* Joy mixed with uncertainty upon return to country
* Israel hopes to deport about 60,000 African migrants
By Hereward Holland
JUBA, June 26 (Reuters) - Wearing low-slung ripped jeans, a silver cross and
diamond-studded earrings, Marshan Mai cursed as he stepped off the aircraft
back on to the land he left years ago.
He was in the second group of South Sudanese migrants who arrived at Juba
airport on Tuesday after being deported from Israel and who face an
uncertain future back in their war-torn and impoverished country.
"I don't want to be here. I didn't want to come back. I have nothing to do
here," Mai said, as migrants carried laptops, toy cars, huge plasma screens
and a guitar off the plane. "They said, 'Go back to your country, you are
black people'."
The South Sudanese are a tiny community in Israel, making up only a few
hundred of the 60,000 African migrants who have entered across the porous
desert border with Egypt in recent years.
Israel launched weekly airlifts this month to send back the South Sudanese,
as part of a crackdown on the African migrants - the majority of whom,
Israel says, came illegally to work and threaten to upset the demographic
character of the Jewish state.
Israeli humanitarian organisations say the migrants should be considered for
asylum and it is legally questionable whether the majority - about 50,000
migrants from Eritrea and Sudan - can be deported.
Many of the South Sudanese migrants being expelled had stable jobs in the
service sector, waiting tables in restaurants or scrubbing hotel toilets.
They return to a land ravaged by neglect and civil war for half a century,
with some of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world and where
just a quarter of the adult population can read.
South Sudan split from Sudan a year ago under a peace deal that ended
decades of north-south civil war, but the fledgling state is struggling to
build up basic institutions, end corruption and confront widespread rebel
and tribal violence.
Akec Kuol, a hotel janitor who arrived in Israel five years ago, said he got
a knock at the door at 5 a.m. and was taken to immigration. They told him he
could go to jail or volunteer for repatriation, he said.
"If I was staying there now I would be in jail, I would die in jail," he
said.
Others said they returned voluntarily after being given $1,300 at Tel Aviv
airport and were less pessimistic about their return. One shouted the old
southern rebel war cry "oyee" while flourishing a small flag of the new
state.
On seeing her independent homeland for the first time, one woman ululated
before erupting in tears and falling to her knees on the airport tarmac.
George Eyenyori, wearing a Jewish skullcap, said he was away from South
Sudan for 27 years and had converted to Judaism in Israel. He now plans to
start practising the religion in South Sudan, which sits at the intersection
of broadly Christian sub-Saharan Africa and the continent's mainly Muslim
north.
An Israeli court rescinded the de facto refugee status of the South Sudanese
migrants this month, and the new nation's government, sympathetic to the
Jewish state, was happy to take them back.
Attempts to return migrants to Eritrea or Sudan are unlikely to be met with
similar cooperation.
South Sudan received clandestine Israeli help for decades before its
secession from Sudan last year, and is counting on Israeli investment in its
struggling agriculture and oil sectors.
(Editing by Alexander Dziadosz and Pravin Char)
C Thomson Reuters 2012 All rights reserved
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Received on Tue Jun 26 2012 - 18:22:22 EDT
