- Title: SOUTH SUDAN: Sudanese migrants expelled from Israel face an uncertain future
- Date: 18th July 2012
- Summary: VARIOUS OF THOWAT WITH HIS SICK DAUGHTER AND HIS WIFE
- Embargoed: 2nd August 2012 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Israel
- Country: Israel
- Topics: International Relations,People
- Reuters ID: LVAB2VRJL6AABN5J3X480T5H91SY
- Story Text: Deported from Israel with his wife, children and two brothers, life for South Sudanese Dhan Thowat has changed drastically.
The family lives in a two-bedroomed rented house. Thowat two-year-old daughter is sick from malaria and he cannot afford medication. The 1000 Euros he got from the Israeli government upon deportation has ran out.
"There is mosquito and the water when they are bathing, they don't like to go inside the toilet, now I think I need someone to help me and if I get the money I (will) go to Kenya," he said.
There is no running water, no functioning sewage system and no electricity in Thowat neighbourhood on the outskirts of the capital Juba. He buys water from a vendor who transports gallons from the River Nile.
Last month, Israel launched airlifts to send back South Sudanese, as part of a crackdown on African migrants - the majority of whom, Israel says, came illegally to work and threatened to upset the demographic character of the Jewish state.
But not everyone cursed being sent home. Some returned voluntarily and were excited at the prospects in their newly independent homeland.
Many of the migrants had stable jobs in the service sector, waiting tables in restaurants or scrubbing hotel toilets in Israel.
However, 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.
"When we were there in Israel, there was a lot of things, if you are working, everything is okay. Because we had electricity, also water, like that, and also we had television, like that. Also more of things, the life was good, it is better, it was good, like the first world," said Duop Gach, Thowat brother.
The bulk of the some 60,000 Africans who have walked into Israel through its porous desert border with Egypt are from Sudan, an overwhelmingly Arab Muslim nation that does not recognize the Jewish state, and from war-ravaged Eritrea.
Israeli humanitarian organizations say an estimated 1,500 South Sudanese migrants should have been considered for asylum but courts ruled that the petitioners had not proven that deportees would face "risk to life or exposure to serious damage".
Sympathetic to the Jewish state, South Sudan was happy to take the migrants back, but many were unwilling to return.
"I know that the country (South Sudan) is new, they need more time to come up. And then they forced me, if you did not want to come back, they take you to jail, even now those who did not adjust their names in the immigration office, they are now in the jail," said Gach.
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.
It is an uncertain future back home but just as they struggled to make a life for themselves in Israel, many are coming to terms with the reality that they have to make it here as well. - Copyright Holder: REUTERS
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