The prison doors are slammed and the keys are turned, such is the treatment Egypt reserves for its Syrian brothers, and according to a report by Human Rights Watch there are at least 1,500 refugees detained by the authorities in Cairo. Of these at least 250 are minors. Some are new-born babies and others are yet to be born, protected from the brutality awaiting them by their mothers’ wombs. They will be charged with illegally entering Erupt and attempted illegal immigration in Europe, while fleeing from the bombs that since 2011 have destroyed their homeland.
According to United Nations data there are at least 300,000 Syrian refugees in Egypt, and of these about 125,000 are registered with the United Nations Commissioner for Refugees. They are university students, craftsmen, and even intellectuals who often arrive in Egypt with a few suitcases and a great desire to return home soon. They intentionally chose the land of the pyramids. Their relatives who sought refuge in Turkey and Jordan warned them, “Here you will only find crowded, dirty and humiliating refugee camps. There are no bombs, but it is hell.” “It would be best to go to Cairo in that case. For a number of years Egyptians and Syrians were also citizens of the same republic,” thought the young historian Ahmed, now detained, who in order to keep his brain in shape tells the story of the alliance with which, for three years, Damascus and Cairo formed the first nucleus of the pan-Arab experiment that failed in 1961.
A mousetrap
Few welcome Syrians with open arms along the banks of the Nile, especially after Mohammed Mursi – the Islamist president deposed by the army last July 3 – spoke in their defence. “Without any evidence, the media have started to speak of bribes paid by Islamists to Syrians, in exchange for their attendance at protests supporting the Muslim Brotherhood, greatly criticised by most of the population. Xenophobia is now sky high,” explains Malek Adly, a lawyer trying to save Syrians from yet another hell, the one they are experiencing since arriving in Egypt.
One should bear in mind the words spoken on July 15 by Tawfiq Okasha, a famous and influential philosopher, and the owner of the television channel Al Faraen, who, addressing the Syrians present in Egypt, launched an ultimatum: “The Syrian people know your addresses. If you protest together with the Muslim Brotherhood, within 48 hours those people will come and destroy your homes.” Very soon the refugees were labelled as Brotherhood collaborators and consequently as terrorists. And while the rift between Mursi’s supporters and his opponents increasingly divides the country, the Syrians who had fled from a land torn by divisions, have been sucked into the vortex of Egyptian polarisation making them an enemy of the faction that regained power following the deposal of the Islamist president.
Exactly five days after the army deposed Mursi, Egypt implemented restrictive border policies. Syrian refugees must now obtain a visa before turning up at the border where they are handed a residency permit valid for just one month. Those without the correct paperwork are thrown in jail or deported. Only ten percent manage to avoid this trap. On October 11th the coast guard arrested 270 Syrians and Palestinians trying to reach the northern shores of the Mediterranean. The judge presiding over the court in which they appeared the next day did not manage to charge them with any crimes, and ordered they be released. So as to put them back in handcuffs, the National Security Agency intervened, ordering they be detained in the Montaza and Abu Qair police stations in Alexandria.
Asylum behind bars
“Our detention centres are among the worst in the world,” said Adly. No revolution has reached those parts of the Egyptian inferno. It is sufficient to try and deal with the bureaucracy required to set foot there to understand what one is facing. Everything seems organised to ensure one does not succeed. First the officials try and lead astray those attempting the challenge. “There is nothing to see. The detainees are in small rooms like this one,” said a policeman showing us a room at the police station, one equipped with a carpet and air-conditioning. The tales told by those who have managed to leave these cells are very different. “We sleep on mounds of sand, with no blankets. When they allow us to visit the bathroom, the guards watch through the keyhole preventing us from washing,” says a young girl who still does not know what will become of her.
She came to Alexandra hoping to travel by boat to Italy, but after everything she has seem, she has given up all idea of what she described as “a dangerous gamble” for her life and that of the baby she is expecting and who will be born in January. Due to the operations with which the Egyptian coast guard tried to prevent a vessel sailing to Italy, this young girl has lost her friend Fadwa Taha Ali, a Palestinian who took refuge in Syria where she left her three children. Saad (21 years-old) and Hassan Saad (11) are detained at Abu Qair, far from their sister Siham Saad, held in Montaza. None of them know what has happened to their mother’s body.
Omar Dalool died in exactly the same way. This 30-year-old will never know the daughter expected by his wife Kordi, released from prison at the beginning of November after being detained for twenty days with her eldest daughter.
It is difficult to make a list of detained minors, but there are many examples of children whose childhood has been lost, surrounded by the indifference of the entire international community.
In Montaza there are also Osama Ali Shaaban’s three children, Alaa Osama, 12, Doaa Osama, 9, and Israa Osama who is only five and the only one who still holds the hope of finding at least three pencils to pretend to draw on paper she is unlikely to be given. Here too there are the children of Anaas Ali Shaaban, detained in Abu Qair. Lian Anaas and Lauren Anaas are not even two-years-old and are looked after by Ridan Anaas who, aged only five, is already the head of the family.
