Category: African refugees

How to End the Eritrean Refugee Crisis

by adminin African refugees, Israel, Writing

The Nation, December 2, 2015

Tesfu Atsbha, 35, stands in the alley behind an unmarked Eritrean community center in south Tel Aviv, just blocks away from the park where a memorial service was held for Habtom Zerhum a few days before. Zerhum, an Eritrean asylum seeker, was killed when he was mistaken for a Palestinian terrorist during an attack on the Beer Sheva bus station. He was shot by an Israeli security guard, and as he lay bleeding on the ground, he was beaten by onlookers. One of them picked up a bench and dropped it on Zerhum’s head.

Atsbha is the chairperson of the Eritrean Solidarity Movement for National Salvation, one of the biggest diaspora-based opposition parties seeking to depose Eritrean dictator Isaias Afwerki. The group’s headquarters are in Ethiopia, where Atsbha lives. He landed in Israel in late October to find its community of 45,000 asylum seekers—most of whom are from Eritrea—in mourning and shock.

Not that things have ever been easy here. When African asylum seekers cross the border from Egypt to Israel, they are imprisoned. After they get out of jail, they are not allowed to work legally. So they take black-market jobs, where they are subject to exploitation. Israeli politicians and the mainstream media call them “infiltrators”—a loaded term that, for many Israelis, is associated with Palestinians. The Prevention of Infiltration Law, which Israel drafted in the early 1950s to stop Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes inside the newly created Jewish state, has been broadened so that the state can use it to detain African asylum seekers as well.

And for many years, the Israeli government refused to process their requests for refuge. Now officials take the paperwork and don’t reply. Or they summarily reject applications for asylum without thoroughly investigating claims, human-rights groups say.

It all stems from the state’s goal to “make their lives miserable”—the laws and policies are meant to deter African asylum seekers from coming, while pressuring those who are here already to leave. So far, it has worked. Several years ago, the community numbered 60,000. The South Sudanese who lived in Israel were deported in 2012; others who faced indefinite detention versus “voluntary deportation” chose to leave. Some who left Israel have tried to go on to Europe; a number drowned in the Mediterranean Sea. A handful were killed by ISIS.

Despite the immense pressure they face in Israel, many Eritreans were surprised by what happened to Zerhum, an event that the Israeli media called a “lynching.” During the interviews I conducted in the wake of his death, some told me that it pointed to how dire their situation is in Israel. Others remarked that it’s yet another tragic reminder of how urgent it is to stop the repression in Eritrea.

That’s why Atsbha’s here.

While he supports asylum seekers’ rights, he doesn’t believe that absorbing Eritreans and those fleeing other repressive regimes is a sustainable answer to Europe or Israel’s migrant crises.

“To accept thousands of refugees is not an easy task. It costs millions of dollars.… It’s not sustainable. The solution is to get rid of the system,” Atsbha says, referring to Afwerki and his regime.

A crowd of about 200 Eritrean asylum seekers, donning white jerseys emblazoned with the Eritrean Solidarity Movement for National Salvation logo, have gathered in the community center. Every chair is full. In the back, rows of men stand. They crowd around a pool table, the game they’d been playing moments before forgotten. All eyes are trained on Atsbha, whose story is not unlike their own.

Atsbha had only heard about prisons and torture in history class, when he’d studied the Ethiopian occupation of his homeland, Eritrea. But that changed in 2001, when he found himself detained without charge or trial.

Atsbha was a student at Asmara University then. He was in his final year, working toward a degree in public administration, when 20 people—11 high-ranking government officials and 10 journalists, a group that Eritreans call the G-15—disappeared.

Students, including Atsbha, started asking questions about the G-15, about “starting a democratic process, and [the] implementation of the constitution that was ratified in 1997,” he recalls. The head of the student council made a little too much noise and was arrested; Atsbha and others went to the courthouse in a show of solidarity. But justice was nowhere to be found—the group, which numbered in the hundreds, was rounded up and taken to jail.

