Israel to return Sudanese to Egypt, absorbs only Darfur refugees
July 2, 2007 (JERUSALEM) — Israel is clamping down on a soaring number of infiltrators from Sudan and other lands by reaching an understanding with Egypt to keep Darfur refugees and send others back there, a decision that’s drawn fire from critics who say people’s lives will be put at risk.
Prime Minister Ehud Olmert told parliament’s Foreign Affairs and Defense on Monday that about 2,800 people, including 1,160 Sudanese, have crossed illegally from Egypt through its porous Sinai desert border with Israel, in recent years, a participant in the meeting said
Olmert said Israel would absorb Sudanese the U.N. designates as refugees from the western region of Darfur, where violence has killed some 200,000 people and left 2.5 million homeless. Illegal immigrants who entered Israel looking for work will be returned to Egypt, he said. He did not estimate how many Sudanese in Israel might qualify as asylum seekers.
Others have arrived from Eritrea, Ivory Coast, Georgia and Turkey, with numbers rising sharply in recent months to 50 a day in June, said Michael Bavly, a representative of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Israel.
Egypt has assured that infiltrators who are returned will not be placed in danger, government spokeswoman Miri Eisin said. There was no immediate reaction from Egypt.
Israeli soldiers will quickly return infiltrators to Egypt at the border crossings, and in cases where immediate return is impossible, infiltrators will be handed over to Israel’s immigration police until they can be returned to their country of origin, the government said.
The government together with the UNHCR will compile a list of infiltrators already in Israel with a view to returning them to Egypt, the statement said.
Olmert also has given security officials 30 days to present a plan to build a barrier on the Egyptian border to keep infiltrators out, the government said.
The arrival of Darfur refugees in Israel, a country that grew out of the Nazi genocide of Jews, has hit a raw nerve. Human rights groups and high-profile figures have appealed to the Israeli government to give them a home.
“As members of the Jewish people, for whom the memory of the Holocaust burns, we cannot stand by as the refugees from the genocide in Darfur hammer on our doors,” Avner Shalev, the director of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, wrote in a letter to Olmert last year.
Shalev added Monday that he has been in constant touch with Olmert and was encouraged by the prime minister’s pledge to absorb those escaping genocide.
“Now I want to see that in fact the refugees from Darfur get a solution to their plight,” he said.
Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel, himself a Holocaust survivor, told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper last year that “we as Jews are obliged to help not only Jews.”
The government’s decision Monday drew fire from migrants’ advocates, who fear the government will return people to dangerous lands.
“How can an 18-year-old soldier at the border be expected to make a decision about whether to admit someone or not?” asked Sigal Rozen, a spokeswoman for the Hotline for Migrant Workers.
Israel should show special sensitivity “because it’s a state founded by refugees, for refugees,” Rozen said. The fact that these aren’t Jewish refugees “shouldn’t matter,” she added.
Bavly said Egypt has pledged not to return Sudanese infiltrators to Sudan, because the government there, which Israel considers an enemy state, “will not look favorably upon that they were in Israel, so they are a special group.”
Two million Sudanese have migrated to Egypt, so 1,000 more will not make a major difference, he said.
Five hundred people from Ivory Coast are staying in Israel with government permission because of the war going on there, and 400 Eritreans have been allowed to stay so far because of war and famine there, he added.
(AP)