Yishai: Situation in Eritrea better than in Sderot

June 28, 2012June 28, 2012

By JPOST.COM STAFF
Interior Minister Eli Yishai on Thursday called the situation in Eritrea better than in Sderot.
Yishai’s comments came hours after the interior ministry announced that migrants from the Ivory Coast have two weeks to leave voluntarily before being deported by force.

“Infiltrators, starting now, will be thrown directly into jail,” Yishai said. “I insist that the Eritrean and Sudanese migrants will all eventually be thrown out of the country… the situation in Eritrea is better than in Sderot and southern Israel.”

Yishai added that Israeli officials are in contact with counterparts in Sudan and Eritrea to organize the deportation of migrants.
Source: Jerusalem Post

assenna[sourcehttp://assenna.com/yishai-situation-in-eritrea-better-than-in-sderot/

Tribune de Genève Describes Eritrea as Mafia State

Last Updated on Thursday, 28 June 2012 22:32 Written by EPDP Information Office Thursday, 28 June 2012 22:15[source

Tribune de Genève Describes Eritrea as Mafia State

Tribune de Genève, a leading Swiss daily newspaper in French, in a full-page coverage described Eritreans as hostages at gun-point by “a regime of gangsters, a Mafia clan” that has turned a once promising new country into “a Mafia State”.
Writing on the June 28, 2012 issue of the newspaper, its journalist Bernard Bridel believed that the Eritrean president, Isaias Afworki, is “a warlord who runs a state as his guerrilla army”. He also extensively quotes a 248-page book published in French this year by Leonard Vincent, a journalist of the Reporters Without Boarders, who wrote that Eritrea is already  “an African version of North Korea”.
The writer of the reportage stated that Switzerland is hardening its refugee laws to deny asylum to military deserters, majority of those who come to Switzerland being Eritreans. But he added: “Eritreans are not migrant workers or economic refugees but fugitives running away from a prison at a nation-wide scale”. Journalist Bernard Bridel further stated that the Eritrean president and his regime force everyone to belong to the army and the party and that anyone who fails to obey is considered a deserter.
The forceful reportage of Tribune de Genève adds that “Eritrea is at war because its leaders wanted it to be at war”. It said this is their Maoist method of “conquest of power through the barrel of the gun and maintaining it through the gun”.
Besides facing torture and denial of freedoms like in any dictatorship, ordinary Eritreans who take risk to escape forced conscription are subjected to constant harassment of rounding up and capture (Giffa) to return to the army. The consequences are severe treatments under  the security apparatus.
The newspaper mentioned the sources of support for the Eritrean regime to include Iran, China, Qatar, extremist groups and the regime’s Mafiosi activities.
The writer believes that over 20% of Eritrea’s population of 5 million resides outside Eritrea, and that the Eritrean opposition organizations in the diaspora are bedeviled by the diversity that reflects the presence of nine ethnic groups, two religions and a history of two rival liberation movements of the armed struggle era.
The writer concluded that the only possible change of regime in Eritrea may come through an internal coup d’etat by the Eritrean regime’s army itself.

Rape and HIV as Weapons of War

While the history of wars and conflicts is replete with systematic incidents of sexual violence against vulnerable women, modern-day wars have witnessed large-scale indiscriminate deployment of rape as a “weapon” of war by combatants. In recent armed conflicts — such as in the former Yugoslavia, Liberia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Sudan, the Central African Republic, Sierra Leone and Rwanda — the widespread use of rape as a tool of warfare has become a conspicuous phenomenon. Read more

'Eritrea won't accept forced citizen repatriation'

Written by BEN HARTMAN

‘Thank you for betraying your country,’ Eritrean envoy tells asylum-seeker at Knesset panel; 144 S. Sudanese head back to Juba.

