Suffering in silence, Sudanese refugees now migrating from Egypt
Egypt’s Sudanese refugee community looks to the Mediterranean as a way out of the intimidation and corruption they face in Egypt.
CAIRO — Sudanese refugees are now thought to be the group leaving in the largest numbers from Egypt’s north coast this year.
According to the latest Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) data based on detention figures, since the beginning of the year, more than 650 Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers were detained for trying to leave irregularly, compared with around 330 Syrians.
Although the North Africa Mixed Migration Hub, a Cairo-based group of agencies that report on irregular migration and immigration detention around the Mediterranean, noted in its latest monthly trend bulletin that "increased number of arrests of Syrian refugees … have been observed in May and confirmed in June 2015, as compared to previous months,” by the end of June, Sudanese refugees still “constituted the great majority” of those attempting to leave Egypt.
Egypt’s Sudanese community gets relatively little attention when compared with Syrians. So why are migration flows from Egypt apparently so dominated by Sudanese this year?
