Refugee Rights in the Mother of the World: Sudanese Refugees and Civil Rights in Egypt

Previously: Egyptian-Sudanese Unity & Darfur in Diaspora (Part 1), Identity In An Egyptian Cafe & A Sudanese Restaurant (Part 2), and Sudan’s Lost Generation (Part 3).

On the correlative topics of Sudanese migrants in Egypt, and Darfur in diaspora, media representation emphasizes the theme of neglect overwhelmingly. For example, an Associated Press article released in December of 2013 revealed a glimpse of life for African refugees, who self-sacrificed to the intensively in serving their community through activism and creativity, risking their personal safety in the process, such as exemplified by Abdel Rahman. Yet, the fate of Mohammed Hussein Bahnas, the Sudanese guitarist, singer, artist, poet, and novelist, was not as forthcoming. The story emerged to report his death, by exposure on the streets of Cairo. Despite a successful exhibition in France, and prospects in Cairo, two years of impoverishment led to his untimely end. Though Bahnas did not pass before contributing to the revolutionary expulsion of Mubarak, and his thirty-year farce of a democracy, with his graffiti murals.

With respect to international attention directed towards Darfur, the Huffington Post reported, “Darfur: The Genocide the World Got Tired of” in August of this year. One day prior to publishing the article, tens of thousands of displaced civilians, largely women and children, were attacked by military and security forces of the dominant national regime of Sudan, the National Congress Party (NCP) led by President Omar Al-Bashir. Those who were not arrested, and threatened with torture were beaten, and robbed. The humiliation is enough to writhe the stomachs of any thinking person, all the more so the immediate relations of the survived forced to live abroad, without the means to help their people. Truly, the appalling neglect of Darfur in diaspora, especially in Egypt, where so many have fled since the beginning of the conflict, is part of the genocide, albeit in a slower, while equally torturous form.

Imagine 140 heavily armed vehicles rolling into El Salam camp, where on August 5^th countless people were unprotected by the UN/African Union (UNAMID), which has vowed, principally, to protect civilians. Ironically, the UNAMID headquarters was only a few miles away from El Salam, in Nyala, the capital of Darfur. UNAMID has often been restricted from accessing scenes where atrocities have been committed by the state, adding to terrifying lack of security for so many tens of thousands of innocents. Silence, and impunity is, in such contexts, a prerequisite to the stability of UN, and NGO missions. While the UN looks to UNAMID for field knowledge, the indigenous Radio Dabanga is often the only reliable, and consistent source of awareness for outsiders.

The Huffington Post reported that the UN, and its Department of Peacekeeping Operations “simply wants to get rid of this embarrassing and resource-consuming failure”. While Russia and China supplies weapons to Khartoum, and the US, and EU stands by with their hands in their egregiously fat pockets, attacks on displaced persons camps have increased in the past decade. As Smith College Professor Eric Reeves wrote in the insightfully provocative Post article, “Darfur has been abandoned by the international community…attacks on unarmed and innocent civilians continue to be a daily reality, without any end in sight.”

The example of incompetent humanitarian protections in Darfur does not stand alone, however, as it represents only one of many failures beholden to U.S. foreign aid in Africa. The self-interested programs of American goodwill are essentially a strategy to prevent the African political elite from bending over backwards towards greater oppositional extremism. Author, and journalist Nick Turse, now also a fellow at the Nation Institute, recently published a scathing account of African-U.S. relations, titling the slew of abandoned humanitarian aid projects in the region as among the “monuments to U.S. failure” around the world. He even notes the futility of U.S.-led “community relations activities” and other “low-cost activities” such as “English language discussion groups” as had been integral to the community-based work of Abdel Rahman at the El-Wafaa Refugee Culture Center in Cairo.

Following humanitarian intervention efforts led by the U.S., accountability, and efficacy are among the casualties of violent civil conflicts that have ravaged African societies throughout the modern era. In his article on the mutual failure of American efforts to win over the hearts and minds of Africa, Turse refers explicitly to the mismanagement of $1.3 million funded by American taxpayers for schools and a clinic in East Africa. In the face of such blatant powerlessness to affect positive change at the source of the conflict, the humanitarian perspective on displaced persons, both internally, and regionally, is arguably more a subject of controversy than of action.