Photo: Ben Hartman Eritrea will not accept the forced repatriation of its nationals living in Israel, Ambassador Tesfamariam Tekeste said on Monday, at a lively and at times heated meeting of the Knesset Committee on Foreign Workers.
Tekeste said his government’s position remains that it will welcome those who choose to return and will help the Israeli government determine which migrants are Eritreans. He also said his government would ensure the safety of those returning and would not prosecute them for leaving the country, except those who skipped out on mandatory military service.

Related:

• 'J'lem could use Eritrea ties on migrant issue'
• UN human rights chief accuses Eritrea of rights abuses

He then held up a list of what he said were the names of hundreds of Eritreans who had come to his office in the past year to arrange their voluntary return home.
Eritreans make up the majority of the more than 60,000 African migrants in Israel, with some estimates claiming there are over 40,000 in the country. Their homeland is ruled by a dictatorship and Israel cannot legally return Eritreans there due to the possibility of persecution upon their return. Commonly referred to as the “North Korea of Africa,” the country is ranked by Reporters Without Borders at the very bottom (179 out of 179 countries) in terms of press freedom, and has been accused of widespread human rights abuses against its citizens.
Tekeste began his remarks from a defensive stance, and expressed concern about the presence of NGO representatives and Eritrean asylumseekers, saying he was only coming to brief the government and not get involved in a debate.
Committee chairman Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz) told him it was a meeting open to the public and he would have the opportunity to respond to any allegations against himself or his country.
Throughout the meeting, which was held in English, Tekeste was dismissive of all claims presented against his country, which he said is beset by allegations and demonization from “external forces” trying to smear it. He defended the lack of democracy in Eritrea, where no elections have been held since independence from Ethiopia was gained in 1993.
“We consider democracy a process; it should not be imposed. We witnessed in our neighboring countries [that] because of elections, people are now buying guns and sharpening their swords. This is the history of Africa, where there is elections there is bloodshed. [Elections] divide the society and the country and other African countries have this, and we have our own recipe for our country,” Tekeste said.
“People blackmail Eritrea, say we are not a democracy and a lot of allegations because we don’t comply with their policies which have their own agenda,” he added.
The ambassador admitted that his country has never had elections, at which point MK Miri Regev (Likud) cracked that the Eritrean regime resembles that of Avigdor Liberman’s Yisrael Beytenu party, which does not hold elections for party leader.
Tekeste was later interrupted by a back-and-forth between Regev and Horowitz in Hebrew, after which Horowitz apologized and said that “Miri Regev is considering immigrating to Eritrea.”
While there have been allegations that the Eritrean regime has encouraged its citizens to immigrate to Israel in order to send money back to their cash-starved homeland, Tekeste blamed Israel for giving work permits to Eritreans who arrived in 2006 and 2007, saying that it has created an incentive for economic migrants to continue to move to Israel.
Tekeste said he has followed the issue for the entire seven years he has been stationed in Israel, at which point MK Ya’acov Katz (National Union) asked, “Will you stay in Israel when your time is up?” He was answered by Horowitz with, “Yes, he will move to a neighborhood in Beit El.” Katz lives in the West Bank settlement.
Tekeste also claimed that Israel has granted group protection to thousands of African migrants from Ethiopia and Sudan, who claim to be Eritrean in order to remain in the country.
Horowitz then asked Tekeste about the UN position that Eritrean asylum-seekers cannot be returned to the country because they might face persecution.
He replied, “Well, as an Israeli member of the Knesset, do you accept all the UN resolutions against Israel? Do you take it at face value? I think we’re in the same position on this.”
