Hundreds of Sudanese refugees in Jordan deported: Reports

Hundreds of Sudanese refugees in Jordan have been deported to Sudan, the Jordanian authorities said on Wednesday. 

Information Minister Mohammed Momani said that 800 people had been flown back to Sudan after applying for refugee status.

He stressed that the UNHCR in Amman "does not consider them to be refugees," and also claimed that they had entered Jordan to seek medical assistance. 

The announcement comes hours after a Sudanese protest camp - set up outside Amman's UN refugee offices a month ago to picket what the Sudanese said was UN discrimination when it came to resettlement - was dismantled by Jordanian police on Tuesday morning. 

Refugees told Middle East Eye that police arrived at the protest camp at 4am (0200 GMT) on Wednesday morning and threatened refugees with deportation, demanding that they hand over their passports. When the protesters refused to move, they said, police used force to break up the protest and the refugees were loaded onto around 20 buses.

“I can say simply it is a kind of genocide. Right now we have women, children, guys. We know they would like to return us back to our country. We are really facing a serious problem and we need help,” Faisal Babakr, 24, told Middle East Eye, speaking over the phone from the camp where protesters were moved to by the Jordanian authorities after the camp was dismantled. 

“Police did not give us a chance to speak with them. They said they would take us in order to leave the place. They said we have broken the rules for refugees in this kingdom, so it is not acceptable for us to stay,” Ali Yahya Babakr said, speaking on the phone from the area outside Amman where the protestors were being held prior to the alleged deportation. 

“We are afraid to go back to our country. You know that the conflict in Sudan is happening. If they take a decision to send us back to Sudan, we will die,” Babakr continued. “Most of us refused to go and then they used violence against the refugees. People were shouting. The children came out and people were injured.”

Some 3,500 Sudanese were living in Jordan after fleeing a brutal civil war has seen mass killings and displaced up to 4.5 million people.

“They say they want to return us back to the country,” Faisal Babakr said. “My life will be in danger if I go back to Sudan. I fled to Jordan because of a crisis and a genocide. We came here for security but we got the opposite.

“Our sisters and mothers were raped and murdered, so we had no choice to flee for our lives,” he said.

Other refugees said several people were hurt as the camp was broken up. Representatives from the UNHCR could not be reached for comment on the issue on Wednesday.

Under the 1951 Convention Relating the Status of Refugees, it is forbidden to return people to the country where they would be at risk from persecution and their life or freedom would be threatened. But while this the principle – known as non-refoulement – is a cornerstone of refugee law, high-profile cases of deportation, most notably from Israel, mean many Sudanese in Jordan still fear being returned to the country they fled.