The Skeptic الشكاك

37 Arabic Blogs on Crackdown on the Sudanese Refugees

Casualties, Detention Centers, Mouths Shut

Skip my blather, go straight to the translations

I’m worrying about the bodycount. Seems the SPLM has backed off the number Eric Reeves reported. The official number, 27, has been independently verified several times over. But it represents only those bodies that arrived at the Zeinhoum Morgue, the central morgue where the bodies of all people who died in unusual circumstances are supposed to be taken. It’s possible, especially given one testimony collected by the Nadim Center and translated below, that there are bodies elsewhere. Certainly, there have been all kinds of dark rumors circulating.

I’m also worried about reports that Sudanese security forces went through the detention centers and said, “We’ll take that one, that one, and that one.” It’s normal for an embassy to send officials to visit nationals detained abroad. But given that this embassy represents the government the detainees were fleeing, that they were detained at a protest staged largely because they were afraid of being returned to that government’s jurisdiction, and that there is photographic evidence that Sudanese thugs armed with clubs and knives arrived in a Sudanese Embassy car to attack the protesters early in the protest, this is not a normal situation. I’m concerned that some of the missing might have been sent back to Sudan. I wonder if someone in Sudan can find out. The UNCHR is desperately trying to locate the missing. The Sudanese took names on Dec. 19. The UNHCR wants a list of names. I hope they’ll hook up.

I don’t know whether I should be concerned by what happened when I tried to go back to see the refugees in Abassiya today. (A reporter gave my number to some refugees as the local Human Rights Watch guy. His heart was in the right place, but I learned of this with a bit of chagrin first because I’m not the local HRW guy and second because HRW has decided not to do a full report on this for the moment…the American University in Cairo’s Center for Forced Migration and Refugee Studies is doing what looks to be a fantastic report. But new people keep calling me, and I keep dutifully going out, showing my face, and directing them to the press or to AUC’s researchers). Anyway, I went out this time with a photographer who works for a wire agency. Turns out the guy who called me wasn’t there and was expecting me at another neighborhood across town.

A small crowd was gathered around a Sudanese guy who I was told works for the United Nations.

I asked for some people from the “High Council of Sudanese Refugees” I had met in the neighborhood before. No one had heard of them. Hmm. Fine. Without a contact, and with no good reason to be there, I wasn’t going to go around asking people their life stories for my entertainment. I gave up on the trip.

“So, do you want to ask if you can take some pictures?” I asked my friend so her trip wouldn’t be a total wash.

She got one picture off before Blue Jersey, who said it was his job to protect the market outside the church, stopped her. Blue Jersey was making quite a display, saying he should take the film, so on and so forth. We apologized, tried to explain how we got out there so he wouldn’t think we were spies or profiteers. I got the guy I was supposed to meet on the phone and handed Blue Jersey the receiver. Blue Jersey chewed him out and, projecting so everyone could hear, said he didn’t want anyone snooping around talking to the refugees. We apologized some more, assured him we understood, and he relented.

As we were leaving, a man ran across the street and passed me his phone number and the number of a friend. “Here,” said, “If you want to talk to people, call this number.”

At first I was glad for what had happened. The intense interest (finally) from journalists, investigators, and people who read what they write may yet wind up being the only phyrric victory of this whole awful saga. It’s also meant that some traumatized and vulnerable people have wound up repeating the stories of their trauma again and again without any clear idea whom they’re talking to or what good it will do. It’s also meant that all kinds of wild rumors and inconsistencies have crept into the public record (and far more have died in reporters’ notebooks), diminishing the refugees’ credibility when they need it most. It’s better for the refugees control how their stories are told and to whom, to control the message now that someone’s listening.

And given that many of the people at the protest and in the city at large were people who’d been denied refugee status and so may now be in the country illegally, it’s probably better for them not to be in the papers. Too much attention from well-intentioned reporters also risks drawing too much attention from Security.