Avi Granot, deputy directorgeneral of the Foreign Ministry’s Africa department, described how Israel has had relations with Eritrea since it became independent, but would prefer it chose a different path in its internal politics.
“We value the strategic relevance and importance of Eritrea, but this does not mean we agree on all variety of issues and politics. We do realize that Eritrea has taken a certain policy of isolationism in regards to its multilateral relations,” Granot said, earning a miffed look from Tekeste with his reference to isolationism.
“That is Eritrea’s choice,” Granot said. “But that is not what we’d welcome in our relation with Eritrea, we’d rather welcome greater sharing of responsibilities.”
Granot also spoke about the desire to find a third country willing to take in Israel’s Eritrean population, but said that since there are 20 million refugees and illegal migrants from Africa just within Africa – including 200,000 Eritreans in Ethiopia – this has not yet borne fruit.
Tekeste was beset by criticism of his country’s human rights record by Amnesty International director in Israel Yonatan Gher and Tel Aviv University Prof. Irit Beck as well as MK Dov Henin (Hadash). They said accepting the ambassador’s assurances of refugees’ safety upon return would be akin to a Syrian ambassador promising that Syrian refugees who return from Turkey would not be harmed.
Tekeste said he would invite a delegation to visit Eritrea, saying that people should not speak ill of his country without having visited it. He then added: “Everyone told me before I was going to Israel that it is hell. If you look at it from the outside you see hell, but seeing is believing. Someone who has never been to Eritrea cannot give me a lecture.”
As for accusations that the Eritrean Embassy is taking money from migrants in Israel, who have to pay a “recovery tax” on their earnings abroad, Tekeste said that this is done with Eritrean diaspora communities around the world. He compared it to Israeli practice, saying, “You Israelis collect money from Jewish communities all over the world, any hospital I go to [in Israel] I see this donation from somebody from here or there, so we can’t be accused of these issues.”
While Tekeste was criticizing protests held by Eritreans outside the country’s embassy in Ramat Gan, an Eritrean man named Isaias shouted, “It’s not like that, it’s not like that!” “Do I have to confront him? Is this the aim of the meeting?” Tekeste asked. “Democracy is not elastic, this is a problem of democracy.”
Isaias accused the ambassador of lying and said, “Eritrea is being led by a group of people who have a dictatorial way of thinking, and because of this we have been dispersed just like a seed all over the world.”
He added that he never dreamed of coming to Israel, but fled after seven years in Eritrean prison because “I love democracy, I love human rights.”
The ambassador responded, “Thank you for betraying your country. You are talking so much nonsense.”
He then said that if Isaias “had any courage to fight for the liberation of the country you should just come and fight for the liberation of the country. Why did you cross so many countries’ borders? Why didn’t you stay in Sudan and fight us from there? This is nonsense. If you had a gut and courage you would fight for the liberation of the country like I did, when I spent years in the bush. I am proud of that.”
The meeting concluded with Katz proposing a committee visit to Eritrea to assess whether Israel can return Eritrean migrants to their homeland. The proposal was greeted warmly by the ambassador.
On Monday night, a plane carrying 144 South Sudanese, including 53 minors, took off from Israel on a one-way flight to Juba. The Population, Immigration and Borders Authority said that would bring to 271 the number of South Sudanese repatriated since the first flight left last Sunday night.
Each adult received 1,000 euros and each child 500 euros.
PIBA spokeswoman Sabine Haddad said Israel had chartered an Ethiopian Airlines plane for the flight, and there were plans for two more flights next week. In total, 600 South Sudanese had agreed to leave voluntarily, 300 had refused and were arrested and another 500 face deportation proceedings.
PIBA also said that 800 African migrants had entered Israel from Sinai this month, and they were all in prison.