Or something like it. They were held in an outdoor pen—300 people, Atsbha estimates, crammed into a 100 meter by 50 meter space. They were surrounded by a fence and armed guards. There was nowhere to bathe or go to the bathroom; the soldiers took them out once a day so that the prisoners could relieve themselves. Meals consisted of little more than bread and small amounts of water. There was no roof or shade of any kind, nothing to guard them from the searing heat.

Three of the students died from heat stroke while they were detained.

During the day, soldiers marched Atsbha and the other prisoners out of the pen to collect stones. Many Eritreans who have been detained or imprisoned speak of forced labor; other interviewees have told me that they were taken outside mid-day to dig ditches. Atsbha’s story is unusual in that he and the other students were held outdoors. Most Eritrean asylum seekers I’ve spoken to who have been detained describe dark underground prisons.

After 45 days, Atsbha was released. The experience, he believes, was meant to break any glimmerings of resistance. Instead, it planted the seed of revolution in his heart.

After Atsbha finished his degree, the government called him up to return to Sawa military camp, where he’d undergone three months’ basic training before university. From Sawa, Atsbha was sent to do civil service in the ministry of education. He received $10 a month for his work. Atsbha suspected that the government would never release him from duty—indeed, other Eritrean interviewees have been forced to spend a decade or more in the army, earning anywhere from $10 to $20 a month, with no end in sight.

Atsbha points out that keeping young men in the military indefinitely is another way to prevent the people from revolting.

Atsbha knew that if he went AWOL and was caught, he would be jailed. Still, he decided to flee. It was risky—many Eritreans have been killed by their own government as they’ve attempted to cross the border. So he left the country at night, crossing into Ethiopia in the dark in 2003.

He spent two years in a refugee camp there before joining his extended family, who had immigrated decades ago to Denver, Colorado. Atsbha arrived there in February of 2005, he recalls, and the streets were full of snow. He laughs as he remembers how shocked he was by the sudden change in both culture and climate.

But Atsbha adjusted to life in America. He began working part-time at a grocery store and studying medical technology. He got citizenship. He was comfortable, he says, but he couldn’t sleep at night.

“I never forgot about my land. Every day we heard bad news: people are dying, people are arrested, people are going out [emigrating].”

By this time, Eritreans were already making the trip to Libya, where smugglers ferried them across the Mediterranean to Italy. They began to arrive in Israel in 2006; some interviewees have told me that they went to Israel after they’d waited for months in Libya, only to give up on getting to Europe.

“What will be the future of the country [if everyone leaves]?” Atsbha asks. “We, as a people, will have a very ominous future.”

He worried about the fate of his parents and six siblings, who remain in Eritrea. He also thought about his “ancestors,” he says. “I have the land where I was born that I was given by God.”

In 2012, Atsbha decided to return to Africa. Because it was too dangerous for him to enter Eritrea, he went to Ethiopia. There, he got involved in the Eritrean Youth Solidarity for National Salvation, which was founded in the same year; it later changed its name to the Eritrean Solidarity Movement for National Salvation in order to broaden its appeal.

Today, the movement is trying to strengthen its network between those in Ethiopia and other nearby countries and “clandestine organizations” in Eritrea. But Atsbha admits that it’s impossible to overthrow the regime from the inside at this point. So the first step, he argues, is to get the Eritrean diaspora organized.

It’s no short order. Since they began to leave the country in large numbers around 2000, Eritreans have fanned out across the globe. Various opposition movements have sprung up; Atsbha puts the number at 17. These groups must be unified, he says, under a clear goal—a lesson they could learn, perhaps, from the Palestinian struggle, which does not have one crystallized aim and is plagued by internal conflicts.

The organization also aims to raise awareness about Eritreans’ plight through various nonviolent means, including seminars, workshops, and demonstrations; they hope that this will cause the international community to put diplomatic and political pressure on Afwerki to step down.

Ultimately, resources from the diaspora must be pooled so that the opposition movements can “gain…the necessary equipment for the revolution,” Atsbha says. “The sharpest…edge of any struggle is armed struggle.”

