Murder from Darfur to Cairo

Jan. 13, 2006 | KAKUMA, Kenya -- No one, it seems, could reason with the Sudanese refugees gathered in Cairo on New Year's Eve.

For three months they had maintained a squatters encampment in the Egyptian capital. At times, as many as 3,000 men, women and children were jammed into a small park, not much larger than a basketball court, at a busy intersection in the upscale Al-Muahandiseen, across the street from the United Nations High Commission on Refugees. They were protesting UNHCR's refusal to grant them official status as refugees and resettle them in a third country.

Stubbornly and against all obstacles -- the growing stench of human waste, complaints from neighbors, the repeated refusal of UNHCR to grant their request, and threats from the notoriously violent Egyptian police -- the Sudanese maintained their crowded vigil. UNHCR refused to grant them refugee status because it reasoned that Sudan was no longer at war. Following the January 2005 signing of the Comprehensive Peace Treaty, it stated that Sudanese citizens were free to return to their homes.

However, many of the refugees had fled from Darfur, a volatile western region of Sudan not covered by the peace treaty. There, African farmers are still being killed and raped by Arab militias known as Janjaweed, which are supported by the government of Sudan in a systematic pattern that the U.S. government has identified as genocide. Along with refugees from other parts of Sudan, an estimated 8,000 Darfurians have taken refuge in Egypt, where they have complained of racism at the hands of Egyptian landlords and police, and where Egyptian law does not allow them to work.

Frustrated by weeks of negotiation and the refugees' refusal to accept a deal whereby they would remain in Egypt, UNHCR officials turned the matter over to Egyptian authorities. On the night of Dec. 29, according to published accounts, Egyptian riot police began blasting the group with water cannons and yelling through bullhorns that the protesters would be removed by force. The drenched refugees huddled together in the cold, steadfastly refusing to abandon the park.

Then, a few hours before dawn on New Year's Eve, 5,000 black-clad riot police, swinging truncheons, waded into half as many unarmed protesters. Among those killed were young children. "My daughter, Asma, was killed," Abdul Aziz Muhammad Ahmed told a reporter. The girl was 9 months old. Her uncle dropped her when the police clubbed him. Another man's 3-month-old baby was clubbed in his arms.

The official death toll climbed to 28, as more died in the hospital and in police custody. But the Cairo representative of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement claims the death toll may have been as high as 265, based on a tour of the city's hospitals. Egyptian authorities have barred journalists and refused to release bodies.

Whatever the actual figure, the attack was in clear violation of the U.N. Code of Conduct for Law Enforcement Officials, which states that "law enforcement officials may use force only when strictly necessary and to the extent required for the performance of their duty."

The massacre was forgotten almost instantly by the world press. But the factors leading up to it point to the much larger problem of Africa's 15 million refugees -- and in particular those from war-ravaged Sudan, Africa's largest country, whose continuing export of misery threatens the economic health and political stability of its neighbors.

This was made clear to me one week before the attack in Cairo, when I interviewed refugees in the Kakuma refugee camp, located across Sudan's southern border, in northern Kenya. What the refugees told me underscores the desperation of their compatriots in Cairo.

Kakuma camp is larger than most actual towns in Kenya. Home to 73,000 refugees, it is a sprawling expanse of huts organized along tribal lines, its perimeter fenced with concertina wire, and surrounded by desert. The camp, once regarded as temporary, is now 14 years old.

Sudanese make up the majority of the camp's inhabitants. Most fled their homeland some years ago during Africa's longest-running civil war -- the 21-year-old struggle between the Islamist government centered in Khartoum, in the north, and the marginalized black African rebels in the south fighting under the banner of the Sudan People's Liberation Movement.

Among the refugees I interviewed, some had survived attacks from government troops and helicopters. Others had fled the SPLM and the bloody tribal violence and famine that followed a split within its leadership. When I asked Daniel Mathiang, a 25-year-old Dinka tribesman, about the crisis that had forced him from his home in south Sudan, he responded with irony in nearly perfect English. "Do you want to know about the crisis so many years ago, or do you want to know about the crisis right now in Kakuma?"

"Our daily ration of water is 1 liter per person," he continued. "This is for drinking, cooking and washing." As a visitor who was drinking 3 to 5 liters per day to stay hydrated, I found this difficult to believe. But others corroborated Mathiang's claim. Food was also severely rationed. The monthly allotment of maize was 3.5 kilograms per person; .2 kilos of beans, and .25 of rice. Milk and sorghum were more abundant. The couple dozen people gathered around me, mostly children born in the camp, showed none of the grosser signs of malnutrition that I could observe, but all were thin.

Their complaints were borne out in testimony given in June 2002 before the U.S. Senate by Jason Phillips, director of the International Rescue Commission's program in Kenya. The IRC's role is chiefly to supplement the meager daily rations in the case of young children and lactating women. Refugees rarely receive the 2,168 calories considered the daily minimum, Phillips said. He called attention to a "dangerously high rate of malnutrition in Kakuma representing a complete abandonment of minimum international humanitarian standards for food assistance." Chronic shortages in the World Food for Peace pipeline were creating a "downward spiral" at Kakuma. Cutting back on food, he concluded, was "neither cost-effective nor humane."

Phillips' warning came more than three years ago. Inaction and the past two years of drought in northern Kenya and Ethiopia are expected to triple the rate of malnutrition among children under 5. Not surprisingly, last November the U.N. World Food Program Emergency Report cited "alarming rates of malnutrition" in Kakuma. In December, to make matters worse, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. John Bolton succeeded in putting a cap on the U.N.'s annual spending. In short, the food deficit at Kakuma and other camps is increasing, not shrinking.

Next page: Failure at the U.N., and why prospects for the surviving refugees remain grim