As the debate rages on in the West over Syrian refugees, as policymakers wrangle over quotas and screenings, one group of people displaced across the Middle East remain forgotten.
As Syrians brave sea voyages to take up fleeting European hospitality, these refugees have little hope after spending years in limbo, filling up decrepit apartments and rotting jail cells in host countries.
While dozens of international aid groups scramble out to give Iraqis and Syrians food aid, cash and medical care, they are forced to watch as they are simply passed over.
They are Sudanese and Somalis – the region’s forgotten refugees.
There is no exact number of Sudanese and Somalis who have been scattered across the Arab world. Various estimates put the number of Sudanese in Egypt at one million – a mere 15,000 have been registered by the United Nations as refugees. About 4,000 people have taken refuge in Jordan while more than 300,000 are believed to have moved to Saudi Arabia to work illegally.
Most Somalis have fanned out to nearby Yemen, with over 249,000 finding themselves one again caught in the jaws of war. Some 7,000 have fled to Egypt, while about 500 have made their way to Jordan.
With some African refugees displaced for as many as 17 years, theirs is a life of waiting.
Unable to afford or obtain a work permit in Jordan, Egypt or Saudi Arabia, the vast majority work illegally, toiling away in day-to-day labour such as construction, left at the mercy of their employers. Some earn Dh55-Dh80 a day. Some are not paid at all.
In Egypt and Jordan, most Sudanese and Somalis live in squalor. As many as four families cram into one- and two-room bare apartments in Amman and Cairo, within crumbling walls and under sagging ceilings, trapped in the unrelenting summer heat and exposed to the harsh winter winds.
Several Sudanese families have lost young children to the elements: to a curable cold, pneumonia or bronchitis. Faced with rising medical costs – as much as Dh150 for a doctor’s appointment in a public hospital in Jordan – Sudanese and Somalis let simple ailments and debilitating illnesses go untreated.
In Jordan and Egypt, Sudanese and Somalis are arrested so often, many of them know prison staff on a first-name basis. Their only crime, they say, is trying to feed their families.
While Syrians in Egypt receive assistance and those in Jordan can report to refugee camps where food, clothes and basic medical care is provided, African refugees have nowhere to turn.
And then there is the wait. The seemingly eternal wait.
“Every year we hope it is our last,” says Waheed Abdllah, who has been awaiting resettlement since 1996.
Host countries set resettlement quotas, deciding what nationalities are let in and when. Somalis and Sudanese are simply not high on the list.
Civil war in Darfur led to the United States opening its borders to tens of thousands of Sudanese in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but since then Washington and its European allies lost enthusiasm as other conflicts arose in Iraq and Syria.
For Sudanese and Somalis displaced by conflicts so far away, where the West has so few interests, there simply isn’t the emotional connection or political will to extend a helping hand any more.
When arriving upon host countries in the Middle East, eligible people were told that they could be resettled within a year, or maybe two.
But then came the Iraqis, and then the Syrians.
African refugees were helpless to watch tens of thousands of Syrians and Iraqis get fast-tracked resettlement, while they continued to struggle in host countries. Next year, they are told. Then, the year after that.
Meanwhile, aid continues to dry up. In the past two years, international organisations which had provided outreach to Sudanese and Somalis, ranging from medical care to food aid, cut their “non-Syrian” programmes as the numbers of Syrians in Jordan and Egypt swelled to more than one million and 140,000 respectively.
The UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) provides aid of $100 (Dh367) monthly to only the most vulnerable cases.
People are becoming increasingly desperate. Sudanese migrants throw themselves at the Egyptian-Israeli border wall in hopes of breaking through and seeking asylum in Israel. In one week alone recently, Egyptian authorities shot and killed 15 Sudanese who tried to storm the fence.
Hundreds of Sudanese are now camped outside the UNHCR headquarters in Amman in protest against resettlement delays. They will not move, they say, until they are granted what they claim they were promised: resettlement.
They are from different tribes and regions, but they have one message to the West: African refugees can no longer, and will no longer, wait.
But will the world listen?
Taylor Luck is a political analyst and journalist in Amman
