Egyptians are urged to leave South Sudan – official
Jan 5, 2005 (KHARTOUM) — The authorities in south Sudan called on Egyptians to leave the region for their own safety Thursday following the killing of 28 Sudanese refugees by Egyptian police in Cairo last week, a spokesman told the official SUNA news agency.
Samson Kwaje, information minister in the autonomous regional government established under a peace agreement signed in January last year, said the call was issued at an emergency cabinet meeting chaired by southern former rebel leader Silva Kiir Mayardit that also condemned the killings.
He said the authorities hoped that Egyptians working in the south’s main towns of Juba and Malakal would be able to return once passions raised by the killings had subsided.
He said ministers in the regional government had also decided to send a committee of experts to Cairo to establish how so many southern Sudanese had been killed in a police action to clear protestors from outside the Cairo offices of the UN refugee agency.
The committee would also meet representatives of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees to express the south Sudanese authorities’ dismay that the UN agency had sought the help of the Egyptian police in clearing the three-month-old protest.
Kwaje, said that the southern Sudan cabinet charged the committee to meet the refugees and exhort them to come back to Sudan.
Ministers issued a statement condemning the “massacre” after hearing a report from Kiir, who took over as southern leader last year after the death in a helicopter crash of veteran rebel leader John Garang, Kwaje added.
He said the government agreed to cooperate in the voluntary repatriation of Sudanese refugees from Egypt after the authorities in Cairo announced earlier in the day that they had shelved plans to deport some 600 refugees.
They appealed for assistance from the international community to establish a planned programme to bring home some 30,000, Kwaje said.
Speaking in the capital Khartoum later, Egyptian ambassador Mohammed Abdul Monim al-Shezly angrily denied that there had been any massacre by Egyptian police and accused third parties he did not identify of attempting to poison relations between the neighbouring countries.
“What is being said about the Egyptian police using firearms in dispersing the sit-in by the Sudanese refugees at Mustafa Mahmoud Square in Cairo last Friday is sheer lying,” he told reporters.
“There are hidden hands that intend to poison the atmosphere of bilateral ties.”
Shezly also strongly denied that Cairo had any plans to deport Sudanese, except those who were in Egypt illegally.
He said there were more than four million Sudanese in Egypt who had become “part of the Egyptian social fabric.”
(ST)