Dwindling hope among Amman’s Sudanese community
Coping with poverty, instability and insecurity in a foreign land
“I have a degree in agricultural engineering, but I want to study alternative medicine,” an articulate Sudanese refugee told me, who had fled the insecurity in Darfur and came to Jordan two years ago seeking safety, personal development, and the chance to help her own country and people. “Medical care in the camp [in Darfur] is terrible. Instead of sending the sick all the way to Khartoum, risking their life along the way, I wish I can help out by introducing alternative medicine in the camps.”
The following blog post is about how the Jordanian government forcefully deported hundreds of Sudanese asylum seekers and refugees, including this incredible Sudanese woman, back to Sudan under the pretext of having entered the country on medical visas, while the international community watched from a safe distance.
The persecution some people face in Sudan — especially in Darfur, Kurdufan and the Nuba Mountains — has many-a-time been a topic of discussion around my family’s dinning table. My mother has been working for Sudanese asylum seekers in Jordan for some years now, and many times she returned home heartbroken by the stories of desperation she had heard from her applicants. And yet, having never met a Sudanese in Amman personally, I couldn’t fully understand the extent of their suffering here, despite the fact that I am a recurrent visitor to their areas of residence like Jabal Amman and Jabal Weibdeh.
I had already conducted two interviews with Sudanese men last month when I learned about an open-ended peaceful demonstration organized by members of the Sudanese community in front of the United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) office in Khalda. Families and single men and women, I learned, had broken their rent agreements with landlords of apartments for which they could no longer afford to pay monthly rent in the absence of any form of assistance despite the fact that they were holders of asylum seeker and refugee certificates. The purpose of the demonstration was to bring attention to their plight here as a marginalised refugee group, a non-Syrian caseload that doesn’t make it to UN funding appeals to donors. Around 500 people participated in the demonstration; a sizable population out of the total 3,500 in the country, which in the bigger picture is considered a drop in the ocean when compared to over one million Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the country.
While the demonstration lasted, the majority of local media outlets turned into echo chambers in their coverage of the issue, reverberating the government and UNHCR’s official narrative, carefully constructed by professional communication specialists. On the other hand, the voices of the very refugees sleeping out in the open remained somewhat buried, to the extent that the demonstration lasted for a whole month without raising any emergency response neither by UNHCR nor by the government. In this article published by the Jordan Times for example, the reporter uses two quotes by a single Sudanese protester, while the rest of the article body is donated to UNHCR’s defensive narrative speaking of “best practice” and accusing the protesters of “use[ing] women and children to push their case” while around 500 people slept out in the open for the 17th day with no aid distributed just outside the UNHCR office. For the record, even the protester who was interviewed, Gassim Khalil, later told me that he was misquoted in that article, explaining that he himself doesn’t get the 75 Jordanian Dinars monthly assistance that the article quotes him referring to. I tried to get in touch with the reporter on several occasions to understand her point of view but she never picked up my calls nor called me back.
As an outsider following this demonstration, I couldn’t help but ask questions like: who would leave their home in the middle of the harsh winter to live in a tent mounted in a parking lot, had they not been so desperate? How could the body that legally represents a community, that is considered their only voice in a foreign country, see them camp outside of their well-heated offices, calling peacefully for their rights, and think people could be “using women and children to push their case” instead of thinking of the level of desperation that would push people to take such a decision? I don’t know what is more absurd, the Marie Antoinette “let them eat cake” response to peasants unable to afford bread, or UNHCR’s “they are using women and children” response to refugees unable to afford rent.
So what in the first place brings Sudanese asylum seekers here? Desperate to flee the insecurity in their country, those who come in most instances are not aware of a country named Jordan before arriving here. The money demanded by the smuggler is collected through hard labor, borrowing, or selling of family’s belongings, with a promise of a better, safer life and with the hope of getting the remainder of the family out of the uncertainty they live in. Jordan for them represents hope. The Sudanese asylum seekers, most of them, arrive to Jordan on medical visas, and are afterwards offered protection through the United Nations as asylum seekers. They arrive here not knowing a soul in the country until a taxi driver approaches them at the airport and offers to drop them off at the second circle (charging them 50 dollars for the trip), where the likelihood of another Sudanese national passing by and helping them out is the only “plan” they come having in mind. Some spend hours at this circle waiting, waiting, waiting for someone to pick them up and take them home.
As asylum seekers in the country, they register with the UN once they arrive and wait until they are recognized as refugees, a status under which they are entitled protection under international humanitarian law. In accordance to UNHCR mandate, refugees are entitled one of three possible durable solutions: voluntary repatriation, local integration, or resettlement to a third country. I had interviewed around 10 Sudanese, all were recognized as refugees, yet only one was receiving monthly cash assistance of 75 Jordanian Dinars due to a medical condition he suffers.
