Fleeing home

MOVING at night through the cold, flat desert, armed people smugglers are exploiting, abducting and sometimes killing Eritreans fleeing their homeland, the UN and refugees say. “People catch us, sell us like a goat,” one Eritrean asylumseeker said of the human traffickers.

Like others who have reached this wind-blown collection of shelters inside the Sudanese border, he accused the local Rashaida tribe of involvement in the people trade, which the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) is hoping to counter through a $2-million effort to support local police and improve camp security.

“These groups that are involved in this are heavily armed. We hear of firefights between government forces and these armed groups,” said Felix Ross, the UNHCR’S senior protection officer in Sudan’s eastern region.

He said the problem has emerged over the past two or three years, with the UNHCR hearing of at least 20 kidnapping cases a month. “But we believe that the number itself is much higher,” Ross said.

On a visit to the Shagarab camp last Thursday, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, said a global criminal network of smugglers and kidnappers is “taking profit of the desperate situation of many Eritreans.”

Shagarab camp receives about 2,000 asylum-seekers monthly, largely from neighbouring Eritrea where many have fled compulsory military service.

The UN estimates that 80 per cent of the new arrivals leave the camp within two months for Khartoum, Egypt, Israel or further afield, in search of better economic opportunities.

“Due to the limitation on the freedom of movement of refugees in Sudan, refugees and asylum-seekers resort to smugglers to transport them into, through and out of Sudan,” a UNHCR briefing paper said.

But some simply end up being kidnapped for ransoms which the UNHCR said can reach $10,000.

“Here there is not security. There is many person kidnapped,” an Eritrean who has spent four months at Shagarab said, speaking in English.