As African refugees are put into camps and attacked by racist gangs, Donald Macintyre reports from Tel Aviv

Immigration in Israel: African outcasts in the promised land

Written by Donald Macintyre

Amine Zigta is not a timid man. If he was, he would not have risked his life by escaping indefinite enforced army service in Eritrea, or making the hazardous journey through Sudan and the Sinai desert to Israel. Nor would he have kept open his corner bar in south Tel Aviv after 15 local hoodlums shouting "what do you care, you black son of a bitch?" broke off table legs in March to assault him after he refused to serve teenagers below the legal drinking age. "But now," Mr Zigta, 36, says in fluent Hebrew, "I am afraid, all the time. At night I can't sleep. I am in danger."
Given subsequent events, his fears are understandable. On 23 May, with a demonstration against African refugees planned for the evening, he locked up at around 4pm. Hours later, residents phoned to say demonstrators were breaking in. Mr Zigta went to two police stations for help and was still waiting at a third when he got another call to say a police patrol had finally turned up. When he arrived, he found the plate glass windows smashed by bricks, tables upturned and all his stock stolen by looters.
This month, a motorcyclist hurled a firecracker into the bar, injuring a customer. An Eritrean woman working there was threatened by two men that "her stomach would be cut open with knives", he says. "I have been to the police but they say they can't guard the place 24 hours." Friendly local Israelis phone in warnings when trouble is afoot. "But then they are told: why are you helping this man?"
Mr Zigta's experience is extreme. But otherwise he typifies the 60,000 African men and women who have crossed the still-porous Egypt-Israel border since 2005. Many of the more recent have braved kidnappings, torture and rape by their Bedouin traffickers. Of the 50,000 "infiltrators" (the official term has been condemned by the US State Department) still here, Eritreans and Sudanese cannot be deported because the dangers at home qualify them for "collective protection" under international conventions. A third group, 1,000 South Sudanese, are being deported after a court ruling that the new state is safe to return to.
But with a suspended deportation order hanging over them, the remaining African asylum-seekers are in legal limbo, unable to secure refugee status and therefore access to health and social services. Their entry documents forbid work, and though Israel's Supreme Court has ordered the state not to enforce this, the Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, says he intends to find a way to do so. A new law permits detention of refugees for three years, and so Israel is constructing a 12,400-place desert prison camp – along with tented facilities across the country – "to house tens of thousands of infiltrators until they can be sent out of the country", Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said this month. The inmates will not be allowed to work.
Until this month, when the government decided to keep new "infiltrators" in jail, refugees have been detained and screened before "conditional" release. They generally say they were humanely treated by the soldiers on arrival. It's after that that life got difficult.
"I was shocked. I thought Israel would give us our human rights," says Abdo Omar, 32, a university graduate who is one of around 200 Darfuris currently living at a grubby shelter rented out at a steep £2,000 a month, with sleeping bags on the floor and in corridors. Israel says that, as the nearest democracy to Africa with a first-world economy, it is uniquely vulnerable to a migrant influx. And it's true that south Tel Aviv has replaced Calais as the highest-profile flashpoint of a global crisis, the handling of which by European countries, including Britain, has been criticised.
But it's hard to imagine the British Home Secretary, Theresa May, say, surviving the generalisations deployed by Mr Yishai about the asylum-seekers he says have made south Tel Aviv Israel's "garbage can". The minister has suggested that "most" African migrants are criminals, and that many, including rapists, are HIV positive. Arguing that the refugees threaten the "Zionist dream", he has claimed that most are Muslims. Yet official figures show that in south Tel Aviv 13.5 per cent of crimes are committed by foreigners, who make up 28 per cent of the local population. And while Health ministry experts estimate that 17 per cent of HIV sufferers are among legal and illegal foreigners, who are 3 per cent of the national population, police say only one refugee has been charged with rape. And most members of the largest single group – the 35,000 Eritreans – are Christian.
Miri Regev, a Knesset member in Mr Netanyahu's Likud party, told the May protest that African migrants were a "cancer in our body". That evening, rampaging demonstrators attacked Africans and ransacked businesses – including Mr Zigta's bar. Because of the overtones of Hitler's wartime language against the Jews, Ms Regev later apologised to Holocaust survivors (and cancer patients) but not to the Africans. Both the language and the violence were subsequently condemned by Mr Netanyahu. But Ms Regev also unwittingly touched on comparisons some liberal Israelis make with the country's own foundation largely by refugees. Each evening, in Tel Aviv's Levinsky Park, up to 500 Africans queue for a hot meal provided by Israeli volunteers.
One volunteer, Vardit Shlafy, 50, explains that her parents were also refugees – from Poland – and that her mother was saved by a Catholic priest who helped her fake an ID that would allow escape to Russia from the Nazis. "Otherwise I wouldn't be here today. I am saying how grateful I am to that priest by doing something for others."
Even some Israelis in south Tel Aviv express unease about the government's policies. Shop owner Meir Yakoby has participated in "anti-infiltrator" demonstrations. Yet he employs an Eritrean worker. While he wants the refugees dispersed across the country, he says: "He has to work, he has to eat." Israel, he acknowledges, has "not been showing a good face to the world".
Certainly, it's hard to see how mass detention will help. According to Sigal Rozen, of the Hotline for Migrant Workers, a non-governmental organisation, government hopes that the Eritreans (whose average asylum application success rate is 83 per cent in countries – such as those in the EU –which process them) will thus be persuaded to return home are baseless. Israel is hardly going to follow Eritrea's example by raping inmates or torturing them in basements, she says. "No matter how they are abused, they know their own country will abuse them worse."
Kidane Isaac, 26, an Eritrean community activist, says if he returned to his homeland he would face torture or even execution after escaping from the army and then from jail. He says the Eritreans are increasingly "nervous about the general atmosphere because of the new campaign against refugees". Of Israel's "right-wing government" he says: "They are forgetting their own history.

