By targeting refugees and migrants, Sudan's new rulers
are betraying the popular revolt that brought them to power.
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| Irregular migrants wait to be transported after being arrested by Sudan's paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) on the Khartoum State border, Sudan. September 25, 2019 [Mohamed N Abdallah/Reuters] |
Since the first week of December, the police have been
given license to round up the poorest and most vulnerable of Khartoum's
refugee and migrant residents. Eritrean, Ethiopian and Syrian refugees and
migrants are now open game for a demoralised and ill-reputed police force eager
to reclaim its diminished authority following a popular uprising it failed to
prevent. They are arrested and then forced to bail themselves out of detention
by paying hefty fines ranging from 50,000 to 100,000
Sudanese pounds ($1,100-2,200) in what can only be described as an
extortion campaign.
Those who experience the most abuse are the ones who are
at the very bottom of the pecking order: Eritreans who have nothing and are in
constant search of work as day labourers and domestic workers.
The victimisation and abuse of migrants and refugees in
Sudan is nothing new. It has happened in the past and was intensified after the
EU concluded a migration agreement with al-Bashir. However, it is disappointing
that it continues to happen today in revolutionary Sudan.
Impoverished refugees and migrants from the Abyssinian
Peninsula, many undocumented and effectively stateless, started arriving in
urban Sudan in the second half of the 1960s, fleeing persecution, guerrilla
warfare and military conscription. The number of refugees from the region
soared yet again in the 1980s as the 1984-85 famine drove more than 300,000
herders and farmers from the Abyssinian Peninsula into eastern Sudan.
Throughout the 1990s, thousands more sought refuge in Sudan to escape the armed
conflict, forced military conscription and immiseration which followed
Eritrea's declaration of independence.
According to the United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, there are more than 123,000 Eritrean refugees
currently residing in Sudan, the majority of whom confined to remote camps in
Kassala State along Sudan's border with Eritrea. In
Khartoum, most Eritreans are settled either in the neighbourhood of al-Deim,
which was partially vacated after local skilled labourers left to seek
employment in booming Gulf countries in the 1970s, or in the densely populated
working-class areas such as al-Sahafa, Greif East and West and
al-Kalakla.
With or without documentation, they are generally subject
to recurrent waves of harassment and violence from the Sudanese authorities and
are at considerable risk of human trafficking. Women and girls, meanwhile, face the
added threat of sexual exploitation.
Short of options, many Eritreans in Sudan turn to
smuggling networks in a desperate attempt to reach Europe and find safety
there. Very few of them, however, actually make it into Europe. At the height
of the migration push towards Europe in 2015 about 40,000 Eritreans managed to reach the shores of
Greece, Italy and Spain. The UN estimates that approximately 400,000 Eritreans have fled the country in recent
years at a rate of 4,000 a month - almost 9 percent of the country's total
population.
With the 2014 "Khartoum Process", the EU outsourced the task of
"managing" migrants seeking to reach Europe through the horn of Africa
migration route to regional state and non-state actors in exchange for
financial support. Al-Bashir's regime was eager, if not thrilled to provide its
services to help the EU externalise its border well into Khartoum's al-Deim and
al-Kalakla neighbourhoods.
Implementation of the EU's border externalisation policy
was entrusted to Sudan's security authorities and militias, including
the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) controlled by Mohamed Hamdan Daglo "Himedti". While these
arrangements were given benign-sounding labels such as the "High-Level Dialogue on Migration with Sudan" and
the "Better Migration Management" (BMM)
programme, they, in essence, marked the beginning of a militarised campaign to
apprehend and punish migrants.
In the summer of 2016, following the start the EU's
so-called High-Level Dialogue on Migration with the Sudanese authorities, RSF
units were deployed to northern Sudan to patrol the areas near
the country's borders with Egypt and Libya. In early 2018, the RSF's migration
control operation was extended to eastern Sudan along the
country's border with Eritrea. Inevitably, RSF units turned the task of
"managing" migrants into another lucrative trade, intercepting, taxing and releasing
smugglers and migrants repeatedly along the desert route.