The entire veil of the humanitarian West into the 21^st century is increasingly exposed. Meanwhile, strategies led by the peoples immediately affected by such ongoing human rights catastrophes continue to petition assistance from the international community, particularly the resourceful and empathic communities of the West. The ability to be led by community-based advocates in diaspora is a rare, and humbling feat on behalf of Western humanitarianism, which is often characterized by either inadequacy, or self-importance, and too many times by both compounded.

“Humanitarianism after the event savours of hypocrisy as much as of philanthropy,” wrote Jeremy Seabrook, a seasoned author, journalist and specialist on topics concerning social and development issues. The themes pertaining to refugees are often considered “after the event” and are vulnerable to disregard as such, marred by humanitarian hypocrisy, and political apathy. As the most recent perpetrations of state violence in Darfur foretell, displaced persons are an integral part of the ongoing humanitarian crises. The displaced persons of the El Salam, Dereig and Shangil Tobaya camps who were brutally attacked in August, are inextricably related to the fate of forced migrants, asylum seekers and the refugees of Egypt, all of whom represent an ever mounting transnational demand for refugee rights in Egypt, as globally.

In Egypt, and surrounding regions, there is an overall chauvinistic, authoritarian climate of power politics, so pervasive as to influence daily life, especially within the regulated, and policed urban infrastructure. Egyptian society has maintained itself through the Mubarak era, and carrying over to today through overt military rule, by an informal network based on ethnic, religious and culturally apt, politically conservative identifications with the status quo. Deviation from the norm, which stigmatizes African refugees by default, is met with the posturing of power, highly inflated in the midst of the traditionally U.S.-endorsed militarized, police state.

A manifestation of this occurred on the night of March 23, 2014, when Abdel Rahman walked down Nur Ed-Din Street through a busy Cairo neighborhood, only to wind up in a police office with a smashed head, and a testimony of victimization by physical assault. As filed by the official police report an hour after the incident occurred, Abdel Rahman suffered contusions to the head, enduring physical and verbal abuse as an unknown assailant attempted to rob him. (Thomas A. Leddy-Cecere, who holds an M.A. in Arabic linguistics and is a PhD candidate with the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Texas, Austin, translated the report from the Arabic.)

Interestingly, the Egyptian police investigation held discretion with respect to important details that had taken place in the course of the assault, battery and attempted robbery. The assailant had intended to rob the national passport of Abdel Rahman specifically, as the criminal left his mobile phone, and money unhandled. The local police refused to officially report this detail, and also denied Abdel Rahman the means to more tangible testimonial evidence, such as access to medical services, and also restricted his testimony to an oral account. When a foreigner stands before a criminalized Egyptian citizen, the justice system leans brashly towards the protection of the Egyptian national.

In Egypt, and surrounding regions, there is an overall chauvinistic, authoritarian climate of power politics, so pervasive as to influence daily life, especially within the regulated, and policed urban infrastructure. Egyptian society has maintained itself through the Mubarak era, and carrying over to today through overt military rule, by an informal network based on ethnic, religious and culturally apt, politically conservative identifications with the status quo. Deviation from the norm, which stigmatizes African refugees by default, is met with the posturing of power, highly inflated in the midst of the traditionally U.S.-endorsed militarized, police state.

In many ways, the struggle for refugee rights in Egypt is likened to the ensuing debate in the wake of civil uprisings in Ferguson, Missouri. The celebrated American historian and dissident Howard Zinn chronicled the relationship between African-American civil rights in America, and African independence movements, as he reported from the American South at the height of the civil rights movement. Yet, in his work, he emphasized the local, grassroots cause as primary in advancing the efforts of the people toward collective harmonization in the name of justice, and therefore, rights. For example, the Greensboro sit-in, Zinn wrote, was a more substantial prerequisite to civil rights than solidarity with the newly independent African nations, and more importantly, the sit-in was also more significant than the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision, because it was an effort of the people, by the people, for the people.

