Human Rights Watch: Arrests of Syrians in Egypt Raise Deportation Fears

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Human Rights Watch: Arrests of Syrians in Egypt Raise Deportation Fears

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by Human Rights Watch (HRW) on 25 July 2013]

Egypt: Arrests of Syrians Raise Deportation Fears 

(New York) – Egyptian authorities should stop arbitrarily detaining Syrians and threatening to summarily deport them. The authorities should release the Syrian detainees unless they are promptly charged with a valid offense, and not deport Syrians with visas or asylum seekers without their claims being impartially reviewed.

On July 19 and 20, 2013, Egyptian police and military police arrested at least 72 Syrian men and nine boys at checkpoints on main roads in Cairo. Those who remain in custody, including registered asylum seekers and at least nine Syrians with valid visas or residence permits, have apparently not been charged with any offense. The authorities have threatened to deport at least 14 of them to countries neighboring Syria, Human Rights Watch said.

“There is growing hostility in Egypt to the Syrians who fled there seeking refuge from the war,” said Nadim Houry, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “But a tense political climate is no excuse for police and army officers to pull dozens of Syrian men and boys off of public transport and throw them in jail without regard for their rights.”

Human Rights Watch is concerned that Syrian asylum seekers may be deported without a fair examination of their asylum claims, as required by international law. On June 24 a family member of one of those detained told Human Rights Watch that deportation proceedings had been initiated against seven of the adult Syrian detainees and that their removal from Egypt was imminent. Lawyers who reviewed the case files of seven detained children said they also were at risk of immediate deportation.

The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, in Egypt has registered, or is in the process of registering, some 90,000 asylum seekers from Syria. The Egyptian authorities should at a minimum provide lawyers and UNHCR staff immediate access to all Syrians in detention to ensure that there are no registered asylum seekers among them, Human Rights Watch said.

Since the Egyptian military removed Mohammed Morsy from power on July 3, regulations governing Syrians’ entrance to Egypt have changed. Since July 8, Syrians have been required to obtain entry visas and security clearance before they arrive in Egypt, a hardship for those fleeing fighting. Arrests of Syrians living in Egypt have increased to levels that activists working with Syrian refugees in Cairo told Human Rights Watch were unprecedented.

On July 10, Egyptian television presenters on local channels including Faraeen and OnTV began accusing the Syrian community of siding with Morsy supporters, fueling an atmosphere of mistrust and xenophobia. One popular presenter, Tawfiq Okasha, gave Syrians living in Egypt a 48-hour warning, telling them that the Egyptian people knew where they lived and that if Syrians did not stop “supporting the Muslim Brotherhood” after 48 hours, the Egyptians would destroy their homes.

Police and military police arrested most Syrians being held by removing them from buses and microbuses at checkpoints on Cairo roads. For example, police and military checkpoints appeared in Obour City, a development on the outskirts of Cairo with a large Syrian community, at the time of Morsy’s overthrow, community members told Human Rights Watch. Starting on July 19, security officers began arresting Syrians on microbuses and public transport and detaining them at the checkpoints. One man who was detained but released, as well as relatives who went to the checkpoint to bring passports to people who had been arrested, told Human Rights Watch that security forces stopped vehicles, then asked all Syrians to disembark and provide identification documents and passports. No reason was given for their search or detention.

Witnesses told Human Rights Watch that on July 19 they saw military police holding 50 to 60 Syrians and three Bangladeshi men at a military police checkpoint on the Cairo-Ismailiya Desert Road. Those detained that night at the checkpoint included two boys, ages 14 and 16. The military police ordered the men and boys to board buses at the checkpoint, which then drove them to unknown locations.

Relatives and lawyers provided information to Human Rights Watch about the detention of approximately 40 Syrians apprehended at checkpoints and held in Qanater Prison on the outskirts of Cairo, as well as 7 boys in al-Marg juvenile detention facility in Cairo. Local activists who reached the detainees by telephone gave Human Rights Watch the names of another 34 men and boys detained on July 20 and held in Shurouq police station, in a northern Cairo neighborhood. Five of those men were released on July 21, according to a local activist, but the rest remained in custody.

Families of 16 detainees told Human Rights Watch that neither they nor their relatives’ lawyers were able to visit the detainees during their first three to four days of custody. Two of the detained boys called their uncle at about 2:30 p.m. on July 21 and told him they had been separated from the other members of the family with whom they had been travelling. They said that Egyptian National Security was holding them, and that officials had told them they would be deported. They said that they had been blindfolded and handcuffed, and been given inadequate food.

The two boys have not been held in accordance with international standards for the treatment of children, including the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Their families told Human Rights Watch that they had had no contact whatsoever with their sons for the first 40 hours of their detention, and they had no way to call or meet with them for several days. No charges are known to have been filed against the boys.

“Syrian children in particular have already faced enormous trauma at home, so separating them from their families and throwing them in jail in Egypt is unconscionable,” Houry said. “The Egyptian authorities need to treat all Syrians in accordance with the law and to inform their families of their whereabouts and status.”

All seven members of the group threatened with deportation had valid immigration documents and four are registered as asylum seekers with UNHCR, according to the relative who told Human Rights Watch about the situation. Lawyers representing seven detained children said that the children’s case files referred to deportation orders and that they were also at risk of imminent deportation. Children, regardless of their immigration status, should be afforded special protection and should not be deported and separated from their families, Human Rights Watch said.

Under international refugee and human rights law, the Egyptian government may not send anyone to a place where their life or freedom is threatened, or where they risk torture or inhuman or degrading treatment. Before deporting anyone to Syria, Egyptian authorities should ensure that all asylum seekers from Syria have access to UNHCR, which under a 1954 agreement with Egypt conducts refugee status determination procedures in the country.

“The Egyptian authorities should uphold their obligations to Syrian asylum seekers under international law,” Houry said. “That starts with ensuring that the security services immediately end their campaign of picking up Syrians on the streets and threatening them with summary deportation.”

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Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412