Migrants arrive at a naval base after they were rescued by Libyan coastal guards in Tripoli, Libya, November 6, 2017. AHMED JADALLAH/REUTERS
Dawit, another Eritrean who told his story, talked about a friend who was sent back to Eritrea. They had worked together in Israel but while Dawit managed to reach Europe, his friend was caught along the way. “He left Israel for Rwanda, and from there to Uganda, South Sudan and Sudan. In Khartoum the police came, put him into a car just like that and sent him back,” says Dawit, basing the details on conversations with his friend’s family. “Today, he is in jail in Eritrea.”
Another Eritrean named Tesfay also describes the fear of being sent back to Eritrea while in Sudan. “There are workers who take us back to our country” if asylum seekers are walking around in Khartoum in the evening, he said.
Tesfay also provides evidence of human trafficking. He tells of paying $700 to a smuggler who promised to take him to Juba, the capital of South Sudan. Then he was sold to another smuggler. “We told them we have already paid $700 a person, but they said they don’t know him and if we don’t give them the money they will kill us.” Tesfay also told about abuse and harsh treatment on the way to Juba: “They threw us on the floor, we didn’t eat or drink water The cut me, beat me, that’s how my blood came out.”
The media reported this week that Israel will pay Rwanda $5,000 for every African asylum seeker it takes in. A senior Israeli government official confirmed the information, which was originally reported by Channel 10. The agreement signed between Israel and Rwanda remains secret and until now it was not publicly known what Israel agreed to give Rwanda in return for accepting the refugees. In addition, Israel will continue its policy of paying each asylum seeker who agrees to leave the country $3,500, along with buying their plane ticket.
The Hotline for Refugees and Migrants said on Thursday that the statements collected from the refugees “all testify that the Israeli government has deceived the court when it said that someone is supervising the fate of asylum seekers who leave for a ‘third country.’ [The government] deceived the court when it said that people will receive [residency] status or rights in those countries. We do not know what is written in the secret agreements, but it is clear to us that no one is guaranteed safe refuge and that asylum seekers are forced to continue their journey as refugees that exacts a mental and physical price – and human lives. Israel, which initiated and pushed for and set up the refugee agreement, today is sending them to their deaths.”
Birger, Shoham and Bolzman, independent researchers who study immigration and refugees and who collected the testimonies of the asylum seekers in Europe, say their investigation is still ongoing and that similar testimonies continue to arrive. “Every interviewee that we find knows dozens of other asylum seekers from Israel,” said Birger. An opinion piece she wrote was published in Haaretz on Thursday and it provoked a debate over the voluntary return program that drew in even Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“We don’t know how to quantify the number of refugees who came form Israel to Europe at this stage, but it is a phenomenon,” she said. “We must also remember that there is no documentation of the people who left Israel and died on the journey or who are still imprisoned in camps along the way.”
Birger says that the testimonies collected by the three paint a picture in which people who have left Israel – or who may be deported involuntarily in the future – undergo another journey as refugees. “Their goal is to reach a safe place, but according to the materials we have gathered, in every country they reach they are unable to receive protection, not even in Rwanda, which Israel has an agreement with,” she says.
The refugees’ journey is paved with dangers that ultimately force them to continue northward, says Birger. “The interviewees managed to reach Europe, but everyone says that if they had to choose again between being jailed in Israel or repeating the journey they went through, they would have remained in Israel,” she said.
Fleeing from ISIS
One of the most important stations along the way for the refugees is Libya. Based on the testimony they have gathered, the researchers describe it as hell. Thirty-three-year-old Tsegay speaks of what befell him there: “There are two governments there, one from Tripoli and one from ISIS. If you have luck you can get past the ISIS one, and if you don’t have luck, they will cut you up,” he said.
As the only Arabic speaker in his group, Tsegay warned everyone to say that they were Muslims because anyone who didn’t would be killed by the Jihadists. Tesfay talks of the sexual abuse along the way: “We were 27 people in the car ... The girls they took for sex, and if you say no, they take out a knife, you can’t talk about it.”
After crossing the Libyan desert, the refugees find themselves in a detention camp. Tsegay, who was jailed for three months, describes hundreds of people imprisoned together in a single space. “There are beatings, and they kill, too,” he says.
Tesfay tells of the intense hunger that plagued those waiting in the prison camp to leave on a boat for Europe. “Each day we ate a kilo of pasta for 10 people. They didn’t care about the children. Every day one or two died there, because how can you eat that way?”
Habtom describes the difficult conditions that he and his wife faced in Libya. They were locked up in a house until the smugglers filled their boat, which was headed for Italy, with 500 people. For a month they received two pitas and a box of pasta a day. “If there were new people, there was food. If not, there was no food. In the house, there was one bathroom for everyone, there was no electricity and they also beat [us] a lot if you didn’t pay money or made trouble,” he said.
Daniel, a 26-year-old from Eritrea, found it difficult to speak about his journey from Rwanda to the Netherlands, where he lives now. “There are a lot of problems along the way, a lot of people die,” he said. “I can’t talk about it. It drives you crazy.” Daniel says a great number of people also died when the group he was with finally tried to cross the Mediterranean Sea. “In Libya, I saw 400 people in the water, all of them died.
“Children who went in[to the water] died, I saw it. A family with two children who entered the water and died. You pay a lot of money, 800 to 900 people and only two boats. There’s nowhere to sit, and a lot of people are impatient and are afraid of the sea,” said Daniel.
Tsegay says he was put on a boat with 300 people, including dozens of children, and they spent 16 hours on it until the Italian navy rescued them. “There were 28 boats at sea at the same time. Our boat was big, but there were a lot of [inflatable] rubber boats and they rescued them first.”
Like torture victims
The researchers, who had worked with asylum seekers in Israel through various organizations, say the behavior of the refugees they interviewed in Europe was very similar to those who were tortured in the Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula on their way to Israel. “People said they find it difficult to speak about what they went through on the way, and especially in Libya,” says Birger. “Some shook, cried, kept silent or said they are trying to forget.”
However, she said, many were grateful for the opportunity to talk about what they went through so the message could be passed on to their friends and families in Israel. “They are very worried about what is going on now in the country, and they hope to convince others not to leave in this way, even though it is difficult in Israel,” she said.
The fact that all the refugees insisted on speaking with them in Hebrew shows their strong connection to Israel, says Birger. “These are people who lived in Israel for five or six years, and some even longer. Some of them miss it, and have even kept in touch and correspond with people they met in Israel. And for some of them it is a connection of anger and disappointment because they could not stay here and the country actually threw them out,” she added.
When asked what he would tell a friend in Israel who asked him whether to remain in Holot or to leave, Tsegay says he would unequivocally tell him to stay. “I would tell him, ‘You’re going to Holot. If you leave Israel, your life is rubbish. It is better [to be] in Israel than to die.’ I thought before that Israel accepted us but now I think that Israel has forgotten its history,” he says.
Daniel says he advises his friends in Israel not to leave, even if their only alternative is being detained in Holot. “I don’t want anyone to go through what I went through,” he says.
Yarden Zur
Haaretz Contributor
