Egypt Is Uneasy Stop For Sudanese Refugees

Before dawn, the police marched into the camp wielding sticks and truncheons. Some refugees pulled poles from the tents to fight back, witnesses said. Some of the children were huddled under the collapsed tarps, Tonga recalled. "The police just marched in and stepped on everything and everyone," he said.

Tonga said he was hit on the back of the head and knocked unconscious. He awoke in one of several military camps outside Cairo where 1,000 detained refugees were bused.

Earlier this month, the last 156 of about 2,000 migrants arrested during the December violence were released from jail. "The Egyptian authorities have set free all the Sudanese who were transported to the detention centers after putting an end to their strike," a Foreign Ministry official said. They were illegal immigrants, the official told reporters in Cairo, but would not be deported "for the sake of not scattering the Sudanese families who live in Egypt."

The refugees think they lost. Amer Gaber, who belongs to a group called Sudanese Refugee Voice and helped organize the protest, said, "We got some attention, but internationally, there was not much reaction."

U.N. refugee officials, whose office is a half-block from the scene of the violence, are fighting accusations that, by urging the police in, they were responsible for the massacre.

Astrid van Genderen Stort, the UNHCR spokeswoman in Cairo, said demands for resettlement are unrealistic; countries, not the United Nations, make the decision to admit individuals. "It is not a gift that we can pull out of our pocket," she said. Repatriation to Sudan is voluntary, van Genderen Stort said. She noted that UNHCR resettled 3,700 Sudanese out of Egypt last year.

UNHCR and refugee leaders had reached an agreement on Dec. 17 to review asylum requests and provide new aid, but some demonstrators refused, the agreement fell apart and the protest continued, van Genderen Stort said. "People began to think that the longer they were on the square, the more likely they could get out of Egypt," she said. "They became like children who thought they could get something just because they wanted it."

Barbara Harrell-Bond, a visiting professor of refugee studies at the American University of Cairo, criticized UNHCR for failing to grant Sudanese blanket refugee status in Egypt and for suggesting that they could voluntarily return to Sudan. "Return to what?" she said. "There are internally displaced people in Sudan as it is. Sudan is not stable. The fact that refugees don't go back indicates they can't go back."

The Egyptian government maintained that it did the right thing by clearing the square.

Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit said Egypt "dealt with the sit-in with wisdom and patience." Egypt's Interior Ministry said police were protecting UNHCR, which it said received threats of attack on commission offices and staff.

In Tonga's mind, such statements demonstrate the weight of discrimination and intolerance. "We need to be settled somewhere else," he said.

As a metalworker, Tonga said, he earned the equivalent of $2 a day, about half of what an Egyptian would be paid, but he left his job because he was afraid. "The Egyptians hate me because I worked for less than them," he said. "God, how I wish I could get paid what they do. But we are discriminated against."