source http://www.harnnet.org/index.php/news-and-articles/top-headlines/3873-immigration-in-israel-african-outcasts-in-the-promised-land-

45K maids to arrive every month from Ethiopia

JEDDAH – Ethiopia is facilitating procedures to send 45,000 maids to the Kingdom every month, an informed source at the Ethiopian Embassy in Saudi Arabia has said.
Ethiopian housemaids have been high in demand after the Kingdom stopped recruiting housemaids from four countries, including Kenya, because the Kingdom has been unable to reach a satisfactory agreement with these countries, Asharq Al-Awsat reported Wednesday.
Noor Adeen Masfa, Vice Consul for Economic Affairs in Jeddah, said his department and committees from the Ethiopian Ministry of Labor met several times to facilitate the travel of housemaids to the Kingdom after they are properly trained in Ethiopia.
“We decided to finish procedures of 1,500 housemaids due to the increasing demand for Ethiopian housemaids by Saudi families. Ethiopian housemaids are trained well on Saudi customs and traditions, besides the percentage of runaways is low,” he said.
Unavailability of sufficient flights from Addis Ababa has also caused the delay in the travel of a large number of housemaids.
Some Saudi families have complained that their Ethiopian housemaids left their households after coming to the Kingdom to work illegally because they get lucrative offers from private companies and brokers. Masfa said this matter was studied and discussed. Deterring penalties will be put on housemaids who do that, he said.
“Some Saudi families employ housemaids illegally and pay them SR2,000 a month. That’s why many housemaids run away,” he added.
Masfa said the Ministry of Labor in Ethiopia is considering to put conditions in the contracts to allow housemaids use a cell phone and talk to their families and the consulate in the Kingdom.
“Saudi recruitment offices have welcomed this idea,” he said. – SG 

http://www.saudigazette.com.sa/index.cfm?method=home.regcon&contentID=20120315119698

a:FREE Bekele Gerba/Olbana Lelisa, Oromo Political Prisoners in Ethiopian Empire, and JUSTICE for the Assasa Massacre

Oromia-Ethiopi

June 9, 2012 at 4:17 pm · Gadaa.com

[source http://gadaa.com/oduu/14092/2012/06/09/oromia-ethiopia-free-bekele-gerba-and-olbana-lelisa-oromo-political-prisoners-in-the-ethiopian-empire/

On August 27, 2011, Oromo political leaders, Obbo Bekele Gerba and Obbo Olbana Lelisa, were thrown into prison by the TPLF regime, which has militarily occupied Oromiyaa since 1991.

