Sudanese Association for the Defense of freedom of Opinion and Conscience: SADFOC

Muhammad Hasan Bushi, a Sudanese opposition activist based in Cairo has been kidnapped from his flat by Sudanese security agents believed to be aided by Egyptian security organs. It is believed that he will be rendered over and transferred against his free will to the Sudanese security organs in Khartoum, supposedly today.

It is believed that there is an agreement of rendition between Sudan and Egypt on one part and

Sudan and Saudi Arabia on the other part. News leaks from Cairo indicate that at least 23 other Sudanese opposition activists who are in Egypt, waiting for the UNHCR to relocate them, are believed to have been short-listed for similar abduction and consequent rendition.

Last year, the Saudi security organs arrested a Sudanese opposition activist (Hisham Mohamed Ali wad Galiba) who used to work there as an expatriate and rendered him to Khartoum. Until now, no one has seen him with his whereabouts unknown to his family.

Such actions are against UN Declarations on people seeking asylum or refugee status in other countries. But it is widely happening in different countries, the Arab ones in particular. However, to have this done on refugees registered at the UNHCR amounts to nothing less than complicity or sheer ineptitude, if not corruption.

Many people wonder, why will anyone seeking refugee status live in Egypt or Saudi Arabia, considering rendition even in developed countries. The answer to this question is very complicated as it is related to how such a collective calamity like the 30 years long surge of refugees in the Sudan is being manipulated by other countries, here Egypt in particular. First, most Sudanese political refugees and asylum go to Egypt because they don't need to get an entry visa. Once there, they get themselves registered at the UNHCR and then wait (mostly for years) to be relocated somewhere in the West or Australia and New Zealand.

Why does Egypt allow them to come in without an entry visa? The short answer is to trap them. While waiting in Egypt, they are not allowed to have any job. At the same time, the Egyptian government keeps urging the UNHCR and western embassies not to relocate them as this will create a surge of refugees. Why all this? The answer should be sought in the answer of the following question: how do those hundred of thousand of Sudanese refugees sustain themselves while spending years to be relocated? Simply by money transferred to them by their relative expatriates in the Arab petroleum countries. And here is the reason for the Egyptian government opening its borders to those wretched Sudanese who are so desperate they are ready to run away

from the lion to only fall in the hands of the crocodile. Egypt is capitalizing on the remittances brought about by those wretched Sudanese. In the mid 1990s, these remittances tripled what Egypt had earned from the Sues canal. This is the biggest slave concentration camp of black Africans in history.

This is not the first time the Egyptian government tamper with the international laws enacted to protect refugees. On December 31, 2005 at the early hours of dawn, the Egyptian antiriot police opened water cannons on thousands of Sudanese refugees who were holding a picket outside the office of UNHCR to protest what was deemed as unnecessary delay in relocating them. While the people committee of the refugees estimated the casualties as high as 280, the Egyptian government only admitted the number of 26 casualties. The refugees were scattered and later chased in Cairo to be deported back to the Sudan. Those who were injured faced a gruesome fate as most of them never left the hospitals alive with their vital organs stolen while under anesthesia. This was the incident that gave to the surge of Sudanese-Israeli refugee influx. It is believed that the Egyptian authorities decided to get rid of those refugees as they were the poor of the poor, being mostly from South Sudan, Darfur and other extremely marginalized areas, who did not have the privilege of relative expatriates to send them money to live on while waiting for their relocation cases sorted out. The UNHCR was silent on that heinous action of violation of its very laws and tenets. Until now no independent investigation was

Hereby, we call upon the free world and international community to stand up for their binding obligation towards Justice, Freedom, and Peace. Sudanese refugees in Egypt are not only entitled to protection from abuse by both governments of Egypt and Sudan, but further they entitled before anything to be saved the dehumanization of the biggest ghetto and slave concentration camp in history. Refugees should not be enslaved by states.

Sudanese Association for the Defense of freedom of Opinion and Conscience (SADFOC)

M. Jalal Hashim 
mjalalhashim@gmail.com

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MJH