Work is illegal for asylum seekers and refugees in Jordan. Hence they are heavily reliant on assistance from the humanitarian community. Being a country that hosts over a million Syrians and Iraqis, most organisations get funding earmarked for people fleeing Syria and Iraq, hence the Sudanese becoming a group labeled as “non-Syrians”. In terms of NGOs providing assistance to this refugee group, I have come across one organisation only which relies on private funding and only assists the most vulnerable Sudanese. The people I spoke with did cite acts of kindness by individuals like a supermarket owner who allows them to buy food items under debt that can reach 50 Jordanian Dinars, but nothing much beyond that.
A month passed on the peaceful assembly in front of the UNHCR office with no resolution in sight in relation to the demands put forth by the protesters. On the 16th of December, armed policemen showed up at the site around 4 a.m. and ordered demonstrators to dismantle the gathering. The protesters were ushered into buses without being told where they were being taken.
Naively, the demonstrators thought they were being transported to the airport to be resettled to the United States. It must be understood that despite the discrimination that the Sudanese were met with in the streets of Amman, they held the Jordanian government in high regard and were thankful to the country for hosting them when their own country couldn’t offer them protection. They were demonstrating against UNHCR being their legal guardian in the country yet not providing any assistance to them and their families.
Rumors started spreading that the government is planning on deporting them back to Sudan as they were summoned in buses for hours. A sense of panic started to fill hundreds of already exhausted, vulnerable individuals. At that point their confidence and trust in the Jordanian authorities was shattered. In the absence of any humanitarian organisation speaking to the detained refugees or hearing from them, they reached to their phones and starting frantically calling the few people they knew in Amman. The refugees’ passports were collected and some were getting exit stamps confirming the plan for deportation.
A couple of hours later, however, they were getting their passports back with the exit stamp cancelled. A short-lived moment of collective hope followed at some point when the refugees were bused to a warehouse nearby the airport. They were given food and drinks, and UNHCR distributed blankets, and the refugees thought that the government had reversed its decision, keeping them in the warehouse until it figured a place to move them to — some were thinking that a camp was being set up for them in response to one of the demands that they had loudly called for. Very little news was coming out in the media as most “developments” were taking place in the darkness of the night and in the absence of the media.
On Friday the 18th of December in the early morning hours, around three hours after the UNHCR blanket distribution, the police started ushering people back to buses. Having learned from the previous encounter with the police, the protesters did not comply and demanded to be told where they were being taken. The clashes with the police at that point turned violent as explained by the Sudanese men who were on the phone with me all night, and evidence was provided of the use of teargas canisters by the police against the protesters in the closed warehouse, where women, men and children were kept for at least 10 hours.
Slowly, I started loosing contact with the protesters I had been in touch with as their phones’ batteries started dying out. We on the outside world started hearing confirmed news of one, two, three planes having deported already. Until now I am not aware of the official number of those deported with the very little official statements by the government or UNHCR. But I have received calls from people who arrived in Khartoum whose conditions were deplorable. Meanwhile, the rest of the Sudanese who remain here are living in terror. They are not leaving their homes and are in fear of losing their refugee status granted to them by UNHCR. Rumors spread about a Sudanese house being attacked by mobs, but they were not confirmed by my contacts, explaining that there might have been a mix up with a story earlier reported.
The fate of the Sudanese community in Amman is unknown. It has been unknown for as long as they have come here, but more so after this very dark episode with the Jordanian government. Questions hang in the air about the reason a country like Jordan would carry out such a mass deportation overnight. It is not to be mistaken for the first deportation of its kind, scores of Syrians have been deported for various reasons including being caught working illegally. While arbitrary deportation has always been criticized, but a deportation on this scale holds precedence for Jordan, a stain of shame that will be remembered. The inhumane treatment in which peaceful refugees were met with behind closed doors is a breach to human rights declarations. The inaction of humanitarian organisations is a disdain.
I will never forget the Sudanese woman whose words I opened this blog with. Weeks before she was detained, degraded and forcefully deported by the police of my country, she told me: “Why all of this suppression? Why not use this energy positively? When the time comes to leave, I want to have good memories of Jordan. Before arriving, I looked online at the photos of touristic areas and they are great, I wish I can visit them one day. My son was born here, at some point I want him to come back here and learn about this country. There are many people who are kindhearted here and we want to forget the negative conditions. But the reality is that our children are very tired psychologically, we are terribly discriminated against.”
To my Sudanese friends, who I would’ve wished to get the opportunity to know better, my heartfelt apologies for failing you as a Jordanian and as a member of the humanitarian community. I pray that you are safe back in Sudan, and I hold the Jordanian government and UNHCR accountable for any life threatening situation you may face in the coming months.
UNHCR often uses the slogan “one refugee without hope is too many”. Today I will paraphrase saying: “one deported refugee endangered is too many”. In the coming months, we will continue to ask ourselves whether each and every one of us tried his/her best in reverting this tragic ending to the journey of the Sudanese people in Jordan.