“But that’s not our choice,” he’s quick to add. “That’s a final resort.”

In some respects, the group’s efforts are reminiscent of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s in its early days. And just as the Palestinian struggle was—and continues to be—often misunderstood, so is the situation in Eritrea.

“Right now, the international community doesn’t recognize the exact cause [of people’s leaving Eritrea]. Some of them, they see it as an economic case…. others say it’s the endless military conscription,” Atsbha reflects. “What makes them leave the country in such numbers and risk their life? It’s a question of liberty. It’s a question of political rights.”

Asylum seekers mourn lynched Eritrean man

by adminin African refugees, Israel, Writing

+972 Magazine, October 23, 2015

Hundreds of Eritreans and Sudanese nationals gathered in south Tel Aviv’s Levinsky Park Wednesday evening to mourn Habtom Zerhum, the asylum seeker who was shot and severely beaten Sunday night during a terrorist attack in the Beer Sheva bus station.

They lit candles and wept.

Desale Tesfay, 35, from Eritrea, explained to +972 that the gathering also served as a moment for members of the community to come together and talk and support one another.

Mourners expressed shock and anger at the accidental killing of the innocent man, who was mistaken for a terrorist and shot by a security guard. Some, like Tesfay, also criticized the Israeli government, calling on it to formulate a meaningful policy to help asylum seekers.

Speaking quietly during a moment of silence, Tesfay reflected on Zerhum’s life and violent death.

“He’s a human being who ran from [Eritrea] because there’s no democracy there,” Tesfay explained. “He was a young man who didn’t do anything wrong, he went to renew his visa and look what happened to him.”

Tesfay left Eritrea in 2008 after he was forcibly conscripted to the Eritrean army for eight years, for very little pay and with no end in sight. “It’s a dictatorship, that’s why we left. If it was a democracy, we wouldn’t be fleeing.”

When asked if Israel is also a democracy, Tesfay laughed long and hard.

“Yes, there’s democracy here, as they say, for their people [the Jews]. But for the refugees?”

Tesfay, a father of two, points out that his children cannot receive Israeli citizenship even though they were both born here. His visa stipulates that he does not have permission to work. And, when Tesfay arrived in 2008, he spent six months in Saharonim prison, without trial.

He added that while he has not been summoned to Holot, the desert detention facility where Israel sends asylum seekers, he feels like he is “still in prison.”

“It’s like the government put a long string here,” he said, pointing to his ankle. “I go to work, I come home and [otherwise] I don’t move.”

“Now, today, we are supposed to go to jail again,” he said, referring to Holot. “It’s not how things should be. We don’t deserve jail. What did we do? We requested [protection] as refugees.”

Tesfay said he does not fear for his personal safety after what happened to Zerhum. But because he has no rights in Israel, he added, he feels he must accept whatever happens to him “quietly… even if someone comes to kill me.”

Next to us, the mourners began to wail again.

The lynching of Habtom Zarhum: A history of incitment

by adminin African refugees, Writing

+972 Magazine, October 20, 2015

An Eritrean asylum seeker was mistaken for a Palestinian during ashooting attack at the Be’er Sheva bus station Sunday night. Habtom Zarhum, 29, was shot by a security guard who thought he was a terrorist and then – as the asylum seeker lay bleeding on the ground – civilians kicked him, cursed and spat on him. A bystander bashed his head in with a bench.

In a video that circulated on social media Sunday night, one man is seen holding a chair over Zarhum. It is not clear whether he was trying to harm the asylum seeker or protect him.

The video also shows a small number of policemen and civilians trying to stop the mob from further harming Zarhum. But their efforts were unsuccessful. At one point a man walks through the loose ring they’d formed around Zarhum, who was writhing in pain, and casually kicks his head like a soccer ball as he passes the already bloody and battered asylum seeker.

When medical personnel arrived, a crowd that was chanting “Death to Arabs” tried to prevent them from reaching Zarhum. The medics first treated the wounded Jewish Israelis. The asylum seeker was reportedly the last to receive help.