Or maybe they’d decided not to rock the boat now that the UNHCR is processing applications. Maybe they’d grown sick of the activist leadership that organized the protest, or the new leadership that (according to one version of events) overthrew the leaders that brokered the deal UNHCR offered in December. Maybe they said, “Look where you got us with your public approach.” Can’t say I’d blame them.

In any case, I took heart from my wasted afternoon.

But then I got home to an email from a guy who’d previously been very anxious to set up a string of one-on-one interviews with victims for me.

thank you for caring about the refugee need but now iam very to give no appointment . i will let you know when you come to meet with us .

And so now the wheels of paranoia are turning. I thought of the guy who ran after us to give me his number. Has someone instructed the refugees not to talk? If so, who?

Arabic Blog Review

A few telling conversations about the Dec. 30 crackdown on the Sudanese protesters from the Egyptian, Arabic blogs…

First, vintage Alaa, translated:

The scandal is that people have started to believe what the newspapers say

In the two demonstrations that we staged to protest against the massacre, we had lots of debates with people in the street. They repeated exactly what the media say, so much so that at first I thought they were all informers.

“Do you believe what TV and newspapers say when they talk to you about government promises and tell you how you’re doing as Egyptians?” I asked them.

“No, of course not,” they all said.

So for fuck’s sake, why do you believe them when they talk about refugees?

The other problem is that people have gotten used to being morons. One guy told me that the refugees had opened up the stomach of a police officer. Insteading of abusing that animal of a police officer who deserved far more than having his stomach opened and calling for Tanzim al-Jihad to resume their armed operations against the security forces, I told myself it would be better to debate with him. So I asked him, “The four-year-old girl who was killed, did she mutilate a police officer?”

“Of course not,” he said, but blamed her family for exposing her to danger.

“That’s exactly the line the Israelis use to justify killing Palestinian children.”

This caused complete chaos. They were about a million responses to what I said. The simplest was that “Israel kills children when they’re going to school, not when they’re at a protest,” but really it became clear they had no response, and they all fell silent […]

You get the impression people don’t even listen to themselves sometimes. They sit there saying things like, “Would you like your mother to see people shitting in the street?” I asked him, “What, and Egyptians don’t shit in the street?” He shut up. Someone else replied, “Yeah, but not in Mohandisseen!” (You listening to this, you dogs? Shitting in Mohandisseen is a crime punishable by death?)

Anyway, the thing I want to say is that after all these debates and the complete refusal on my part to talk about anything but their deaths, people started to be convinced. One person joined us and started carrying a candle too. Basically, years of shitty education and shitty media and the inhuman treatment that’s made an event like this completely normal have made the average Egyptian forget what dignity is…

Three refugees joined us, including Soliman, whose daughter and wife were killed. I found that there were people who weren’t really able to sympathize with him because he wasn’t screaming and slapping his cheeks and rolling around in the dust. One of the guys we’d convinced to join us was asking, “That guy’s family died? That guy?” The problem is not that we reject diversity of opinion, the problem is that we’re not aware that there’s any such thing as diversity of opinion. This guy expected a particular response to death, a particular kind of drama, but it didin’t happen, and he couldn’t get his head around it.

Although it’s not what I usually do, I’m going to generalize: We’ve become a nation of cowards, to the point where we don’t even understand when someone just isn’t afraid, like when Soliman said, “I’m going to sleep here.” People gathered around him and in all sincerity insisted that he shouldn’t do it, that the Security people would rip him up…. In short, he told them that he wanted to stay there and die like his family, or at least get thrown in prison so he could be with his people. They got the point, then sat there trying to convince to take a rest just for two days and after that we’ll see what we can do and that his death or being imprisoned wouldn’t help anyone. The ordinary people just didn’t understand. As far as they were concerned, he might as well have come from Mars.

The best moment was that complacent young guy who just couldn’t believe that the security forces had killed them: “I’m telling you,” he said, “It was a stampede!”

I asked him, “Why should it be so difficult for Security to kill refugees when they’re perfectly capable of killing voters. Don’t they kill peasants as well?”

So the kid said, “No, I’m telling you, all that stuff about the peasants, that was in the days of the King.”