Two of the estimated 20,000 Oromo nationalist political prisoners in the Ethiopian empire, Obbo Bekele Gerba was the deputy Chairman of the opposition Oromo Federalist Democratic Movement (OFDM), and Obbo Olbana Lelisa a leader in the Oromo People’s Congress party (OPC) at the time of their arrests.
Obbo Bekele Gerba and Obbo Olbana Lelisa were thrown into prison after meeting with an Amnesty International delegation, which was also expelled from the Empire afterwards. Please read here about Amnesty International’s report about the two prisoners of consciousness. The Amnesty International delegation was in the country to collect information for its report, which was later published in Dec. 2011: “Dismantling Dissent – Intensified Crackdown in Ethiopia”
The two were then joined in October 2011 by another 100 Oromo political prisoners, including leaders and activists of the Oromo civic organization, the Macha-Tulama Self-Help Association (MTSHA), which was afterwards closed down for yet another round.
According to an October 12, 2011 report by the Macha-Tulama Association, USA, INC., a US-based civic organization with a similar name as the one currently banned in Oromiyaa:

Obbo Laggese Deti, former leader of MTSHA (Read the biography of Obbo Laggese Deti here)

“The Macha-Tulama high officials, Mr. Laggese Deti Dhaba, Mr. Mulugeta Riqitu and Sisay Sarbesa, are all held incommunicado at the Maikelawi Torture Center in Finfinnee as of today. Mr. Dhaba was the Secretary General of Macha-Tulama Self-help Association for the year 2002- 2003. Mr. Dhaba has also served as the Chairman of History and Culture Committee of the association. He is a cultural expert of Oromo society, and hence imprisoning and attacking him are tantamount to destroying the Oromo cultural resources and foundations. Similarly, his colleagues, who have been imprisoned with him, have deep interests in promoting hte Oromo history and culture. They are Mr. Mulugeta Rikitu, School Director and Board Member of MTSHA; and Mr. Sisay Serbesa, 3rd-Year student at the Addis Ababa [Finfinne] University.”
Following the banning of the Macha-Tulama Self-Help Association, the oldest independent Oromo civic organization with the objective of promoting Oromo history and culture, the Voice of Oromo Liberation (VOL-SBO) carried the following editorial:

Dan Connell: Eritrea’s Refugee crisis is at a crisis level and is intensifying

June 24, 2012June 24, 2012 assenna [source http://assenna.com/dan-connell-eritreas-refugee-crisis-is-at-a-crisis-level-and-is-intensifying/

The Eritrean refuge situation has been in a crisis level for a while and is now intensifying, according to Dan Connell, an author and longtime friend of Eritrea’s struggle for independence. In an interview he conducted with Radio Assenna on his recent visit to the Eritrean refugee camps in North Ethiopia, Mr. Connell said that the refuge situation is in “continuous flux” where some are being resettled in third countries, others are moving out to central Ethiopia, following Ethiopia’s recently implemented Open Camp Policy while many are still arriving from Eritrea. Dan Connell recently returned from Northern Ethiopia after vising three Camps that are sheltering Eritrean refuges.
“One of the most disturbing parts to it was that an increasing trend towards an unaccompanied minors coming to the boarder,” he highlighted. He elaborated that in “many cases what you see is kids who are searching for an older brothers and sisters or their mothers and fathers who had left before. Mr. Connell said that he has himself witnessed the screening of newly arriving refuges and put the rate at between 30 to 35 Eritreans a day.
“You have a significant number of young men which makes these camps very different from most of refugee camps in the world where you find mainly women, children and the elderly,” Mr. Connell underscored. According to him Eritreans are fleeing in all directions depending their [geographical] background in Eritrea. He elaborated that Majority of Tigrigna speaking highlanders with the small minority of Saho gets Ethiopia more accessible while the Afars and the Tigre finds Djibouti and Sudan respectively to be a much safer route.

Dan Connell said, “whenever you have a significant portion of young working age men and women fleeing a country, you are basically gutting the workforce, making it difficult for the country to develop in the future except under forced servitude.”