The children detained at the Karmouz police station in Alexandria fare no better. Nine of them are members of Mohanned Mansour’s family. He was detained after the boat they had boarded, hoping to make their Italian dream come true, sunk. Osama, 9, and Zahra, 6, are with their two younger cousins, Sultana, 4 and Khediga, the most difficult to keep calm in a prison cell since she is only eight months old.
Palestinians lost in the labyrinth of the law
Mohanned was born in Syria but continues to introduce himself as a Palestinian, like about 529,000 of his compatriots that the United Nations Relief and Works Agency has registered in the area surrounding Damascus. His family arrived in the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria in 1967, but when the Syrian uprising started they moved seven times from one corner of the country to another. The fighting between Assad’s government’s army and the rebels has harshly affected the refugee camps. When the camp’s school closed following the December 2012 clashes, Mohanned decided that the time had come to leave that open-air prison.
In order to save his children he thought that best option was to make for Egypt. About another 10,000 Palestinians who have taken refuge in Syria also, like him, relied on Egypt’s welcome, only to regret the decision as soon as they were thrown into an overcrowded cell, with dirty water to drink and camp beds to be shared with other detainees.
Once again, the Palestinians are the most unlucky of all. The UNWRA does not operate in Egypt and the about 6,000 Palestinian refugees from Syria who cannot get hold of this agency fall under the UNHCR’s mandate. The authorities in Cairo allow the UNHCR to assist Palestinians arriving from Syria, but this agency cannot register them, nor consider their requests for asylum. Furthermore, while Syrians can ‘hope’ to be deported to Turkey, the Lebanon and Jordan, the only choice for Palestinians is to end up in the Lebanon. Once there they are given a 48 hour visa valid for returning to Syria.
Without any alternatives; like the Palestinians that little Fatima draws, abandoned in a sea of trouble. “My mother lost her suitcases in the water and I lost my doll’s shoes,” she explains pointing at all the objects she has drawn in her Mediterranean. There are also rays of sunlight in her drawing; they are blue like the water and like all the other things lost in the waves. “I only have this pen to draw with, but the sun should really be yellow,” she says, almost forgetting the colour of that star she has not seen for some time.
Fatima is one of the many little girls who have ended up behind bars for reasons she cannot explain or understand. The status of immigrant is not a good enough reason for putting minors in handcuffs. According to the Convention on Children’s Rights which Egypt has signed, a minor who tries to obtain the status of a refugee must receive the protection and humanitarian aid needed to be allowed to benefit from the rights set out in the convention. Since 1981, Egypt has also ratified the convention on refugees, that in Article 31 forbids refugees illegally present in a country from being arrested, but, “In spite of this the authorities have continued to keep hundreds of children behind bars” reports a lawyer in Alexandria, holding the hand of a 9-year-old Palestinian girl who left Syria with her father, only to find herself an orphan in prison.
Parked in a police station
“Although the situation is critical and does not appear to be improving, the UNHCR is not doing all it could do to defend these children from the physical and psychological abuse they are subjected to,” observes a statement issued by the Egyptian Centre for Economic and Social Rights.
“Every day I hear terrible stories from the refugees I assist, trying to ensure their release from this unfair detention. To tell the truth, however, there is very little hope that the Egyptian authorities will abolish these trials and prevent deportations. Egypt is not a resettlement country for refugees. This is a station and from here, after about a month, the refugees will probably return to Syria,” explains Adly. “As far as the Egyptian government is concerned, the Palestinians can go to hell. They are a bureaucratic complication that is not their business, the last on a very long list of problems to be solved. They are supported in this by many foreign governments, both Arab and Western ones. Where have the countries that are supposed to accept refugees all gone? Where are the Europeans and the Americans? Where are the Italians who fearfully watched the survivors landing on beaches in Sicily and Lampedusa?” asked Adly helplessly. “Governments that do not speak up are complicit and participate in the adversities these human beings are subjected to in their attempts to leave a land on which bullets, bombs and grenades rain down every day.”
But those who are the most defenceless do not surrender, although deprived of everything except for the courage to demand a dignified life even behind bars. At the end of November, fifty detainees held in Montaza started a hunger strike. Dirty dishes containing three spoonfuls of soup were rejected even by a number of children, children that life has obliged to prematurely become adults and the only defenders of a life that seems to have been stolen from them. When the lunch trolley comes by, Mohammed is the first to stand up. He is nine years old, but looks much older. He throws the spoon onto the floor; he conducts the chorus of dissidents asking for freedom and not for rotten food, and then even finds the strength to make everyone laugh.
“Mr Prison Guard caught us trying to hide, but one of his colleagues was playing with us and they still haven’t found him. Please Mr good-and-still-hiding Prison Guard, make peace and release us all. Let’s end this game and play another one, ok?”
Translated by Francesca Simmons