Whose days are you living in, you ass?

Selected comments (a lot of people objected to the obscenity, I’m leaving one of those in for a taste)

Comment (in English): Don’t u people have any respect for national feelings….Alaa..u heared the same answer over and over again from the people in the street not because they are stupid and listen to the media.but rather it’s ur stupidness that shut off da remaining functioning part. I’m sorry for ur laptop man but that doesn’t give u the right to thrash every sigle little thing that happens to u as “government bent kalb”. Those sudanesse brothers had no right in what they did…the police was patient for 3 months….they took money from the UN….they worked (had no right to as refugees) for wages egyptians don’t get and yet they don’t like egypt and they want out! well that sucks! I just hope one day u leave the country u hate so much and go seek assylum in australia…ur free word..where u’ll be kept in detension camps for up to 5 years till they study ur case and guess what only 15% get granted a stay…….p.s) the war in the southern-sudan is over . p.s2) as far as i’m concerned…we r overpopulated,unemployed,economicaly devestated contry….southern sudanesse (not arab brothers and pro-israel hords) can go to canada for all i care!

Comment from Egiziana: The issue of believing anything you hear is something that requires a study of the psychology of the Egyptian people. Are they “good” to the point of being complete morons? Or do they just not want to tire their brains? Or do they just not know how to analyze events?

Comment from anonymous: So what’s so new about the way the security services are acting, you sons of sluts? More than 12 Egyptians were murdered during the elections! Instead of the same old boring shit about the barbarity of the security services, you should do something. But you won’t because you’re all being fucked up the ass and fingered day and night. You fucking fags. You ones who have been fingered. The scummiest police officer in the scummiest police station could fuck any one of you, you cowards, you fags, you sons of filthy women. You want to do something for the Sudanese, but what have you ever done for the Egyptians? “We’re all Sudanese.” You fags. “We’re all niggers.” Why don’t you pull down your trousers and present your asses because [Min. of the Interior Habib] al-Aadli is coming and he feels like a fingering. You’re all talk, you whores.

Comment from red: (in English)
Why the foul Language, I think it’s the tool of the weak. I like what I read here, I can see a lot of genuine intelligent posts, but please guys and girls, please, dont use foul language (3amal 3ala battal), its use distracts the reader from the main arguement.

Comment from somebody: (in English) Only now ya 3alaa u discoverd how messed up our people are. Yabni our goverment should be noted in history cause they created a new type of dictatorship, insted of killing people who object or say no, they decided that they will mess up all values and intentionaly destroy and corrupt the quality of Egyptians so they can never know what is right or what is wrong “3’anam ya3ni” so it is easier to drive them like animals, and hence they will never ever solidify on one single issue.

U may visit this for further explanation http://www.almeezan.blogspot.com

Bye

Comment from beasttrue:
Look, Alaa, this thing about believing or excusing what the government or the security forces do is the thing that really drives me insane. I have heard comments you wouldn’t believe. Like, “But they tried to deal with them politely,” and “They were making a mess of Mohandisseen,” and “Begging was spreading,” and “It didn’t look nice,” etc. Stuff that really just kills you from inside. I would have really liked someone to have said, “If those were Arabs instead of ‘Sudanese,’ how would they have been treated then? If it had happened in France or in England, would society have responded the same way?” I don’t know. I just know I’ve never come across anything so disgusting as the comments I heard about this.

Bint Misreya posted a poll asking what caused the deaths in the crackdown. The results are were dismaying:

What caused the deaths?
A) The refugees stampeding
B) Violence perpetrated by the security forces
C) Fighting between Security and the Refugees
37 respondents. 43 percent: refugees stampeding. 41 percent: violence perpetrated by security forces. 16 percent: fighting between security forces and refugees.

