Israel detains Darfur refugees in desert "prison"

A feature from Sunday's edition of the UK's "Telegraph" that's related to, most recently, the pair of "Haaretz" stories...

In the five years since the Janjaweed militia attacked his Darfur village and burned his father alive, Ismail, 42, has been on a quest for freedom. Since then, he has endured torture in Khartoum, and constant fear on the streets of Cairo, where police raids and beatings have become routine for Sudanese refugees.

Now, as he camps out in a park across from the Israeli parliament, where he and his family are seeking refuge after a treacherous two-day journey across the Sinai desert, he once again fears imprisonment.

A detention camp in a remote, desert prison complex, reminiscent of those used to house Jews who fled to Palestine after the Second World War, will open today [Sunday] to hold survivors of the genocide in Darfur who are seeking refuge in Israel.

"If they take me to the tent camp, the second step will be to take me back to Egypt - and I am not ready to do that," said Ismail, a teacher who is acting as translator for a group of 44 refugees who have spent the past week sleeping rough in the park in an attempt to draw attention to their plight.

The opening of the detention camp has provoked anguished debate within the Jewish state, itself founded as a place of refuge for Holocaust survivors, as Israelis wrestle with the moral question of whether to offer sanctuary to the predominantly Muslim refugees.

Nearly 1,000 Sudanese are now claiming refugee status in Israel, around one third of them from Darfur; of those, about 200 have been imprisoned as citizens of an enemy state, while others are under house arrest while working on kibbutzes.

A few have found work in Eilat's hotels, but many are camped out in parks or are living in shabby hotels. "It's part of our moral imperative, when it comes to those people whose lives are at real risk. We have to find a human solution," said Avner Shalev, the head of the Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial and one of several prominent Israelis to come out in favour of helping the refugees.

"The whole idea is not to keep them in closed camps. This is out of the question."

But supporters of the camp say [that] it is needed [in order] to enable authorities to sift through all those caught infiltrating Israel through its porous desert border with Egypt. Their number includes an estimated 1,500 illegal immigrants from Africa who have come in search of work, and hundreds of eastern-European women smuggled in for the sex trade.

"We don't want to be the Promised Land for African refugees," said Miri Eisin, a spokeswoman for the prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who said [that] new arrivals would have their refugee status determined at the detention camp. Those without legitimate claim are to be immediately sent back.

The detention site is inside the razor-wire fencing of the Ketziot prison complex, and will consist primarily of small caravans of the sort used on construction sites. A spokesman for Israel's prisons authority said [that] officials were arranging air conditioning and activities for the children of the refugee claimants.

"We are not building another, or new, prison. It will be a camp with some security around it," the spokesman, Yaron Zarit, said.

But the prospect of internment, after they have endured so many years of trauma and hardship, has deeply upset the refugees, who fear being returned to Egypt, even though it has pledged not to send them back to Sudan.

"I need the protection from the Israeli government. This is the safest place for me," said Ismail, who spoke on the condition that his last name not be published. Under Sudanese law, setting foot in Israel is an offence that would warrant imprisonment, and possibly a death sentence.

In the two weeks since he arrived in the Jewish state, he has been shuffled from a military base to a police station, and then to a Beersheba hotel, before joining the Rose Garden protest - all with his wife and four children, in tow.

His eldest daughter, Amal, now a 15-year-old with a charming smile, though her face is still scarred from being shot during the attack on her family's village, said simply that they want to stay: "We just want to live here."