By Ian Timberlake (AFP) –
Kassala — Sudanese officials in the border region with Eritrea appealed on Wednesday for EU help to combat human trafficking, an issue highlighted when hundreds of Eritrean migrants died off Italy.
"We are confronted by organised groups," the governor of Kassala state, Mohammed Yousef Adam, told European Union ambassadors visiting from Khartoum.
"And we need your help on this."
Kassala is one of three states in eastern Sudan that border authoritarian Eritrea, from which many thousands of people have fled.
The United Nations refugee agency (UNHCR) says on its website that the 1,800 refugees and asylum-seekers who arrive each month in eastern Sudan "brave often violent traffickers, smugglers and kidnappers".
Rather than stay in poverty-stricken eastern Sudan, the asylum-seekers are in search of better economic opportunities in Khartoum, Egypt, Israel, or further afield in Europe.
While some are believed to pay smugglers to transport them elsewhere, others are abducted, the UNHCR has said.
More than 350 migrants, mainly from Eritrea, died in an early October shipwreck off the Italian island of Lampedusa as they tried to reach Europe.
The UNHCR says it has begun a project with local authorities and the International Organisation for Migration to address trafficking, smuggling and kidnapping in eastern Sudan.
Sudanese officials told the EU delegation that some suspects have been arrested and Kassala state has passed a law against human trafficking.
"This is really an area which we want to cooperate more with Sudan and with all neighbouring countries," EU ambassador Tomas Ulicny told the state governor.
Italy's ambassador, Armando Barucco, said "the collaboration of the Sudanese authorities to curb the trafficking" is most important.
He said police in Italy and Sudan have concluded talks on cooperation to fight human trafficking, and an agreement is expected to be signed soon.
The UNHCR actually registered just 63 human trafficking cases in the first 10 months of the year, compared with 338 in 2012.
Agency officials could not immediately be reached to explain the fall in the number of recorded cases.
The London-based watchdog said it received "numerous reports" since 2011 that residents of the Shagarab refugee camp in Kassala state, near the Eritrean border, had been abducted.
Ulicny said his delegation, which includes five other ambassadors and a charge d'affaires, is in eastern Sudan "to demonstrate our support for peace and development" in the region, where a 2006 peace agreement ended more than a decade of low-level insurgency.
Since then, the EU has provided 57 million euros ($77 million) in assistance to develop education, health and agriculture in the region.
In addition, more than 24 million euros are expected to be spent over the next two years, Ulicny said.
Their trip concludes Thursday in Port Sudan on the Red Sea.
No comments:
Post a Comment