webmaster
© Copyright DEHAI-Eritrea OnLine, 1993-2010
All rights reserved
From: Biniam Tekle (biniamt@dehai.org)
Date: Wed Dec 29 2010 - 15:52:43 EST
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Editorials/Article.aspx?id=201471 Rattling the
Cage: Calling the Mossad By *LARRY DERFNER*
12/29/2010 22:05
Beduin who smuggle refugees from Sudan and Eritrea through Sinai to the
border – abusing and murdering many on the way – are desert Nazis Finally,
somebody’s come up with a plausible solution for the African refugee
problem: Send Mossad agents to kill the Sinai Beduin smugglers who bring
them here. I can’t take credit for the idea; Alex Fishman, the military
affairs commentator for Yediot Aharonot, broached it in print on Monday. The
day after, MK Ya’acov Katz, chairman of the Knesset Committee on Foreign
Workers, spelled the plan out bluntly: “We must arrest all the Beduin
[smugglers of refugees], put them in holding tanks and fire a bullet in the
head of those who lead the convoys. Three or four Beduin will be shot down
and the convoys will stop.” It wouldn’t be so quick and easy, but – in the
absence of any workable alternative – that’s the only way to go. I think
Egypt would understand where Israel is coming from; for years now Egyptian
border guards have been jailing or shooting African refugees led by Beduin
through the Sinai to the border, where they cross over, often under a hail
of Egyptian bullets. If Egypt were prepared to tell its border guards to
stop killing refugees and start jailing and in the last resort killing the
smugglers who enable them to get here, that would be the best arrangement of
all. If not, the Mossad will have to handle it. Murder, you say?
Assassination? Yes. The Beduin who smuggle refugees from Sudan and Eritrea
through the Sinai to the border are, plainly and simply, desert Nazis.
They’ve set up camps where they torture, rape and kill refugees for money
and pleasure. They richly deserve to die and there seems to be no other way
to stop them. “For 10 days they chained me to three other people. They
treated us like animals. They burned people and told them to get on the
telephone to their families so they would hear them screaming [and send more
money],” an Eritrean man who made it here told Yediot’s Anat Fishbein last
month. An Eritrean woman said the smugglers beat her to a pulp and got her
to call a friend in Sudan for another $500. “But afterward they wanted
$1,000 more. They went on beating me and my husband and demanding the money.
One man would ask my husband: ‘Do you love your wife?’ If he said ‘yes,’ the
man would beat him harder...
“They left me in the house for a week. Every night the man would come, and I
had no more strength to resist. He would blindfold me, take me in the car
somewhere and rape me... After a week my friend sent them the rest of the
money. The man told my husband that even though he got the money, he wanted
me to stay, to be his wife. My husband started to cry, and the man beat
him.” GANGS OF smugglers hold thousands of African refugees, mainly from
Eritrea, in these sadism-for-profit camps in the Sinai. They kill or abandon
many of their victims. Interviewing refugees in the Sahronim facility near
the border, Fishbein wrote: “A tall youth in a hooded sweatshirt says [the
smugglers] left his group in the desert without food or water for three
weeks. Three people died immediately, 15 others died within days and the
rest dispersed. Of the 60 in the original group, seven made it to Israel.
One got shot to death by Egyptian soldiers near the border.” Amazingly, they
keep coming. “They tell themselves it won’t happen to them,” William Tall,
representative in Israel for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told me.
More than 1,000 of these Africans cross every month, twice the rate of last
year. There are about 35,000 in the country now. Some 85 percent come from
Eritrea and Sudan, and Israel is pledged by treaty not to send them home
because they would not be safe there, especially after being here. Egypt,
which already has millions of unwanted refugees, does not want these people
back. No other country has been willing to take them, either, except the
emerging independent nation of Southern Sudan, which, in the last couple of
years, has repatriated some 300 of its countrymen who had been living here. And
the void they left behind was filled in a week. The government is building a
border fence that’s expected to be finished in 2 1/2 years, along with a
detention camp to hold 10,000 refugees that’s slated to be ready within a
year. But what about in the meantime? By the time the camp is ready, another
10,000 or more asylum-seekers will have arrived, and who knows how many will
have been abused or murdered in the attempt. By the time the fence is
complete in 2013, who knows how big the refugee population in the poor
neighborhoods of South Tel Aviv, Ashdod, Arad, Eilat and other cities will
be? And even after the fence is built, what will we do with the Africans who
reach here? Send them back? To where? Nobody wants them. How many detention
camps are we going to have to build, and how long are we going to have to
keep those people in them? This is impossible, obviously. We are on a fast
track to an unimaginable reality. And the first idea I’ve heard that makes
sense, that seems to be a workable solution – that stops the refugees from
reaching our border in the first place, or at least reduces their numbers
drastically – is to kill the people, and I use that term loosely, who bring
them here. If Egypt can’t or won’t do it, then the Mossad has to. ASAP. This
is an emergency. Ridding the world of the Sinai smugglers would be a
tremendous mitzva, worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize. It would spare masses of
asylum- seekers who’ve already lived through hell from encountering an even
lower depth of it. And it would save this country from becoming a permanent
magnet for the desperate of Africa. I’m sorry, but the refugees from Eritrea
and Sudan – and from other African countries later – will have to go
elsewhere. Israel, with 1/1,000th of the world’s population and an even
smaller portion of the world’s land, has already taken in more than its
share of them
----[This List to be used for Eritrea Related News Only]----