Zarhum later died of his injuries. Police on Tuesday said they were waiting to charge anybody in the death until an autopsy clarified whether the gunshot or the beatings caused his death.

Israeli media quickly labeled the incident a “lynch.” Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s top-selling daily newspaper, ran a photograph of Zarhum lying in his own blood and trying to protect his head, on the front page of Monday’s paper with the caption “A terrible mistake.” The article inside the paper was titled: “Just because of his skin color.”

Members of Israel’s African asylum seeker community expressed sadness and shock. Asylum seekers who are currently imprisoned in the Holot detention facility — where they are held for no specific crime and without trial for 12 months — held a vigil yesterday in Zarhum’s memory.

Dawit Demoz is a 29-year-old asylum seeker from Eritrea who has been in Israel since 2009. He criticized the security guard who shot Zarhum for using racial profiling, “You don’t just shoot [because of] the way [someone] looks. [Zarhum] didn’t do anything, he was trying to escape like everyone else… he was just trying to run away from the terrorist.”

Activists, asylum seekers and refugee advocates Israel were quick to point to the incitement directed toward African asylum seekers — by politicians, state institutions and the media — as necessary context for the killing in Be’er Sheva. “You leave a horrible situation [in Eritrea or Sudan] and when you come here and call yourself an asylum seeker, [the government and media] call you an infiltrator,” Demoz explained, referring to the term the Israeli government and media use to refer to African asylum seekers, a term rights groups have long decried as derogatory and inflammatory.

In death, however, Israeli media has taken to calling Zarhum an asylum seeker, “the Eritreat,” and in some cases, even a refugee. Police, strangely, began referring to him as a “foreign subject.”

Rotem Ilan, head of the migration department at the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, echoed the same sentiment. “You can see the difference between how the media talks about asylum seekers every day and how they talk about them when they die. Suddenly, they don’t use the word infiltrator,” she said, “suddenly he’s a human being.”

The lesson Ilan hopes that Israel will take from this incident, she continued, is “to treat people as human beings while they’re still alive.”

Some 45,000 African asylum seekers, most of whom are from Eritrea and Sudan, are currently in Israel. Authorities systematically reject or ignore almost requests for refugee status by African applicants. Israel has granted refugee status to only four Eritreans and no Sudanese nationals. In the European Union, by comparison, Eritrean asylum seekers’ applications for refugee status receive a positive answer 84 percent of the time.

At the height of their migration to Israel, there were 60,000 asylum seekers but numbers have waned as a result of an official policy to “make their lives miserable” and encourage those who are here to leave. Numerous Israeli officials have called African asylum seekers a demographic threat.

While Israel cannot deport Eritrean and Sudanese asylum seekers directly back to their countries of origin — because it would blatantly violate the principle of non-refoulement — most of the asylum seekers who live here do not receive work visas. With no legal way to survive, they work low-paying black market jobs where they face exploitation.

Israel has also tweaked its 1954 Prevention of Infiltration law, which was initially created to stop Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes, broadening the legislation to imprison African asylum seekers. The Israeli High Court of Justice rejected the legislation that authorized indefinite detention twice as unconstitutional, and upheld a third version while limiting the administrative detention of asylum seekers to one year.

Some activists, like Ilan, are pointing a finger at politicians for fomenting the conditions of xenophobia and vigilante violence that led to Zarhum’s death.

In the wake of stabbing attacks carried about Palestinians from East Jerusalem and the West Bank, politicians and state officials — including Knesset Member Yair Lapid, Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, and the Jerusalem District Police Commander Moshe Edri — have encouraged Jewish Israelis to arm themselves and to “shoot to kill,” as Lapid put it. Last week, human rights groups issued a public letter expressing their concern about such statements.

ACRI, where Ilan works, sent an additional letter to the country’s attorney general warning of the consequences of such dangerous rhetoric.

“In such a tense time the leader’s job is to calm things down not to add fuel to the fire,” Ilan reflected. “In our letter we said that the end result of this current atmosphere and [politicians’] careless [remarks] is that innocent people will be hurt. This is what we saw yesterday.”

