Sudanese seek refuge in Israel from Darfur
March 8, 2007 (MAAGAN MICHAEL, Israel) — Collective farms that for decades formed the Zionist backbone of Israel today shelter scores of Muslim refugees from Sudan who walked into the Jewish state to flee persecution.
Ali said his life as a farmer in Sudan’s western Darfur region ended four years ago when the pro-government Janjaweed militia ransacked his village and slaughtered 40 of his relatives in the civil war between Khartoum and rebel groups.
Today he works for the minimum wage on a kibbutz that makes plastic components, joins his adoptive family for the Jewish Sabbath and watches football on his own television.
But Ali remains tortured by memories of his wife and child, and has no idea if they are dead or alive. He last saw them two years ago, sheltering under a tree as he went to fetch supplies.
That was when he was captured by the Janjaweed. He said they beat him, slapped him in prison, deprived him of food and water and three times threw him to a poisonous snake for their personal amusement.
Eventually they released him to act as an informer. A fellow Massalit tribesman then took him to Khartoum on a donkey and hid him before Ali fled to Egypt.
There, like many of the 330 Sudanese refugees now living in Israel, the authorities granted Ali permission to live.
But life was hard. His experience in war-torn Darfur at the hands of the authorities had instilled in him a collective distrust of Arabs, so he bribed an Egyptian border guard to let him walk across the desert into Israel.
“Israel is better,” Ali said, at the same time admitting that he knew little about the country beforehand other than “Israelis and Palestinians kill each other.”
Within minutes of his arrival on Israeli soil he was arrested for being a citizen of an enemy state and a threat to security. But after Ali spent more than a year in prison, an Israeli court allowed him to swap jail for life on the kibbutz.
The Committee for the Advancement of Refugees from Darfur, or CARD, is an advocacy group that campaigns for the quick release of all jailed Sudanese to kibbutzim or moshavim agricultural cooperatives and a final legal solution to their fate.
But for the more than 100 Sudanese farmed out to 20 such communities, their detention and deportation warrants remain effective, meaning they have the same legal status as prisoners, said CARD spokesman Eitan Schwartz.
Israel’s dilemma is what to do with these “enemy citizens.” They cannot deport them back to Sudan or send them to Egypt — where many have refugee status — because Egypt has not guaranteed it will not deport them either.
While campaigners believe Israel will ultimately let some stay, they believe the authorities fear that setting a precedent could encourage hundreds of thousands of non-Jews from neighbouring enemy states to seek refugee.
People treat Ali well at Maagan Michael, Israel’s largest kibbutz on the Mediterranean shore. Ali says his boss and adoptive family threw a party for his 32nd birthday. He has a mobile phone and wears smart hand-me-down clothes.
He and four other Sudanese refugees working on the kibbutz get free board and electricity and subsidised meals. They have private Hebrew lessons twice a week and go on day trips to Tel Aviv.
But as Ali talked about his new life, a tear rolled down his cheek as he also remembered the family he may never see again.
“Sometimes it makes me crazy. I’m thinking about my family,” he said, eyes cast downwards as he fiddled with the plastic screws he sorts during his 10-hour shift, pocketing two hours of overtime five days a week.
Sharon Harel, a protection officer at the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), said there are 330 Sudanese refugees in Israel, 90 of them from Darfur.
Although more than 200 Sudanese are still in Israeli prisons, Harel praised the kibbutz scheme pushed through the courts by advocacy groups as a short-term solution, with some Sudanese already living freely in Israel afterwards.
“To expect the Israeli state to grant citizenship to citizens of an enemy state, that’s quite ambitious. The solution of burden sharing may be the best. Countries will take some and Israel will take some,” she said.
In its left-wing welcoming embrace, the kibbutz is only too happy to host Sudanese willing to work regardless of the state’s classification of them as enemy aliens and potential security risks.
Naama Carmi, a university lecturer and human rights activist who is responsible for the Sudanese at Maagan Michael, believes Israel is duty-bound to help people like Ali, given the Jewish legacy of the Holocaust.
“I feel Israel should have a more special duty besides the universal duty that every state should have… Putting them in jail reminds me what Britain did to the Jewish refugees” before Israel gained independence, she said.
Schwartz, who won a reality TV programme in search of the country’s ideal “ambassador,” hopes that ultimately some Sudanese will be allowed to stay, but he also recognises the state’s reluctance to set too cosy a precedent to non-Jews.
“Israel is a Jewish democracy and we’re constantly challenged by how you negotiate the two and consolidate the two. What happens when in the name of democracy there is a challenge to the Jewish nature of the state?”
(AFP)