CAIRO: A woman from the war-torn Darfur region of Sudan was shot dead by Egyptian police on Sunday while trying to cross the Egyptian border with Israel, a security source told AFP.
The 28-year-old, named as Hagga Abbas Harun, died instantly near the town of Rafah. She was part of a group of 27 African migrants hoping to make the illegal desert crossing into Israel. The source said that live rounds were fired to disperse the group and stop them reaching the border.
Four others were injured as a result of the incident and were taken to a nearby hospital. They were also from Darfur.
Egyptian police claimed that before firing they had ordered the Ethiopians, Ivorians and Sudanese to stop but were ignored. The police did not aim at anyone, according to the security source, they fired into the air.
This follows another incident earlier this month where one Darfuri was shot and wounded after a similar attempt at crossing en masse.
An ever increasing exodus of Sudanese refugees is leaving Cairo and crossing the Sinai into Israel, say experts. But, for many, Israel has not been their promised land.
According to United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) statistics, 382 have traveled to Israel in 2007 since June, up from 59 who made the journey in 2005.
There is anecdotal evidence of dozens per night, added Mike Kagen, senior fellow in Human Rights Law at the American University in Cairo (AUC).
While some have found work for $4 an hour in tourist hotels in Eilat, many have been detained indefinitely, and some even deported back to Egypt.
And here is where experts such as Kagen and Tawer El Merghany, a Sudanese researcher, see a critical potential problem. Refugees deported from Israel might then be deported back to Sudan and executed.
Sudanese passports say to all countries of the world except Israel, said El Merghany, and the Sudanese government in the north believes that Sudanese refugees in Israel might form an army or become spies against Sudan.
So simply stepping foot in Israel can give [a Sudanese person] a potential refugee claim, said Kagen at a news conference organized by Africa and Middle East Refugee Assistance on Thursday. El Merghany put the problem in a harsher light. The Sudanese who go to Israel can never go back to Sudan; [it] means capital punishment in Sudan, he said.
Section six of Israeli s asylum system, developed in 2001, states that it may refuse to consider asylum applications from enemy nationals, said Kagen, adding that Israel has claimed in the past that Sudanese refugees might pose a security threat.
According to Haaretz newspaper Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak agreed at a recent Sharm El-Sheikh conference that Israel would deport the African refugees back to Egypt though international border crossings. But at the press conference on Thursday, Kagen said that Egypt had never denied or confirmed this agreement.
The professor also stressed several times during the meeting that Egypt is not legally obligated to take the Sudanese refugees back from Israel. And technically Israel, according to the 1951 Refugee Convention, has agreed to not forcibly return people to territories where they could face persecution.
In September 2004, several Sudanese were deported back to Egypt after the UNHCR received assurances that they would be protected.
In Cairo, several of them were almost deported back to Sudan before UNHCR stepped in at the last minute.
Experts say that the UNHCR has not received assurances from the Egyptian government that the refugees deported from Israel will not be subsequently deported to Sudan.
The UNHCR and the Egyptian Ministry of Interior could not be reached for comment at time of press.
Israel has said it would assist “a small number of refugees from the civil war-plagued Darfur region in Sudan. UN figures put the number of Sudanese refugees in Israel at the moment at 1,200, some 300 of them from Darfur.