Unfortunately, this is far from the first time asylum seekers have experienced violence at the hands of Jewish Israelis. For years, the community has dealt with near-constant, low-level violenceaccentuated by more serious attacks. Things boiled over in 2012, when a small race riot broke out in south Tel Aviv after Knesset Member Miri Regev, who is part of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, called African asylum seekers a “cancer in our body.”

When asked whether or not he feels safe in light of yesterday’s events, Demoz sighed and answered, “I don’t know what I’m feeling really. It’s hard for me to answer this question.”

*While the Israeli media has identified Zarhum as Haftom Zarhum, he has been identified by the African Refugee Development Center as Habtom Zerhom.

 

Israel makes no distinctions in its endless persecutions of the ‘other’

by adminin African refugees, Writing

The National, 17 August 2013

A little more than a year has passed since a violent race riot rocked south Tel Aviv, the heart of Israel’s African refugee community. The neighbourhood has not made international headlines since the incident in May last year, when Jewish Israelis attacked Africans on the streets, smashed windows of African-owned businesses and looted the stores. But the area is still simmering and the state is putting asylum seekers under increasing pressure.

Amine Zegata, an asylum seeker from Eritrea, owns a bar in the HaTikva neighbourhood in south Tel Aviv. The front window was shattered during that night of violence, as were the bottles of alcohol inside. Later, as he repaired the damage, Jewish Israelis came and cracked the new storefront. They also threatened to hurt him again. That was not the beginning. Several months before the riot, Mr Zegata was beaten to the point of hospitalisation in what he says was a racially motivated attack.

On a sunny summer afternoon in Shchuna HaTikva, which ironically translates to Hope neighbourhood, Mr Zegata explained to me in fluent Hebrew that locals still enter the bar on a regular basis and harass him. For that reason, he was initially hesitant to be interviewed for this story. “Every time a new article comes out, it creates more problems,” he says, adding that he fears for his safety.

Mr Zegata isn’t alone in this feeling. In the wake of the riot and continuing harassment, the African asylum seekers who were once Mr Zegata’s clients have stopped coming to the bar. “I don’t have enough business,” he says. “I’m in the red now.”

His slide into debt began when his business was vandalised last year. Not long after he’d repaired the bar, city inspectors came and told Mr Zegata that he needed to make further changes in order to bring his place in line with municipal ordinances and to get a business licence. He hired an engineer to make sure the renovations met the city’s requirements.

Despite his efforts, the municipality refused to issue him a licence. Their reasoning? Mr Zegata, like most of the 60,000 African asylum seekers who live in Israel, does not have a work visa.

For the most part, Israel does not process asylum seekers’ requests for refuge. Eritrean and Sudanese nationals do, however, currently get group protection from deportation – de facto acknowledgement of their refugee status. But a majority of asylum seekers receive visas that explicitly state that they are not allowed to work, forcing them to take whatever low-wage, off-the-books jobs they can find. Opening a business has provided a lifeline for a small number of refugees.

But not for Mr Zegata. When his request for a licence was refused, he “asked [officials at the municipality], ‘Who is responsible for all this debt?’ They replied, ‘We don’t care.'”

And Mr Zegata might not have the chance to get back on his feet. This week Israeli authorities began shutting down African-owned businesses in south Tel Aviv, according to the local newspaper Haaretz. While Israelis also run businesses without the appropriate licensing, officials emphasised that the operation targets Africans.

The state is making other moves to drive asylum seekers out of the country. In recent months, Israeli officials have pressured jailed Sudanese and Eritreans into deportation by presenting them with the “option” of staying in jail or “voluntarily” returning to their home countries. Last year’s amendments to the 1954 Prevention of Infiltration Law – which was originally created to stop Palestinian refugees from entering the young state of Israel – mean that African refugees can be held for lengthy periods without trial.

Changes to the Prevention of Infiltration Law remind that, in the “Jewish and democratic” state, anyone who is a not Jewish is subject to discrimination and persecution. One cannot separate the experience of African refugees from the gross human-rights violations Israel visits upon Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line.

