World Refugee Day Celebration; Cairo, Egypt (2005)
The elections in Sudan are understandably grabbing all of the headlines this week. The National Election Commission today extended voting for two days because of the widespread confusion and delays in the electoral process. The opposition parties boycotting the elections also directly attacked U.S. Special Envoy to Sudan Scott Gration and former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, as the head of the Carter Center’s election monitoring team, for their support of these elections. It is their claim that the Obama administration has made a deal with Omar Al Bashir’s government to support fraudulent elections in exchange for the referendum of southern secession in January 2011. At Save Darfur, we have put together a full summary of the election-related developments.
Tonight though, I wanted to take a brief moment to highlight another human rights issue: the status of refugees in Egypt. The treatment and daily life of refugees – mostly from Eritrea, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan – has never been easy. I know this from a year spent volunteering as an English teacher at a refugee center, Saint Andrews, in downtown Cairo. Due to these daily hardships, over the past few years, a number of refugees have attempted to travel to the Sinai peninsula and enter Israel illegally. In some instances, Egyptian security forces have shot at and killed refugees making the crossing, and the Israeli authorities have also violated the rights guaranteed to refugees.
Why am I writing about this tonight? Because at least two Darfuris in Egypt are at immediate risk of forcible return to Sudan. Amnesty International issued a warning on Friday that the authorities planned to return Sudanese refugees Mohamed Adam Abdallah and Ishaq Fadl Dafallah to Sudan today, April 12. If returned, Amnesty warned that they would be in grave danger of being tortured or otherwise ill-treated in Sudan.
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