The Skeptic الشكاك

17 20 Sudanese Refugees Killed in Cairo

I stepped off a plane from Jordan this morning (photos), turned on my mobile at the Cairo airport, and got a string of increasingly distressing text messages saying State Security had finally moved to clear the Sudanese migrants from the square in front of Mostafa Mahmoud mosque (and the UNHCR’s Cairo offices) in Mohandisseen, Cairo. They had been camped there for month to protest UNHCR’s decision to stop processing them as refugees.

After a standoff, some 20 would-be refugees were killed, including a small girl. An unknown number, easily hundreds, have been carted off to jail. Manal and Alaa have posted photos and accounts.

I’d spent a lot of time talking to the refugees. (I posted a few photos of them last month, for those interested). I know them. So my immediate reaction was purely emotional. This is a terrible end to a terrible story. These people have left awful situations in Sudan to come to an awful situation in Cairo and now to an awful end. They deserve better.

My second reaction was guilt. They have been expecting this situation for a long time. I should have been there when this happened. I should have spent more time recording their life stories. Now they’ll be impossible to find, impossible to talk to.

I’ve also had some private conversations with UNHCR people about the situation. It is complicated. I won’t say more now because there is a slim chance I may have to work on this.

Jordan

Everythinge else seems frivolous. Particularly my couple days’ holiday in Jordan. Interested to note the extent to which Jordanians seem to resent the Iraqis who have come pouring into the country after the war…particularly after the Amman bombings. I was there with my wife and mother-in-law, so I was intentionally shying away from any kind of heavy conversations, but almost everyone I talked to brought up the Iraqis. They were, I was told again and again, driving up prices, increasing the crime rate. They were helping only belly-dancers, nightclub owners, and construction workers. They were stealing cars. They were, it was rumored, kidnapping children. Parents were no longer letting their kids play in the streets of Amman unsupervised.

After the arrest of three Iraqis for the Amman bombings was announced, Iraqis changed their license plates.

A few guys told me only half jokingly that they missed Saddam Hussein. He gave Jordan oil almost free of charge. He built the highway linking Amman to Aqaba. And he kept Iraqis locked up in their country, out of Jordan.

I had failed to register that the suspects accused of the Amman bombings were all Iraqis. And now “Al-Qaeda in Iraq” has claimed responsibility for the Katyusha rocket attacks against Israel that prompted Israel to bomb southern Lebanon (see AP story).

Reminds me of a time, oh, maybe six months before Gulf War II. I was in New York. A German-Israeli-American coworker brought me a Wall Street Journal opinion piece to read. It was the first time I’d seen the argument that a war in Iraq would unleash a domino effect of democratization on liberation across the Middle East articulated. I was amazed that any intelligent person (and the writer sounded like he knew what he was talking about) could argue this with a straight face. Surely anyone who’s spent a minute in the Middle East (outside Israel, I guess I should stipulate) would know this was bunk? That the war was far more likely to destabilize the region and prompt more terrorist attacks in the Middle East and on U.S. soil?

So now we’ve seen years of anarchy and bloodshed in Iraq. We’ve seen Iraqis launch a large-scale attack in Jordan, previously (and still) a miraculous island of peace and stability wedged between Iraq, Israel, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Lebanon. If this report is true—and that’s a very big “if”—then we’ll also have seen Iraqis attacking Israel and prompting Israel to bomb southern Lebanon just as things are getting really ugly again in the Gaza Strip (See BBC and B’tselem).

So where has this democratic flowering taken hold in the Middle East? Lebanon? No, the crowds came out in response to a bombing, not the toppling of Saddam Hussein. Egypt? Have you read anything about the elections here? And the Kifayah movement took hold first with the Palestinian solidarity committees and gained strength with the antiwar protests in 2003.

The New Egyptian Cabinet

People seem happy with the preliminary lists of new Cabinet appointees published in the government newspapers. The appointees are big businessmen. The “reformers” kept their posts. The rich consolidate their economic power and informal influence with political power and formal influence. Nazif has, probably wisely, catered to big business already, cutting corporate taxes, reviving the privatization program, lowering trade barriers, floating the pound… Hurrah, it could have been worse.