Abu Yousef‘s comments are worth translating:

I’ve been following the massacre in Mohandissen since yesterday morning… Borrowing the government’s and the UNHCR’s excuses about the illegality of the strike some people have been saying that the strikers represented a danger to Egypt, spreading diseases and plagues. I supported this opinion at first, but does this excuse killing them? Have we exhausted all other routes, leaving us with no option but blind stupidity to solve the problems that face us? Then again, is that such a shock? For how long has our proud nation been using such methods to solve its problems? Was it since Black Wednesday [May 25, 2005, when protesters were beaten outside the Journalists’ Syndicate] or before that? Was it since 14 people were killed in the recent elections? I believe that everyone must take some responsibility, starting with the UN, whose secretary general said, “their death is a terrible and inexcusable tragedy,” right down to the lowliest Egyptian who passed by the demonstrators and hated the very sight of them, just this hatred inside of him…

Meanwhile Amr has been nobly slaving away, amalgamating statements on and testimonies from the massacre as part of a new project he and Alaa set up, TortureInEgypt.net. [Correction: Alaa and Amr note in the comments to this post that TortureinEgypt.net is not their project, they merely provided technical support in setting it up.] The always incredible Nora Younis deserves credit for translating a lot of the testimonies the Nadim Center collected. I got half way through one translation, annoying a friend for help, before I realized she’d already done it.

OK, so a quick review of some of the vast amount of information TortureinEgypt collected in Arabic:

First, applause for Al-Tagamma al-Yad, or the Assembly of the Hand, for being the most entertaining opposition group in Cairo today. As far as I’ve been able to gather, they’re a few students who splintered off from Kifayah with some bad blood (Photos from one of their demos here). A friend suggests calling them The Five-Fingered League because they can’t seem to agree on a name for themselves, because it sounds Holmesian, and because they have about five members. Follow the changing names below.

“A cry from ‘The Assembly of The Hand'”: The Doctors’ Syndicate and the government should issue a decree allowing the Sudanese refugees to take back their wounded from Egyptian hospitals.

In a comment to this post, the Assembly of Independent Egyptians/The Hand wrote:

We sent this call on Jan. 6. From the date of the massacre…committed by Central Security officers against Sudanese refugees until now, the Ministry of Health has not allowed anyone to look at the wounded in the hospitals. Is it because there are so many of them and you are scared that the true size of your crime will be known? Why do the Ministry of Health and the head of the Doctor’s Syndicate not reply? Have some of the organs of the dead been stolen? We want an immediate reply.

Further down, Jan. 5: The Assembly for Egyptian Activists/The Hand reports: according to refugees, 70 missing in addition to 28 bodies in the Zeinhoum Morgue.

Right, enough of The Hand.

The Iraqi Association for Human Rights “has with great sorrow received news” of the crackdown. “The way the security forces acted is proof of the irresponsibility in the way they deal with human beings and an approach that had a catastrophic result,” the group said. “It was a crime that deserves to be condemned, first and foremost, and those who committed this massacre should be brought to account and the families of the victims compensated. At a time when news of this is flying around and a number of international parties, notably Kofi Annan, we have to point out that the UN, as represented by the UNHCR and its director in Cairo, must bear responsibility for the situation that has taken place, for the hardships that the Sudanese have undergone and continue to undergo, particularly this one. The UN and its Secretary General must work with genuine intent to organize the performance of its high commissions, especially in Arab countries, by putting in pure cadres who work transparently.”

Interesting the dig at the unpopular Iraqi head of the UNHCR office here…

The Association of Sudanese Journalists and Writers in Washington singled out the Sudanese government for criticisim: “The official silence of the Sudanese government on this and its continual complicity in actions to hurt Sudanese at home and abroad means that it is the historic duty of Sudanese organizations abroad to defend the rights of Sudanese and their dignity and their freedoms where ever they may be by maintaining contact with the organizations of the international community,” they said.

Meanwhile, Sons of Darfur cast the deaths as a latest in a string of attacks against the Sudanese people, accusing Mubarak (in his Air Force days) of leading Egyptian fighter pilots to bomb the Ansar at Aba Island at the end of the Mahdi’s rebellion and more recently of bombing the people of Darfur as part of the Joint [Egyptian-Sudanese] National Security Defense.

