.
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