The United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) claimed to want to help the Sudanese refugees from the war in Sudan. After getting up to 3000 Sudanese refugees, on September 29, 2005, the U.N. placed them in Mustafa Muhammad Square in downtown Giza (near the UNHCR office in Cairo). The UNHCR has other territories in Egypt that could have provided proper protection for the refugees, such as in Sinai, but it appears that they were just trying to bait the Egyptian government into looking bad.
As the war in Sudan came to an end, the refugees were not refugees anymore in the eyes of the Egyptian government. In the midst of trying to get rid of them, the government tried to spread fear in the streets of Cairo against the refugees by saying they spread AIDS and other diseases.
By then the refugees had given birth to ten children, and the fear of the Sudanese refugees was growing fierce. Three weeks ago on a Thursday night, the Egyptian government sent 15,000 soldiers to the square with water tanks. This was the last week of December, mind you. The temperature was in the 50s or 60s Fahrenheit.
After the Sudanese refused to get into their buses to take them back to Sudan, the soldiers went into action. The soldiers not only blasted the refugees with water, but also beat them, which left many injured or dead in the mess.
Ismail Waby, an Egyptian intellectual, lives only minutes from Mustafa Muhammad Square and made the following comments to me during a recent visit to Cincinnati: “You should see people talking about it normally in the street, thinking that it’s a good thing they kicked them out or it would have been a threat to our nation. Although they are helpless refugees, Egyptians have always been racist with Sudanese. But the views of the intellectuals are very different. They think it was very vicious.”
With an uncertain future, the Sudanese refugees wait in the Egyptian government’s hands.