Earlier today I received a report that around 900 Eritreans have been picked up in Khartoum. They have been forcibly expelled to Eritrea. This is refoulment.

I have now received this report from the same source.

Martin

“The rounding up of Eritreans is continuing in Khartoum.

People are hiding but police and security people are looking for Eritreans everywhere. Anyone who looks Habesha [highland Eritrean] is taken from the streets without any questions.

The police take the plastic residence cards and break them on the spot and put the person into prison as an illegal migrant.

Yesterday they took about 900 people from where they worked, from the streets and from their residences. It’s going on today and getting worse.

When people showed their papers the plainclothes security people would destroy the papers and put the people on small trucks.

In addition to the 800 people who were deported while getting ready to go to Libya.

Hundreds have already been taken from the streets and from their homes this morning.

The few people who had more than 500 USD on their person have been freed after paying bribes, but they still have to hide or risk being taken again. For most refugees there isn’t enough time to collect that amount of money.

It has been weeks since the refugees couldn’t leave their homes, even to buy groceries. The police were taking money, smart phones, laptops and other valuables from homes when the refugees were taken to police stations.

Two months ago the same was happening to push people to go to Libya. When people had started moving to Egypt or just deciding to stay, the smuggling networks had started to bribe the police to help them as many clients as possible. A new route had started to Egypt at the time.

From inside Eritrea, there are no reports where the deportees are being held.

But people there are living under the same stressful security situation as the refugees in Sudan. In Asmara alone 11,000 thousand plainclothes security have been sent out to the streets.

In addition to the unreported Eritreans who have been taken, 50 Ethiopian and Sudanese nationals living in Asmara, Massawa, Keren and Tessenei have been taken away by security people over the last week.
Young people who had not done their military training have been ordered to go to Sawa until May 28 or risk being taken to prison. People’s Army militia in local neighborhoods have been order to create pressure on the target age group to push to go to Sawa. [Eritrea’s main training base]

Border shootings are also increasing on both borders. On May 12 three Eritreans, a woman and two men were found dead near Hamdait due to bleeding from bullet wounds fired at them by border guards and thirst.”