Over the last few days, after working with the CNN and other media to bring this odious trafficking to the attention of public opinion worldwide, our human rights defenders have sent new witnesses accounts and evidence to the international agencies that are committed to fighting the human organs trade. We have also started to collaborate with the COFS (Coalition for Organ-Failure Solution), a non-profit international health and human rights organization that is attempting to combat the trafficking of humans for organs and put an end to the exploitation of the poor as a source of organ and tissue supply. Here, in summary, are the updates about the trafficking in human organs in Egypt that we have sent to the international authorities, NGOs, and the media. The World Health Organization still considers Egypt one of the main centres for the global black market in human organs. The laws approved when Mubarak was still President were not enough to reduce the illegal phenomenon. The market for human organs is an international market, like the drugs market, in which the Russian (or Israeli) Mafia, Arab Mafia and other criminal organizations work closely together to make huge profits.

Until a few years ago in Egypt there was a difference between smugglers and human traffickers. Sometimes the refugees encountered a gang of smugglers (from the Rashaida or al-Tarabin Bedouin tribes) and struck an agreement. On the receipt of $2,000 for Muslim refugees, and $3,000 for Christian refugees, the smugglers accompanied them to the border with Israel. Today, however, the Rashaida, al-Tarabin and al-Sawarka bands are working for Arab organized crime.

The “passeurs” are the Bedouin smugglers who enter into the first agreement with the refugees already in Sudan or Libya. They then sell the groups of refugees to other bands when they enter the Sinai region.

These traffickers ask from $10,000 to $25,000 per person to take the refugees to the border. To convince their relatives abroad to pay the ransom, the traffickers beat, torture, rape, and mutilate young refugees. Some are murdered by the traffickers to show the others they mean business. The girls are repeatedly raped, even in front of other refugees.

The traffickers are always armed (and often under the influence of drugs) and the refugees are imprisoned in underground shipping containers. The camps are in Rafah, Gorah, Arish and other cities inside Bedouin property, often among fruit orchards and gardens. 

November 9, 2011

El Arish, Egypt (CNN) — Bedouin smugglers involved in people trafficking are also believed to be stealing organs from refugees who are unable to pay their demands for large amounts of cash to take them into Israel.

The New Generation Foundation for Human Rights and the EveryOne Group, from Italy, have presented evidence that the bodies of African refugees have been found in the Sinai desert with organs missing.

The Sawarka Bedouin tribe, one of the largest in the Sinai, was named by one Bedouin source as being involved in organ thefts.

A Sawarka leader said he was aware that people trafficking was going on in Sinai and that in some cases refugees were held in bonded labor and tortured. But he added only rogue elements of his tribe were involved.

According to rights groups, refugees — from places like Ethiopia, Eritrea or Sudan — are enslaved and tortured and the women raped if they cannot come up with the large sums of money the Bedouin try to extort from them and their families to smuggle them into Israel.

Among Bedouin leaders in the Sinai, no one was willing to speak openly about the organ theft. Tribal leaders said they knew nothing about it or had only heard rumors.

But Hamdy Al-Azazy, head of New Generation Foundation, has photos showing corpses with distinctive scars in the abdominal area. All the photos were taken in a morgue in the Egyptian port town of El Arish after the bodies were brought there.

Al-Azazy says the organs are taken from refugees while they are still alive. “The organs are not useful if they’re dead. They drug them first and remove their organs, then leave them to die and dump them in a deep dry well along with hundreds of bodies.”

He says he was once taken to the area where the bodies are dumped after the organ removal process. He says he believes corrupt Egyptian doctors are working with the Bedouins, coming to Sinai with mobile hospital units to perform the operations to remove especially corneas, livers and kidneys.

“Mobile clinics using advanced technology come from a private hospital in Cairo to an area in the deserts of Mid-Sinai and conduct physicals on the Africans before they choose those suitable, then they conduct the operation,” Al-Azazy said.

——-

Read more and there is also a video beyond the link. I’m really getting tired of these stories. The Arab spring brought the African fall, with more stories about massacres and racism against black Africans every week. We shouldn’t even have these terms, black African. But I don’t know what else to say when I read that those from south of the desert are being treated less than animals in the north. Can you get any lower than hurting a refugee? Egyptian or Sudanese, Africans should more respect for one another than this. African refugees trying to reach Israel are being slaughtered and raped in Egypt and there is zero accountability for their actions. If the U.S was behind this there would be protests everywhere.  

in which i babble incessantly about oum kalthoum, which i often do. only now you can listen and see what exactly what the big deal is.