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Injured
Sudanese men sit in Notre Dame church clinic in Cairo. (Reuters)
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CAIRO,
January 3, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Halima Baraka
cried quietly as she recalled how she lost her 11-year old son in the
panic that ensued when Egyptian police cleared a Sudanese refugee
protest camp last Friday, leaving at least 27 dead including 11
children.
A
Sudanese father, Abdelaziz Mohamad, standing nearby whispered that he
did not know what to do with the body of his nine-month-old daughter,
which he said was at a hospital morgue, Reuters reported Monday,
January 2.
People
close by Mohamad scrambled around a pile of photos, books and other
belongings that were dumped on the floor of a church after being moved
from the protest site.
"I
was exhausted. There was chaos and I couldn't find him. I don't know
whether he's dead or alive," Baraka told Reuters.
She
was standing in a squalid room in Cairo's Notre Dame church, which
houses up to 2,000 of the roughly 3,500 Sudanese protestors who
Egyptian police had forcibly moved from a protest camp outside UN
offices in an affluent Cairo district.
The
protesters had been at the camp for up to three months demanding that
the UN's refugee agency move them to another country, citing racism
and a lack of jobs, education and healthcare in Egypt since they fled
violence in Sudan.
Police
used water cannons and beat people with truncheons to move them from
the camp after officials failed to persuade them to board buses
voluntarily. Talks with the UN refugee arm to end the protest had
failed two weeks earlier.
Human
Beings
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A
Sudanese woman believed to be killed in the police break-up.
(Reuters)
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"We
want to move to a country that treats us like human beings, where we
can live in freedom ... Ask anyone -- we can't send our children to
school. The one job we're allowed to do here is be a cleaner,"
said Fawzia Adam, from western Sudan.
"The
Egyptian government will never help. The UN just stood by. If there's
no solution we will all have to just kill ourselves. This is the final
solution, so that world knows it's impossible to live like this,"
she added.
The
office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) has called the
deaths a tragedy but has said it cannot resettle them all in another
country because many are looking for a better life and are not
refugees fleeing conflict.
Egypt
has high unemployment and the UNHCR has said ordinary Egyptians face
similar problems in accessing state services.
Some
politicians and MPs have called for an investigation into the
"large" number of deaths of women and children, reported
Egypt's official Middle East News Agency (MENA).
The
government had ruled out an international investigation and added that
the police had exhausted peaceful means to end the protest.
"Egypt
has dealt with the sit-in of the refugees with wisdom and
patience," MENA quoted Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Abul Gheit
as saying Monday.
Deported,
Arrested
Egyptian
authorities are, meanwhile, preparing to deport some of the evacuated
refugees, while many others are said to be arrested by police.
"The
targeted number of Sudanese who will be flown home ... is around
600," Major General Beshir Ahmad Beshir, who chairs a committee
formed to receive the deportees, told Agence France-Press (AFP)
Monday.
The
Sudanese embassy said Egypt planned to begin the deportations Monday
with a small group of 13 Sudanese.
Egyptian
officials have said that only those Sudanese whose asylum requests the
UNHCR has rejected and do not have legal residence in Egypt will be
expelled.
Refugees
at Notre Dame church said hundreds had been detained. An
Interior Ministry statement denied that any Sudanese were being held in
connection with the clashes.
Sudan's
north-south civil war lasted over two decades and made four million
people homeless. A separate conflict in the western Darfur region has
produced a further two million refugees, according to UN estimates.
A
peace agreement in January 2005 ended the north-south conflict but
many Sudanese say it is not safe to return home as the deal is
fragile.