Speaking of the situation which lead into the festering of all the problems and ills that Eritrea found itself today, Dan Connell said that, despite an uneasy feelings that he and others like him saw early on when the EPLF refused to include ELF in the transitional government it set up, hinting the closing door for a future vibrant democratic society, they kept the “criticisms and questions about them in private and allowed the situation to percolate along the 1998-2000”.
Dan Connell said that the biggest problems at this point are that the Eritrean opposition is “so scattered so internally divided and without clarity for what it stands”. According to him, unless this changed beyond issuing statements, there will not be much interest

African migrants in Israel face angry backlash, deportations

June 24, 2012June 24, 2012 assenna Source http://assenna.com/african-migrants-in-israel-face-angry-backlash-deportations/

By Joel Greenberg, Published: June 23

TEL AVIV — Helen Barhat, a young woman from Eritrea, pointed to two bricks on the floor that she has saved since they were hurled into her small groceryshop by a mob that ransacked the premises last month after a raucous demonstration against African migrants.Crouching with her hands over her head, she showed how she had cowered in a back room as the rioters swept shelves clean, smashed bottles and emptied her cash register during a rampage against African-run stores in the neighborhood.
“People tell us, ‘Go back to Eritrea, this is our country,’ ” Barhat said. Joined by friends who were sitting in the shop, she added, “If there was no one here with me now, I would close.”
On the streets of the Hatikva quarter, one of the low-income neighborhoods in south Tel Aviv where an influx of illegal African migrants has stirred unrest among residents, tension is simmering under a facade of normalcy.

A roundup of migrants from South Sudan and the deportation of more than 100 this month has left other newcomers nervous about what lies ahead and residents clamoring for more action. A poster put up last week summoned people to a demonstration outside the home of Tel Aviv’s mayor against “the concentration of the foreigners in our neighborhoods.”

“The situation is very bad,” said Merhane Melake, an Eritrean who has been in Israel for five years, as he walked home. “We don’t know what comes next and what solution they will find for us.”
About 60,000 Africans have illegally entered Israel since 2005, most of them from Eritrea and Sudan. Two recent sexual assault cases in which migrants were charged and a chorus of heated rhetoric from rightist politicians have fueled a violent backlash against the newcomers. Apartments housing migrants have been firebombed and torched, and some Africans have been assaulted on the streets.

Complaints by residents in depressed Tel Aviv neighborhoods of rising crime and a sense of insecurity brought by the migrants have prompted a government crackdown. About 400 illegal migrants, most from South Sudan, have been rounded up in this month’s sweep, and preparations are underway to hold thousands more Africans in a vast tent camp in southern Israel. The moves to deport people from South Sudan went ahead after a Jerusalem court accepted the government’s argument that conditions in that country were safe enough for their return.

The migrants — some seeking refuge from war and oppressive governments, others looking for work and a better life — have trekked through Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, where many were held hostage and abused by Bedouin smugglers seeking ransom from their families. Crossing the porous desert border with Israel, the migrants have been briefly detained before being bused to Tel Aviv, where some sleep in parks and most live in cramped rented rooms in poorer sections of the city.
Left in limbo
While Israel has committed not to deport people from Eritrea and Sudan, because of the risks they could face if they return, it has not granted them work permits or social and health benefits, leaving them in limbo. But employers have not been fined by the authorities for hiring illegal migrants, enabling many to find occasional work doing menial jobs.
Source:The Washington Post

Sudan: Ban Death By Stoning

4 June 2012 Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (Cairo)

Peter Martell/IRIN

Sudanese women in a market place (file photo) : The man she said she had a sexual relationship with has denied the charge and was therefore acquitted by the judge.

Nairobi — The sentencing of a young Sudanese woman to death by stoning for adultery presents numerous grave violations of domestic and international law, Human Rights Watch said today. The sentence also underscores the urgent need for Sudan to reform its legal system in accordance with its human rights obligations, Human Rights Watch said.
Intisar Sharif Abdallah, whose age has not been determined but is believed to be under the age of 18, was sentenced by a judge on April 22, 2012, in the city of Omdurman, near Khartoum. Since her sentencing, she been held in Omdurman prison with her 5-month-old baby, with her legs shackled. Read more