But it’s not just the government. From open violence on the streets of south Tel Aviv – where teenage African girls have been attacked at knifepoint by Jewish youths – to the 2010 religious edict forbidding Israelis from renting homes to asylum seekers, to anti-African marches through south Tel Aviv, citizens have taken part in the discrimination. According to the +972 website, “real-estate agencies in south Tel Aviv are advertising ‘clean apartments'” – that is, African-free buildings. One Ethiopian-Israeli told me that an Israeli Jewrecently mistook him for a refugee rather than a citizen and threw an empty beer bottle at him.

“I did army service like all Israelis,” the man, who asked to remain anonymous, reflects, “and I can’t go out to enjoy myself.”

Rather than creating sympathy for the asylum seekers, the incident hardened his view that the small community of Africans is trouble for the Jewish state. Like other Israeli residents, he complains that at night it’s impossible to wander around the neighbourhood because the Sudanese drink too much.

Some commentators, myself included, have said that area tensions are the result of deep-seated racism and that xenophobia is unsurprising in a country that defines itself along ethnic and religious lines.

While this explanation is true, it is also overly simplistic and whitewashes the Jewish-on-Jewish discrimination that characterises Israeli society. The Ethiopian man mentioned his time in the military because it is supposed to be his entry card to Israeli society. But Ethiopians continue to find themselves shut out of the mainstream. Last year the community held a number of protests against the racism they face in Israel; that same year the media reported that government doctors were giving Ethiopian women birth-control shots without their consent, sometimes without their knowledge.

Locals’ resentment of African asylum seekers also stems, in part, from decades of neglect. South Tel Aviv’s schools are poor and the area gets few services from the state. For example, residents’ requests for a library have been refused. And while the wealthy, predominately-Ashkenazi north of the city has plenty of sports facilities, a mostly Mizrachi south Tel Aviv neighbourhood that has 45,000 residents has only one gym and swimming pool – and the latter is open only in summer.

None of this is an excuse for Jewish-Israeli racism. It does, however, point to another issue that must be reckoned with – the country’s shabby treatment of the Jews it has deemed as “others”, namely those who are not part of the Ashkenazi elite. The Jews who were brought to Israel for demographic war and who then were tossed into the country’s periphery to secure the border. This is true of south Tel Aviv as well, which was actually Palestinian Jaffa before Israel was created in 1948. Mizrachim were thrown into these far-flung neighbourhoods as a way to prevent Palestinians returning.

By the 1970s, the state had begun evicting these same people from their homes to make way for development. Approximately 800 impoverished families currently face eviction from public housing. Many of these people are Mizrachim who live in south Tel Aviv. So, yes, the area is tense and the problems often express as racism. But the issues are deeper than that.

The impossible situation of Mr Zegata and other asylum seekers – as well as the residents of south Tel Aviv – serves as a reminder that the Israeli government continues to be remiss in its duties to respect the human rights of all who reside inside its borders. Can a country maintain a preferred religious and ethnic character and neoliberal economics without trampling on the rights of all “others” – whether those “others” are Palestinian, African, or impoverished Jews?

*Illustrative photo by Sasha Kimel, via Flickr

Mistreatment of refugees in Israel doesn’t stop at border

by adminin African refugees, Writing

The National, September 17, 2012

Earlier this month, 21 Eritrean asylum seekers, including a 14-year-old child and two women, spent over a week trapped between fences on the Israeli side of the Israeli-Egyptian border. As the temperatures soared, the group was not provided with any shelter; the “most moral army in the world” gave the refugees only small amounts of water and scraps of cloth to protect themselves from the sun.

Soldiers did not give them food and turned away the activists who tried to bring the asylum seekers something to eat.

After the two women and the child were let into Israel – where they were taken to prison – and the men were returned to Egypt, reports surfaced that the army behaved violently towards these refugees. According to the three who entered, soldiers shot tear gas at the group and used an iron pole in an attempt to push them back to Egypt. The 18 men who were returned to Egypt were returned by force.