Torture in Egypt has also posted testimony collected by the Nadim Center. Here are a few translations:

They took us to Torah [prison], our clothes were damp, we couldn’t change them until the second day, when they threw us out into the sun. On that day, people were broken. We had to carry them…They would call to us more than for times and we couldn’t move. It seemed as if they were doing it on purpose.

A child died in the camp. His mother was screaming hysterically and couldn’t let him go. The soldiers were pulling her and we were pulling back. It was like mass hysteria. They tried to break us up. All of us were crying for the child. On the same day that we arrived at Torah, they took us to the airport. There were about 45 of us. It looked as if they were going to send us away. We would whisper to each other, “We’ll fight them, and, God willing, we’ll die, because going back to Sudan would be extremely dangerous for us.”

They got a call on the wireless, and they changed their minds and sent us back to Torah. It was about 12 at night…. There was a disabled woman called Naglah, there were women who had been separated from their husbands at the camp. There were women who’d lost their children. We got off in the middle of the street. We looked awful. We were barefoot, and our clothes were all in rags. People were telling us that they were glad we had been beaten up. I feel really guilty that we left the children at the camp. I’m scared for them…

We went to Qanata Prison. We stayed five days. There were more than 150 women there. We were kept in prison clothes in a cell open to the sky. We slept on the ground and each had one blanket. It was extremely cold. On the second day, they sent us to the interrogation cell. In the interrogation cell, there were a few bunk beds, but most of us slept on the ground. The toilet was inside the cell and water would spill out of it onto the ground. It was extremely damp. I had a wound on my leg. I went to the prison hospital, but they didn’t heal me properly, and I still have a wound.

The female prisoners who were already in the prison welcomed us and said that they had known a day before the strike was broken that we were going to be coming. [Emphasis mine]. There were about five children, one of whom was only about seven or eight months old. There were mothers breastfeeding. There was a five-year-old orphan and an 11-year-old girl who had been separated from her family. The thing that really killed me was the kids.

Whenever I sit by myself, I remember the protest and how it looked.

And another:

I think about everything that happened. This harshness and violence. That they could kill people. I can’t get my head around it. I’m scared to go in the street. I’m scared to see Egyptians. No offense, but I can hardly bear to look at you. They watched it take place and they didn’t say a thing. The officers were getting the soldiers all juiced up and telling them, “Those are infidels, they’re coming to destroy Egypt, they’re coming with whiskey doing filthy and obscene things. Your duty is to beat them.” the soldiers were really wound up and they were singing. Even during the beating itself, you felt the soldier wasn’t beating you because he wanted to disperse you, he was beating you because he hated you in a racist way, as if the Sudanese man was less than him. Even as they were beating us, they would distinguish between northern and southern and beat the southerners more. As far as they’re concerned, a Sudanese citizen is a northerner. I remember everything as if it’s on a video tape. It doesn’t want to leave my head.

From the strike, they took us to Dashour prison. And from the protest to Dashour prison, my mouth and lips were disfigured and I was bleeding from the nose. I’d been beaten on the head. I was dizzy and hallucinating. I spent the whole day wandering around… they put us on buses and dropped us off on the autostrade. I was barefoot, my clothes were ragged, and there was no public transportation. I was compelled to walk in that condition.

One more:

Abd al-Halim Omar, 33, arrived in Egypt June 16, 2005, registered at the UNHCR. He was released from Shabeen al-Qom (general prison) on Jan. 5:

We were sitting at the gates of the garden. Plainclothes Central Security officers came up to us and told us that there was a Muslim Brotherhood demonstration and that the police were coming to protect us. We were confident that the police would protect us. An officer addressed us with a microphone. I and another woman negotiated with him. He said they would send us to camp. I said where. He said you don’t need to know. I said we will get together a delegation and go with you to see the camp. He refused and warned us that after five minutes they would attack us.

After five minutes [witness reports suggest it was more like five hours] they sprayed us first with hot water, then with cold water. They asked us once again to leave. But the park was surrounded from all sides. Then they started attacking us from all sides. I was holding my wife by her hand. I was terrified for her. I was beaten so much I fell down and they trampled on me until I lost consciousness.