This summer, after ignoring the crimes against refugees
and migrants committed in its name for years, the EU was finally forced to
announce the suspension of its migration-related security
cooperation projects in Sudan, following a barrage of criticism regarding the role EU-supported
militias and security forces have played in the attempts to violently suppress
the anti-government protests that rocked the country throughout 2018.
It has widely been documented that RSF troops, among other atrocities,
were responsible for the violent June 3 crackdown at a protest camp
in Khartoum that resulted in the deaths of more than 100 people and the
wounding of nearly 400.
In the post-truth world that we inhabit, however, RSF
commander Himedti asserted recently said that his troops
"did not massacre protesters in Khartoum", but "some imposters
who were actually planning a coup".
Himedti's attempts to whitewash the actions of his
troops, however, are aimed at more than just saving himself. He is hoping to
reinstate the partnership between the militia he controls and the EU states who
are still desperate to keep refugees and migrants away from their
borders.
On December 1, RSF Spokesman Jamal Jumaa doubled
down on the efforts to reinstate the partnership between the EU and the
infamous militia, by publicising the group's alleged past successes in
apprehending migrants. After boasting that the RSF arrested some 2,500 migrants
in 2016-17, he declared that the group is still willing and ready to cooperate
and coordinate with the international community to
put an end to undocumented migration flows.
The continuing campaign of harassment and abuse against
refugees and migrants in greater Khartoum should be viewed within this greater
context of militias and security forces wanting to continue their lucrative
collaboration with western nations to stamp out Europe-bound migration. But,
sadly, militias are not the only ones keen on Sudan's brutal and inhumane fight
against irregular migration to continue. The new rulers of Sudan also seem
happy to use and abuse migrants and refugees in the country for their own
benefit.
On November 11, the transitional government's Minister of
Trade and Industry Madani Abbas Madani issued a decree prohibiting foreigners from engaging
in business activities in Sudan. The blanket order prohibits all foreigners
from engaging in trade, but exempts foreign investors operating under the
Investment Act or special agreements signed between their governments and
Sudanese authorities.
The decree is a haphazard effort by the transitional
government to stabilise the country's struggling economy by
"Sudanising" business and stopping the profits generated there from
leaving the country. But in its current form, the decree not only fails to
address the Sudanese economy's many problems, it also scapegoats migrants and
refugees as the only ones responsible for the country's economic woes.
The ministerial campaign against "foreigners"
fails to stop the voluminous profits of Gulf-owned agro-businesses,
telecommunication firms and commercial enterprises from being funnelled out of
the country.
Instead, it targets refugees and migrants who are working
in Sudan as petty traders, shopkeepers, food-sellers and peddlers. The security
forces interpret the decree to be even broader in scope and use it as a carte
blanche to target any foreigner who is trying to make a living in Sudan.
As a result, now all refugees and migrants who work as
labourers, handymen, barbers, rickshaw drivers and domestic workers are under
attack in Sudan. It remains a mystery, however, how punishing Eritrean domestic
workers and shopkeepers is supposed to help save the national economy.
Destitute Eritreans, who are now the main targets of the
continuing crackdown for lack of agency do not expect any help from their
government. Separate Sudanese
delegations led by Prime Minister Hamdok and Deputy Chairman of the
Sovereignty Council Himedti visited Eritrea in
November. President Isaias Afwerki, who had a rather mercurial relationship
with al-Bashir, is now courting the two forces separately for his own ends; he
is unlikely to bring up the victimisation of his own people with the Sudanese
government.
Sudan's new ministers were raised to their positions of
power by a resolute revolutionary surge infused with passionate patriotism.
Some of the Eritrean residents of the country, now hounded by the police, also
joined the protest movement promising their own dictator a day of reckoning.
In al-Deim, the resistance committee activists who
defeated former president al-Bashir's security apparatus reportedly protected
Eritrean migrants from the police onslaught. The solidarity on display is a
cherished lesson of Sudan's revolutionary season and it is today an urgent duty
of its champions - a test of their fidelity to the ideals that motivated the
uprising against former President al-Bashir.
Sudan's protest movement is grounded in the agonies of
the downtrodden and it benefitted from an Internationale of solidarity. Absent
the solidarity that protects vulnerable refugees and migrants, the lofty
patriotism of its heroes is at risk of being transcribed into a rhetoric of
chauvinism and racial hierarchy.
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