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 أخبار المأساة فى الصحافة العالمية
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After Cairo Police Attack, Sudanese Have Little but Rage
By MICHAEL SLACKMAN
Published: January 3, 2006
CAIRO, Jan. 2 - Hundreds of Sudanese have been released from police detention camps onto the streets of this city with no money, no place to live - and in many cases, no shoes - three days after the riot police attacked a squatter camp set up as a protest to press the United Nations to relocate the migrants to another country.
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Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times
Passports and other identification papers were collected on Monday from Sudanese refugees crowded into a courtyard at a Catholic church in Cairo.
Shawn Baldwin for The New York Times
Abdul Aziz Muhammad Ahmed showed a passport picture of his infant daughter, Asma, who died Friday as the police attacked protesters.
The walled-in courtyard of Sacred Heart Church here was packed Monday with men and women searching for a blanket, a meal, a place to live, word of a lost relative, anything that might help rebuild a life after the police charged their camp on Friday. The attack officially left 26 dead, including seven small children, and many others injured.
"It is a terrible situation," said the Rev. Simon Mbuthia, a priest at Sacred Heart, a Roman Catholic church, as he considered the crowd of people looking for help. "The government here has done nothing."
Abdul Aziz Muhammad Ahmed, 29, sat shivering on the steps just beneath the metal door leading to Father Mbuthia's offices. "I'm not sick," he said through a far-off gaze. "My daughter, Asma, was killed." Asma was 9 months old, and her uncle said he dropped her when the police clubbed him.
"I haven't told my wife yet," Mr. Ahmed said. "She is already sick."
The government waited for three months before sending the police out to empty the squatter camp, in one of Cairo's more upscale neighborhoods.
The police yelled at the squatters through bullhorns, ordering them to leave, and shot water cannons into the crowd when they refused. After the Sudanese remained defiant, the police attacked.
So many were left dead, and the international condemnation was so embarrassing, that President Hosni Mubarak has told the attorney general to investigate.
But the government's official position is that the Sudanese were to blame. Magdy Rady, the government's chief spokesman, said the Sudanese injured their own people by trampling those who collapsed, and he said they also attacked the police, injuring more than 70 officers.
The Sudanese were unarmed and many were barefoot. The police were wearing riot gear, including helmets with face shields, and wielded truncheons.
"We are sorry," Mr. Rady said. "What happened is unfortunate, it is sad, but it was not the intention of the police. The Sudanese pushed us to do this. They do not want even to settle in Egypt. They want to move to another country. We did not know what else to do. It was a very difficult situation."
After clearing the park, the police took all of the Sudanese, about 3,000, to detention camps. where they were asked for identification papers. Those with passports or United Nations documents allowing them to be in Egypt were being released.
Those without documents, or those who had twice been denied refugee status by the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, would probably be sent back to Sudan, Mr. Rady said. Officials acknowledged that many people had lost their documents during the violence.
"I do not understand," Mr. Rady said. "What were they fighting for?"
The Sudanese who had lived together, huddled in a small park in the center of a busy city square, said they were fighting for a better life. Their ultimate goal was to go abroad, to be declared refugees and then sent to live in Canada, the United States or Europe.
But many of them said they would have been satisfied if the United Nations had merely paid attention to their needs, their demands and their rights.
All of the migrants had approval to remain in Egypt, at least for a time. In 2004 the United Nations stopped processing their applications for refugee status, which could have given them a chance to be relocated to the West.
The refugee agency, contending that most of the migrants would not qualify because the part of Sudan they left is no longer at war, said that its decision was in the best interests of the Sudanese.
Many of the Sudanese said that life in Egypt was especially difficult for black people because of widespread racism. And the Sudanese saw the refugee agency's action as a closed door, another indignity.
Even now, a United Nations spokeswoman said that the agency wanted to help all of the people who had been in the park to find a new place to live, and that the agency would help with the first month's rent. But many of the refugees said they doubted the agency's sincerity.
At Sacred Heart Church, Father Mbuthia said the only signs of the refugee agency were the blankets that had been purchased with United Nations money and distributed through a Catholic charity.
New York Times
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Re: أخبار المأساة فى الصحافة العالمية (Re: Masaoud Ali)
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CAIRO, Egypt (AP) -- More than half the Sudanese migrants who were violently removed from a Cairo protest camp will be deported by ship to their homeland, Egyptian authorities said Tuesday.
Human rights organizations have roundly condemned last week's riot police operation, in which at least 27 people died.
On Tuesday, the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees expressed surprised about the deportation order and demanded a clarification from Egyptian authorities.
''We were given assurances they (authorities) would not'' deport them ''as of this point in time,'' said UNHCR spokeswoman Astrid van Genderen Stort.
But Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Fatma el-Zahraa Etman told The Associated Press that 654 Sudanese would be sent home because ''they were either found to be illegal immigrants or refugees who had violated security conditions.'' Egyptian law bans sit-ins and demonstrations unless previously approved by the Interior Ministry.
Cabinet spokesman Magdy Rady said those detained after the brutal clearing of the square were held for ''vetting'' to see who had a right to remain in Egypt and that it was the government's policy to deport those without valid documents.
The migrants do not want to return to Sudan. But the UNHCR has ruled that many of them do not qualify for resettlement because the war in southern Sudan has ended.
The crisis began Sept. 29, when the migrants established a camp in a tiny Cairo park in an upscale neighborhood to protest what they saw as a failure by the UNHCR to help resettle them. It came to a head before dawn Friday, when police evicted more than 1,000 of them from the site.
Afterward, they were kept in detention camps in or near the Egyptian capital. Those not slated for deportation were released Monday.
The Egyptian government has blamed the migrants for refusing orders to leave the park.
The Interior Ministry has said just 12 of the Sudanese squatters were killed in the melee, in which police also doused the protesters with water cannons. The ministry claimed the victims died when they stampeded. It said more than 70 police were wounded.
Security officials, speaking on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak to reporters, have said, however, that the death toll was 25.
On Tuesday, Astrid van Genderen Stort, spokeswoman for the United Nations High Commissioner on Refugees, told The Associated Press that morgue officials now report 27 dead. Boutros Deng, a protest leader, has said seven children were among the dead.
At a news conference earlier Tuesday, van Genderen Stort described the deaths as ''very sad'' but declined to blame the police.
''We are not blaming anyone,'' van Genderen Stort said. The police operation ''went as it went and it ended in a tragic way. It is very sad that so many people had to die and get injured from both sides,'' she said.
''We urged the police to deal with the situation in a peaceful manner,'' van Genderen Stort said.
The Egyptian government has claimed the UNHCR asked authorities to bring the protest to an end. Reporters who were at the police operation saw riot police wade into the crowded camp swinging truncheons and beating the refugees.
The UNHCR has said the Sudanese threatened some of its workers when the migrants were not granted official status as refugees, which would have allowed them to be resettled in the United States, Canada and Australia.
Van Genderen Stort said the migrants had rejected compromises offered by the UNHCR and Egyptian authorities, including a one-time stipend for housing costs.
''There was a dream in their ######### to go to another country ... and that was impossible,'' she said. ''They just wanted to hear about resettlement.''
Asked about the fate of those who have been released, van Genderen Stort said they should simply carry on with their lives and that the UNHCR would continue to provide them with basic health care and education for children
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Muna Khugali
فيس بوك
تويتر
انستقرام
يوتيوب
بنتيريست