I woke up in a hospital whose name I don’t know. When I woke up, I saw that they had given me an IV drip. There was a swelling in my head and my legs were in great pain. It felt like they were broken. There were about 20 Sudanese people in the room and plainclothes guards who would escort us even to the bathroom. When I asked a guard, “Are we under arrest?” He said, “You’re one of Ayman Nour’s lot.”

Our clothes were wet and we were barefoot. They treated us extremely badly on the first day. The next day, a nurse covered us with blankets and was crying for us. They took us to identify the bodies in the second cell. [Emphasis mine. At the hospital morgue?] It was an awful site. Two or three bodies would be piled up on one trolley. I recognized a small child, whose name I didn’t know, but I had seen his father thrown on the ground and then thrown up in the air. He fell on the ground and the soldiers trampled him. They took us to some trucks and brought us to Torah prison.

There were about 20 of us, and to the best of my recollection, it was Saturday. I found my wife at Torah. There were no rooms. Everyone had a single blanket. They divided us into those who had a yellow card, those who had a blue card, and those who, like myself, didn’t have any identification. They started to put us on to trucks. I refused, and asked to be with my wife, who has valid residency. The officer explained that the men and women were going in separate trucks and that I would meet her again when I got to Torah prison. We looked out the truck window and saw the sign saying Shabeen al-Qom, and that’s when we knew we’d been taken there instead of Torah prison. The truck stopped in front of the gates, we got out, and were surrounded by two lines of soldiers. They sat us down in rows and counted us. then they lined us up and gave us clothes with Interrogation written on them. When I protested the officer told me, “You’re our guests.” They put us in the clothes and photographed us, each person holding a sign with his name written on it. They put 25 of us into a small room, with small high-set windows, and in the corner, a small toilet stall.

Soon after we arrived, someone screamed, “Someone’s hanging in the bathroom.” We thought he was joking, but when we saw it we were terrified and hammered on the cell door. A soldier came, took a glance, and left again. Then came a lot of officers, followed by a colonel. They sent us out of the room and took the body out. He was a southerner and his name is difficult to remember. He’d hanged himself with the rope that they use to tie up the blankets. I couldn’t sleep or drink any water from the bathroom sink next to where the man had hanged himself…
[Oh, wait, Nora’s already done this one…]

Finally, a vapid post from Nermeena, in English:

I can’t deny that am glad this situation is coming to an end…gotta admit that having a Sudanese Colony in an Egyptian vital square wasn’t really that interesting or impressive at all…..do I like the way it ended up with…of course not, that was very brutal….and I clearly resent such an attitude…but what were the alternatives????

[tags]Sudan, Egypt, Sudanese Refugees, Human Rights[/tags]

6 Comments »

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1. Alright, a heroic statemnt: I would not mind taking the blame for the TortureInEgypt.net website, but not the credit. All I am doing is helping an N with a few technical things (as if I know what I am doing). She is the real star.

   Comment by Amr — January 17, 2006 #

2. torture in egypt is not Alaa and Amr’s project at all, we are just offering tech support, the project has a dedicated editor who used to run ta3zeeb.blogspot.com

   Comment by Alaa — January 17, 2006 #

3. three of us denying credit 😉
   the testimonies were indeed translated by al nadeem center.. I collected and published them only.. Its a great effort by Aida Seif el Dawla and al Nadeem Center team..

   Comment by Nora — February 1, 2006 #

4. High-ho away

   Comment by Herr nein name — February 11, 2006 #

5. […] I read it very quickly, but I liked the report the Forced Migration and Refugees Studies (FMRS) department of the American University in Cairo did on the crackdown on a protest Sudanese refugees in Cairo. It was, as far as I know, the only serious study on the topic. From discussions with the researchers, some of whom are good friends, I’d been afraid they would pull their punches on UNHCR. They didn’t. […]

   Pingback by The Skeptic ?????? » Sudanese Refugees Redux — July 18, 2006 #

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