According to testimony taken by lawyers from the non-governmental organization We Are Refugees and published on +972, Israeli soldiers, “threw the… men onto a tarp and dragged them underneath the Egyptian fence.” Fearing violence from the Egyptians and deportation from Egypt to Eritrea—where they face imprisonment without charge, torture, and death—the men “screamed ‘kill us right here.’”

International law prohibits states from forcibly returning asylum seekers to countries where their lives or liberty might be in danger, as does the 1951 United Nations Refugee Convention, to which Israel is a signatory.

While this was a dramatic example of the Israeli army’s treatment of the refugees, African refugees in Israel have faced the state’s structural violence and an increasingly hostile public for over six years.

Although small numbers of African asylum seekers have been coming to Israel since the 1980s, a tremendous majority of the 60,000 refugees who are here now have arrived since 2005. More than 80 per cent are from war-torn Sudan or Eritrea, which are gripped by brutal dictatorships. After they enter the country, usually via the Egyptian border, those who are caught are jailed without charge for an arbitrary period; when Israel needs to make way for more prisoners, the asylum seekers are dumped in south Tel Aviv and other cities.

For those bearing the scars of war, detention in Israel is traumatizing. Sunday Dieng, a 26-year-old asylum seeker, left his village in South Sudan when he was 10 years old after he saw his parents murdered by Sudanese forces. In Egypt, Dieng says, he faced racism and violence on the street. So, in 2006, he headed to Israel – only to spend his first 14 months behind bars.

“To live in jail for one year and two months for no reason … it’s terrible, it’s very difficult,” Dieng says. “It causes some damage to the [mind], because you know you didn’t do anything wrong, you didn’t do any crime.” Although Dieng was an adult when he arrived, unaccompanied minors make up a significant part of Israel’s refugee population. And those children are also detained without charge.

Once out of jail, the state either refuses to process refugees’ individual requests for asylum or arbitrarily rejects them without adequately investigating their claims. Instead, Israel gives citizens of Sudan and Eritrea group protection. So they get visas, but not work visas – forcing refugees onto the black market where they face exploitation.

Many are unable to find jobs at all and, because they do not have citizenship or residency, they do not get help from the state. South Tel Aviv’s parks are filled with homeless, emaciated refugees. Others scrape by on odd jobs and live in crowded apartments; sometimes two dozen asylum seekers will share a single room.

Their children, even those who are born here and speak fluent Hebrew, are not recognized by the state. Although they can attend municipal kindergartens and schools from the age of three, before then, their parents don’t get help paying for day-care as poor Israelis do. So they are forced to send their toddlers to cheaper, unregulated black market day-cares, places one NGO worker refers to as “storage of children”.

Mimi Hylameshesh, a single mother from Eritrea, earns approximately 2,000 Israeli shekels (about 500 US dollars) a month working as a house cleaner. Her rent is 1,500 shekels; day-care for her toddler runs another 600 shekels. What about food?

She shrugs and looks away, embarrassed. “It’s hard for me,” Hylameshesh says. But her child always eats.

When Hylameshesh doesn’t have the money, she goes without–just like those 21 refugees who spent over a week on the border.

Africans fear more violence in Israel

by adminin African refugees, Writing

Inter Press Service, June 11, 2012

It’s Saturday night in south Tel Aviv. Amine Zegata, a 36-year-old refugee from Eritrea, is reopening the small bar he owns in the HaTikva neighborhood. The pub was closed after Jewish Israelis smashed his windows and the bottles within during the race riots two weeks back. But Zegata has been assaulted twice since then. Violence against African refugees is continuing.

On the evening of 23 May, a number of Jewish Israelis gathered in south Tel Aviv to protest the presence of Africans in their neighborhood. Members of Israel’s parliament, theKnesset, gave inflammatory speeches at the rally. Miri Regev, a member of Prime MinisterBenjamin Netanyahu’s Likud party, declared that Africans are a “cancer” in Israel’s body. Michael Ben Ari from the far-right National Union party claimed that Africans are rapists, and said the “time for talk is over.”

