The situation for Sudanese refugees camped in front of the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) office in Cairo is worsening despite a supposed agreement last week. Three thousand Sudanese women, men, and children remain huddled under tarps fighting the cold and the diseases that sweep through the encampment which has no sanitary facilities. Since September of 2005 the Sudanese protestors have demanded that UNHCR resettle refugees outside of Egypt, a country which many find discriminatory and bereft of employment opportunity. The Sudanese started the protest because UNHCR stopped automatically interviewing all arriving Sudanese to determine if they were eligible for resettlement.

On December 18, 2005 the UNHCR announced that it had reached an agreement with protest leaders. In return for ending the sit-in UNHCR offered to interview all refugees who stayed in the encampment and to reopen closed cases, to provide about $400 for housing in Egypt, and to assist any refugees who desired to return to Sudan. However, many of the protestors have refused to countenance any agreement that will keep them in Egypt.

Refugees in Egypt have reported to the Damanga Coalition for Freedom and Democracy that the situation in the entire country is intolerable and unsafe. They are frequently harassed and arbitrarily arrested by the security services, even if they have resettlement papers. They face racial discrimination because of their darker skin, and very few are able to find jobs. But the situation that the Sudanese face is perhaps the worst in Egypt. Before they could use the bathrooms at the Mustafa Mahmoud Hospital and Mosque but this has been closed by Egyptian authorities. Diseases, including tuberculosis, are spreading because of the lack of sanitation and poor nutrition. Three people, two men and one child, have died in recent weeks according to (Abu-Idriss Yagoub), a Darfurian who was resettled in Charlottesville, VA from Cairo in late December. The protestors receive no assistance from outside groups and share any money they can manage to earn. Some days they can scrape enough together for one bean sandwich per day.

Now the protestors are split. Many believe that the offer from UNHCR is the best they can get. Others accept the basic agreement but do not trust the UN without a written agreement and registration system witnessed by independent NGOs. Still others believe that any compromise will condemn their families to a life of abject poverty on the margins of Egyptian society. To these immigrants the system is fundamentally unfair and incomprehensible. Sudanese refugees fleeing persecution on account of race, religion, nationality, membership in a social group, or political orientation are entitled to be resettled in the third countries, yet those refugees who have saved their families from starvation or generalized violence are entitled to no assistance. Furthermore, Southern Sudanese who fled persecution in the civil war are unlikely to be resettled in third countries because the recent peace agreement may alleviate the fear of persecution even if they will be killed in the crossfire or die of starvation. The UNHCR, for its part, maintains that there is little it can do because its mandate, created in the post-World War II era, limits its ability to resettle refugees to those who face targeted persecution in their home countries.

While the protest has been tragic, it has managed to highlight the plight of Sudanese refugees in Egypt, culminating in a major article in the New York Times on December 26, 2005. While it is a political reality that all Sudanese refugees including economic migrants cannot be resettled in third countries, the international community and the Egyptian government, if not UNHCR, should reach out to help the refugees in Egypt. The Sudanese government, through its repressive agenda, has caused further economic deterioration in the resource rich country, which has forced many immigrants to flee to preserve the lives of their families. The refugees, regardless of the proximate cause of their migration, should first be interviewed to determine if they do in fact are eligible for resettlement. Even they do not qualify under the UNHCR definition, they should be provided with housing, education, basic medical care, and occupational opportunities along the model of other refugee populations that have fled war-torn regions.


Further reading:
New York Times- December 26, 2005- "Fleeing Sudan, Only to Languish in an Egyptian Limbo" http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/26/international/africa/26egypt .

Sudan Times- Demember 27, 2005- "Have Sudanese refugees' situation in Egypt being politicized?" http://www.sudantribune.com/article.php3?id_article=13251