By Martin Hellicar
BATON-WIELDING riot police were sent in to quell a protest by about 40 boat people outside their Limassol hotel yesterday morning after violent clashes with police.
Four policemen and four demonstrators were injured in the scuffles, which erupted after police tried for the second time in as many days to deport some of the boat people.
Calm had been restored by mid-afternoon.
“It was an uprising by those blacks down there,” a duty officer at Limassol police headquarters said.
Ninety-three African and Arab boat people have been living under police guard at the Pefkos hotel ever since they were rescued from a fishing boat found drifting off Cyprus on June 29.
All of the boat people involved in the protest were reportedly African.
“They were using sticks and injured a number of policemen. Two or three officers were slightly injured, while another was kept in hospital. He needed stitches for two cuts to the head and was feeling dizzy so the hospital kept him in,” the duty officer said.
He said the protest had begun at about 11am and 60 officers, including members of the rapid response unit (MMAD) from Nicosia, were called in to deal with it.
The demonstration was reportedly sparked when police arrived with a van to take a number of the boat people away for deportation. On Tuesday, police abandoned a similar attempt after their van was pelted with bottles and plates by the boat people.
Thirteen of the survivors have already been sent away and those remaining fear they will follow suit without their asylum claims ever getting a proper hearing.
The demonstrators poured into the busy street outside the Pefkos hotel brandishing bits of broken furniture and branches.
Cyprus Broadcasting Corporation (CyBC) radio reported that the demonstrators began chanting and hurling insults at assembled police. Scuffles broke out after police moved in to disarm the protestors, CyBC radio reported.
Other boat people reportedly pelted police with plates and furniture from the hotel balconies.
But demonstrators claimed their protest had been peaceful and was broken up by baton-wielding policemen lashing out indiscriminately.
“They treat us like animals,” one man protested. “We are human beings.”
And he warned he would do anything to protect himself: “I am ready to die, we are ready to die.”
He also wondered where the situation would lead. “They rescued us, they fed us, they spent money on us, and now they want to kill us.”
Another immigrant said he had nothing against the Cyprus government, and that all he wanted was “one paper for one year,” referring to his application for political asylum. “Our life is in danger (back home),” he explained.
The demonstrators returned to the hotel building shortly after midday, chased by police and riot squad officers.
Both the hotel and the surrounding area were cordoned off.
Protests continued from the hotel balconies for a time, but by mid- afternoon order had apparently been restored.
In a statement issued last night, the Alien Support Group, which has championed the case of the boat people, blamed the authorities for the disturbances.
“We have been warning for weeks that… things would get out of hand,” the statement said. “There has been no dialogue (with the detainees) and no real effort positively to handle the matter.”
Immigration department head Christodoulos Nicolaides said yesterday no boat person would be deported before his or her asylum claim had been considered by the UNHCR.
“They will not be repatriated for any reason before a final decision from the appropriate services on whether they are or are not refugees,” Nicolaides said.
He also denied that police had orders to deport seven Sudanese boat people on Tuesday. “There was no intention to deport them, they were just to be transferred elsewhere for the sake of their own comfort; the hotel is overcrowded,” he said.
But a police statement issued after Tuesday’s incident stated the intention had been to take the Sudanese “to holding cells… after an order for their deportation.”
Interior Minister Dinos Michaelides said last month that all the boat people were to be sent away after visiting UNHCR officials ruled that only three of them were genuine asylum seekers.
But UNHCR officials later returned to the island to reconsider the claims of 56 Iraqi Kurd and African passengers after they claimed they had not been interviewed by any official.
In statements to the Cyprus News Agency (CNA), UNHCR officer Freddie Galatopoulou backed Nicolaides, denying that the seven Sudanese faced deportation.
“Nobody will be deported before all applications are examined,” she said.
“The boat people are tired of being shut in the hotel for almost two months now,” she said, but added that “in most countries they are detained in prisons, not in hotels.”
Most all the survivors – who come from Sudan, Sierra Leone, Congo, Rwanda, Bangladesh, Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Lebanon – claim they face persecution in their home countries.
The passengers weak with hunger and thirst when a Ukrainian cargo vessel found them crammed aboard the deck of the tiny Syrian-flagged trawler Rida Allah. They had been drifting for 10 days after the vessel developed engine trouble two days after leaving the Lebanese port of Tripoli on June 18.
Police said two passengers died of thirst on the fishing boat and had been thrown overboard before the vessel was found and towed to Limassol.
The Syrian captain of the trawler, 31-year-old Mohammed Mustafa, has been charged with causing death by negligence and carrying paying passengers on an unsuitable vessel. The survivors claim they parted with thousands of dollars each for passage to Greece or Italy on Mustafa’s boat.
