African Refugees Caught In Bind

Debate over how to handle immigrants spreads as their numbers rise.

Children inside a Tel Aviv building near the Central Bus Station that is being used as a shelter by African refugees. Human rights workers say residents of this shelter, along with two others, often go hungry because deliveries of food donations are intermittent. Photos by Joshua Mitnick

by Joshua Mitnick
Israel Correspondent

Tel Aviv — To anyone who had lost their way in the grimy neighborhood of Central Bus Station here, the hand-written banner falling in the doorway of the dilapidated building is a dead giveaway: “Arresting refugees and asylum seekers is illegal.”
Just a few steps away from the largest of Tel Aviv’s three shelters for African refugees, the workers at a hot dog stand debate the plight of the asylum seekers and what, if anything, the government is supposed to do about it.
“When I was in New York, no one helped me,” said Dror Shmuel, a hot dog vendor in his 40s. “They should put them on a plane and fly them home.”
Yossi Cohen cut in. “If they return to where they came

from, they’ll be killed. There’s no government, no order and no law there.”
Then Shmuel barked back. “So why should we have to suffer?”
The argument reflected a spreading debate within Israel over the dilemma of how to handle the migrants, who continue to reach Israel from Sinai in growing numbers, overwhelming the local prisons and human rights workers.
Calling the tide of refugees a “tsunami,” Prime Minister Ehud Olmert this week chided the military for not doing more to return the migrants back to the Egyptian side before they are taken away from the border area. Human rights officials say it’s illegal under the Geneva Convention to expel asylum seekers before their status is checked by the United Nations.
“Israel puts strict limits on Palestinians on every entry and the right of return, but here, 10,000 have entered in a couple of months and no one is doing anything about it,” Haaretz quoted Olmert as saying.
Olmert also prodded the Foreign Ministry to find a third-party country to which Israel can deport the illegal migrants.
What began as a couple of hundred asylum seekers two years ago from Darfur and southern Sudan has multiplied to as many as 6,000 migrants — about half of them from Eritrea — claiming they are refugees.
The government says that only Muslims from Darfur, Sudan, qualify as genuine refugees.
But the presence of thousands of Africans who say their lives are at risk back home raises moral and emotional dilemmas in a country built up by Jewish refugees from the Holocaust and Arab countries.
“It’s very difficult for the untrained Israeli to make the distinction between a bonafide refugee and an economic migrant,” said Mark Regev, a spokesman for Olmert. “We’ve got to work to make that distinction. People from Darfur have a special status, deservedly so, but not every illegal economic immigrant from Africa can hitch a ride on that status.”
And yet, another government official who requested anonymity acknowledged that Israel has resisted requests from the Eritrean government to deport its nationals for fear that they may be harmed.
“We know what will happen to them,” said the official. “If we could find another country it would be better. I don’t know of any countries that want to take in African refugees.”
Meanwhile, several hundred refugees are being held in a special detention center in the Negev desert alongside the Ketziot security prison. Others have made their way to Eilat, where there is the hope of work in hotels. Some have been taken in on kibbutzim, moshavim and youth villages.
But anywhere from one-half to one-third of the refugees are living in south Tel Aviv in cramped shelters and apartments, without work, health care or social services. This week, Physicians for Human Rights closed down its clinic in the Central Bus Station in Tel Aviv, complaining that an infirmary set up to serve 30 patients a day has been forced to handle more than triple the number. The group said the clinic has been overwhelmed by the surging demand for basic health care while the government has ignored the crisis.
“From a medical professional standpoint, the doctors feel they can’t provide treatment to anyone when there are so many,” said PHR spokeswoman Libby Friedlander. “PHR is saying that the burden of refugees can’t continue to fall solely on the shoulders of human rights organizations.”
As asylum seekers with no health care coverage were shunted to Israeli hospitals, the Knesset’s Committee on Migrant Workers called on the government to allocate about 42 million shekels, or about $12 million, to treating the migrants — money the treasury says it doesn’t have.
“It’s a national obligation for the government to take responsibility for the deteriorating situation and offer a humanitarian response,” read a statement from the Knesset committee.
Back in south Tel Aviv, some 300 migrants are spread over three floors (though some sleep on stairwell landings) in a building that once operated as a brothel and still gets the occasional drop-in nocturnal clients who don’t realize that the building has been converted into a shelter.
The migrants are virtually penniless, and the government refused to give work permits to allow them to earn money for room and board.
Shelter residents sleep in bunk beds, about six to a room. The second floor houses mostly women and children who sit amid boxes of donated clothes strewn about the grimy floor. In another room where five men lay in a listless afternoon nap alongside one another, the pungent smell of unwashed bodies greets visitor.
In the darkened basement, platform bed frames and crates have been put in place so the men can make their way from the stairwell to the bunk beds without having to step in the water from a leaked pipe that is rotting away at the floor.
The real fear, however, is a repeat of a pre-dawn police raid here about a month ago, in which police rounded up a total of 200 Africans.
“It was in the middle of the night. They were shouting at us, but we don’t know what they were saying,” said Mimi Ababa, an Eritrean national. “I was with my son, so I was spared.”
Human rights workers say that the residents of the shelters often go hungry because deliveries of food donations are intermittent.
The shelter at the old Central Bus station was opened by the African Refugees Development Center in the hope of providing a way station for new arrivals. A bulletin board with announcements in English, Arabic and Eritrean includes a schedule of Hebrew classes and information sessions on civil rights in Israel.
The organization is hoping to rent a space for a new shelter that “corresponds to basic human dignity, like enough windows and bathrooms,” said Alice Nagele, a volunteer with the group.
Nagele, who has worked with refugees in Austria and Hungary, says Israel has no legal or bureaucratic infrastructure to handle refugees. Indeed, the word refugees most often stirs up fear of a return of Palestinian refugees from the 1948 War of Independence, she says.
Still, much of the support that the migrants get comes from ordinary Israelis — and the T-shirts from Israeli military training programs is evidence of that.
“There is a lack of awareness about this situation in Israel. The public doesn’t know why these people are fleeing their country. As soon as they know, they help.”

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