Who are they?

• Fin. Min. Yousef Boutros-Ghali gets the Social Insurance portfolio as well.
• Foreign Trade and Industry Minister Rachid Mohammed Rachid, a former Unilever exec who negotiated closer trade deals with the United States and Israel, gets internal trade as an additional portfolio.
• Ahmed al-Maghrabi, an exec with a French hotel chain, muscled out an old-guard stalwart with 12 years’ experience as a powerbroker to become tourism minister.
• Mohammed Loutfy Mansour, who is chairman of Royal and Sun Insurance and whose family owns the Egyptian franchises for McDonalds, GM, and Caterpillar (a company that builds armored bulldozers used to demolish homes in Gaza and Jenin), gets the transportation portfolio.
• Amin Abaza, chairman of Arabia Cotton Gininning, and a former president of the Alexandria Cotton Exporters Association, steps into the space left by the spectacularly and lethally corrupt Yousef Wali, now officially banished from the Hizb al-Watani’s good graces after losing the Al-Fayoum district he owns as a personal fiefdom, as minister of agriculture.
• Hatem al-Gabali, who runs an elite, private hospital, will be minister of health and population.
• The economic liberalizer Mahmoud Mohieldin will keep his job as investment minister.
• Old-Guard powerbroker extraordinaire and Minister of State for People’s Assembly Affairs Kamel al-Shazli was not on the lists.

On a totally unrelated note, two neighboring families in the southern Egyptian town of Ezbet Shams al-Din have been found murdered, disembowled, and castrated. These grizzly stories sometimes appear in the Egyptian press and turn out not to be true. More often than not, however, they check out. So if this is true, what the hell is going on down there?

[tags]Egypt, Sudanese Refugees, Jordan, Iraq[/tags]

3 Comments »

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1. About your comments on Jordan, I think it’s much the same feelings ordinary Syrians have, complaints very often heard about the heavy price influx, especially on rent. That doesn’t mean that ordinary Syrians (or, I think, Jordanians) doesn’t sympathize with the plight of Iraqis under occupation though. At least in Syria, people recognize the new Iraqis as people associated with the former regime, as much as Iraqis.

   Comment by Lars — January 2, 2006 #

2. Lars, you’re right. I don’t think Syrians or Jordanians, or for that manner, anyone with an ounce of humanity has stopped feeling sympathy for ordinary Iraqis. And one has to wonder how the rich Iraqis newly transported to Syria and Jordan got that way…

   Comment by Administrator — January 6, 2006 #

3. I was utterly and totally disgusted by the treatment of the Sudanese refugees. Yes, they protested, BUT, what was the reaction with the protests with regards to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. For a government to justify or “give the order” to end a protest through violence, with the knowledge that women and children will be present is heinous. If I was any less of a person I would hate Egypt, but it goes beyond that. The president of your country is ridiculous to allow such atrocities to take place. And at the end of the day, people died. Any “CIVILIZED” government or group of people, would try to find alterior ways to end the conflict. What was that word again? Ah, compromise. Whatever happened to the good Samaritan? These people were in need of help, and all that the Egyptian government did was kill them. God only knows if they are being tortured now. Let God deal with the actions of sadistic people. Besides that, I only hope that the country will realize exactly what happened. If you give people hope they will follow, if you give them violence you get violence in return, and that is what happened way too much in history. So the “great” country of Egypt with the pyramids that other African countries have INCLUDING Sudan is in the eyes of a few good people is this: They got tired of not being in history. Well congratulations, you’ll be in the books. All the violence, all the deaths, children.. all of it. I long for the day that Egypt realizes that the Nile does NOT start in Egypt, and by the power of God a dam can be created to stop the water from flowing. I don’t know what will happen but I am in grave shock. I am disgusted. I am upset. I am frustrated. I feel such pity for the families shattered that night. Perfect timing Mr. Egyptian President. Maybe next time instead of planning a way to kill other people you will actually PAY ATTENTION TO THE MURDERERS RUNNING AROUND KILLING AND MUTILATING YOUR OWN PEOPLE. YEAH, THAT’S RIGHT I SAID IT.

   Comment by Sandra — January 7, 2006 #

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