Migrants 'risk all' for better life
2008-03-19 08:31
Cairo - Mustafa dodged checkpoints in four countries on his odyssey from poverty-stricken Burkina Faso, but his hopes for a brighter future in Israel were crushed after Egyptian police caught him near the border.
Mustafa, in his 30s, now sits in an Egyptian jail with three other compatriots who attempted the increasingly common illegal crossing, but their fate is better than those who end up shot dead on the sensitive border.
To get here he trekked hundreds of kilometres through the arid deserts of Niger and Libya to reach Egypt's Suez Canal on what was to be the last leg of his months-long journey - across the Sinai desert and into Israel.
"I couldn't find work in my country," Mustafa was speaking from Qanater prison, north of Cairo. "All I wanted was work, in any place on earth."
Foreign migrants 'crowd' jails
Sitting next to him, Daoud dreamt of freedom and seeing his two-year-old daughter again, still hoping he could make the journey to Israel and make a living there.
About two years ago, Qanater Prison overlooking the Nile began to receive a new type of inmate: African migrants caught on their way to Israel.
Now half of the prison's inmates were foreign migrants, said Intissar al-Sayed, a lawyer with the Egyptian Human Rights Centre for the Assistance of Prisoners (HRCAP).
The 250km Egyptian-Israeli border had become a major transit route for migrants and asylum-seekers.
Dozens of migrants, mainly Africans, had been arrested in recent months as Egyptian police tried to halt the constant stream into Israel. Several had been killed while trying to make the crossing.
Last week, Egyptian police shot and wounded a Sudanese man as he tried to cross illegally into Israel, a security official said.
Inmates 'try to escape'
Barbara Harrell-Bond, professor of refugee and forced migration studies at the American University in Cairo, said the number of migrants wanting to leave Egypt increased after at least 28 Sudanese were killed by Cairo police in December 2005.
"Two years ago, there were no prisoners here who tried to escape to Israel, but the phenomenon has increased noticeably," she said.
Thousands of riot police wielding batons and water cannon forcibly broke-up a three-month protest by more than 2 000 Sudanese refugees and asylum-seekers aiming to draw attention to their cause.
The protesters were demanding that the UN refugee agency review cases of asylum-seekers whose applications it had rejected, and resume resettling refugees in third countries, mainly the United States, Canada and Australia.
There were more than a million African asylum seekers in Egypt, according to official figures. They were often subjected to racial discrimination and police violence.
"What happened to the Sudanese in 2005 has depressed many migrants, feeling rejected by the UNHCR, as well as the difficulties that they endure in Egypt," Harrell-Bond said.