The people’s struggle for refugee rights in Egypt, however, lingers as an exhausting abstraction, with grave political, legislative, economic and sociocultural implications. Egyptian nationals are increasingly burdened by flagrant civil oppressions, as regional instability only exacerbates conditions for everyone in the wake of ongoing state-led attacks on internally displaced persons in Sudan. Over the years, Human Rights Watch has issued numerous landmark studies on the topic of refugee rights in Egypt, specifically. In the four years leading up to the Arab Spring, from 2006 to 2010, the issues steadily worsened, from the detainment of protestors to forcible deportations.

Detainment, especially by inhumane means, is inevitably linked to the more pressing and volatile issue of forcible deportation. In 2008, and 2010, Human Rights Watch published reports on the need to exercise greater protections for Sudanese refugees in Cairo facing forced deportation. Also immediately linked is the struggle for peace in Darfur, culminating in the 2005 Comprehensive Peace Agreement. The unabated conflict in Western Sudan was unquestionably interrelated with the civil uprising of Sudanese migrants in Egypt, in protest of the callousness of UNHCR immediately following the Agreement, which led the UNHCR Cairo office to cease conducting resettlement designation (RSD) interviews.

The Agreement was signed between the Government of the Republic of the Sudan and the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement/Sudan People’s Liberation Army on the 9^th of January. By the end of the year, 27 Sudanese migrants would be killed by Egyptian riot police, fearing for their lives amid rumors of forced deportations. While they were not repatriated, their forced removal from Mustafa Mahmoud, where they had staged a sit-in since September, cost them dearly. Soon afterwards, before the year ended, Human Rights Watch advocated for a police investigation into the killing of Sudanese migrants at the sit-in, among them a four-year-old girl.

According to Human Rights Watch, not only has Egypt historically made reservations to the UN Geneva Convention, obliging independent nations to respect refugee rights by the standards and principles of international law, but also that Egypt recurrently breaks that law. Forced deportations among the Sudanese refugees of Egypt are a case in point. Despite official recognition by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, migrants protected by the UN are still subject to persecution in Egypt. In May of 2008, Human Rights Watch reported the forced deportation of eleven Sudanese refugees officially recognized by the UN. Among those detained for deportation were two minors, who were among thirty others arrested in Ain Shams, and other migrant neighborhoods in Cairo.

For Sudanese migrants in Egypt, geopolitical insecurity is a bane to the daily grind of exile. Israel, to the north, is as risky as a death sentence for most, who would face well-armed Egyptian border guards, and if lucky enough to survive a return to Egypt, deportation to Sudan would mean a charge of treason for having entered Israel. Further, the Zaghawa, as Abdel Rahman declared, are the Jews of Sudan, fated with the national stigmatization, and brutal repression amid a series of exiles while preserving their minority cultural identities in diaspora. They even sympathize with Israel, Abdel Rahman said, and the Jewish people, unfortunately another cause for genocidal victimization under the dictatorial, twenty-five-year rule of Al-Bashir.

In August of 2009, two Zaghawa men were arrested by Egyptian security in Sinai, and were subsequently charged with attempting to cross the border into Israel, reported Human Rights Watch. The underlying antipathy towards an apparent African-Jewish alliance is, sadly, another common trait shared by both Egyptian and Sudanese cultures. The men had received documentation from the UNHCR officially identifying them as refugees in Egypt, yet they were told their deportation to a place where they faced life-threatening persecution was immanent.

In the text of a noteworthy WikiLeaks cable from 2008 titled, “Egypt and Refugees: ‘We Cannot Afford To Be A Stepping Stone To The West’” as classified by William R. Stewart, the Minister Counselor for Economic and Political Affairs at the United States Embassy in Cairo, Egypt was referred to as maintaining a higher cooperation ranking with the UNHCR than Jordan (over half of whose population are Palestinians), Lebanon, Sudan, and Syria. Tarek el-Maaty, Deputy Assistant Foreign Minister for Refugees, expressed resolve on behalf of the government of Egypt, which is forced to either resettle, or repatriate refugees, as half of the population of Egyptian nationals lives in poverty.

Next: Perspectives on Darfuri Activism in Exile.

 

Crossposted from Nation of Change.

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