Mobs responded to such speeches by chasing and beating asylum-seekers, vandalizing African-owned stores, and breaking the windshield of a car carrying African men.

Zegata said that the violence “isn’t over.” After assaulting him twice following the riots, local Israelis have warned him to stop repairing his bar, and threatened to crack his head open.

Locals have already cracked the new glass storefront Zegata put in to replace the one that was smashed. Zegata said he is less worried about his business than about his safety. “The glass, this isn’t a problem,” he said in fluent Hebrew, pointing to the cracks. “If they break the glass, I can switch it, I can buy a new one. But life, you can’t buy.”

Sigal Rozen of the Israeli organization Hotline for Migrant Workers said it was impossible to know how many Africans have faced intimidation and assaults in the wake of the race riots. Some asylum-seekers have been coming daily to the organization with complaints about violence, but Rozen says most refugees who have been harassed or attacked by Jewish Israelis do not approach migrant support groups or the police for help.

Rozen offered the example of a refugee stabbed by Jewish Israelis in south Tel Aviv. Rozen ran into the man as she was visiting Levinsky park in south Tel Aviv where many homeless asylum-seekers gather. The man took his shirt off to show her fresh stitches on his stomach. “He said, ‘this is what they did to me in HaTikva neighborhood.’”

As Zegata and Rozen both point out, violence against African refugees is not new. Four months before the race riots, Zegata was beaten up by a group of Jewish Israeli teenagers. He was hospitalized briefly.

Numerous other attacks have taken place. A particularly brutal incident came last year when some African girls were jumped by a group of Jewish Israeli youth. The teenagers shouted racial slurs at the girls, who are Israeli-born daughters of Nigerian migrant workers. One of the attackers was armed with a knife. One girl needed medical treatment for her injuries.

Some Africans in south Tel Aviv say they face constant harassment from Jewish Israeli residents. Zegata opened his bar eight months ago and has had trouble for six months. Several months ago, he also had problems at home. After returning from work late one night, someone opened the window and dropped lit matches into his apartment.

Abraham Alu is a 35-year-old refugee from South Sudan who sells plastic shoes on a busy pedestrian thoroughfare in the Neve Shaanan neighborhood. Locals approach him nearly every day, telling him to “go home.”

Alu is frightened and feels that he and other Africans need to leave Israel for their own safety. But, he said, “There’s nowhere to go.”

Alu fled Sudan when he was seven after he saw his mother and father murdered by militiamen. He eventually ended up in Egypt where refugees are not permitted to work legally. In 2005, Alu was one of the 3,000 African asylum-seekers who spent three months camped out in front of the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) offices in Cairo to protest their treatment.

The demonstrators also called on the UNHCR to help them move to other countries. Egyptian police attacked the protest with water cannons and batons, leading to the death of more than twenty Africans, including a four-year-old girl. Fearing for his life, Alu headed to Israel.

Israel is home to approximately 60,000 African asylum-seekers, 85 percent of them from Eritrea and Sudan. These men, women and children get group protection against deportation, and Israel gives visas to the refugees. Although they remain in the state legally, the state does not allow the refugees to work.

African asylum-seekers take odd jobs and crowd into cheap apartments in poor neighborhoods, including south Tel Aviv. Those who cannot scrape together the money for rent live in parks.

Knesset members have participated in anti-African protests like the one that led to violence last month since the demonstrations began in 2010. Most of the Knesset members who have joined in are from the far-right. But Miri Regev belongs to Likud, a mainstream party led by Netanyahu, a popular prime minister who enjoys high approval ratings from the Israeli public.

While Regev faced sharp criticism for inciting violence against African refugees, government officials have long used inflammatory language. Speaking to Army Radio in 2009, Interior Minister Eli Yishai said that asylum-seekers bring “a profusion of diseases” to the country. In 2010, Netanyahu remarked that Africans pose “a concrete threat to the Jewish and democratic character” of Israel.