“I love the early summer in Alexandria. The season, which has yet to begin, seems filled with promise. All is possible; all is still in the lap of the gods. I am like the infatuated boy I used to be, feverishly waiting for Sunday to come round.” These are the opening words uttered by Maxim Touta, the lead character of the Robert Solé novel The Semaphore of Alexandria, the account of an Egyptian family of Syrian origin who lived in Egypt in the 19th century and during the heyday of the Egyptian Shawam — citizens originally from the Levant, which once included Syria, Lebanon, Jordan and even parts of Iraq. Solé and Gilbert Sinoué, two French novelists born in the mid-1940s in Egypt where they lived during the early years of their lives, have both written several novels that offer rich and inspiring accounts of the Shawam of Egypt, the rich and the middle class, those who were well-integrated and those who failed to fit in. The accounts are of a once-upon-a-time Egypt that was open to people from across the world to live in and settle in. Such accounts are hard to square with the lives of new arrivals in Egypt from Syria, people who have been flocking in their thousands from the country since the beginning of the protests against the regime of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad in the spring of 2011. The words of Maxim Touta, said in 1885, offer a shocking contrast to the accounts of Syrian refugees today, one group of whom said that they had seen one of their number shot dead while trying to land in Egypt on the Mediterranean coast. This was the same sea that had brought thousands of their ancestors to Egypt through the 18th, 19th and even early 20th centuries. Twenty-nine-year-old Adnan arrived in Alexandria by boat after a trip across the Mediterranean that had also probably carried some of his ancestors to Egypt a couple of hundred years ago. Once there, he was faced with something very far from what he had been hoping to find. “When I thought about coming to Egypt, I heard about the large number of Syrians who had found a safe haven and a good welcome in the country, far from the endless bloodshed and destruction that we have been seeing back home.” “But unfortunately it seems that I came at the wrong time. Alexandria did not welcome me. On the contrary, people were on the defensive, and while it has been three months now every day gets harder and harder and I am finding it very difficult to get by. I even have to hide my Syrian accent to avoid being attacked. I cannot find a job, and I am not at all sure about my future,” Adnan told Al-Ahram Weekly. The story of Adnan may well be a typical one among the Syrian refugees in Egypt, now estimated in official circles at well over 300,000 people.
‘EGYPT, NOT MORSI': In 6 October city, where Syrian refugees are lumped together like the Iraqi refugees that lived in Egypt from 2004 to 2009, Ahmed and Talal offer somewhat similar accounts to that of Adnan. For Ahmed, who was studying to be an interior designer and who is now helping Talal, just graduated from a Faculty of Commerce in Syria, to sell fruit and vegetables at a small shop in a poorer neighbourhood of 6 October city, the beginning was smoother. They both arrived from Homs in Syria at the beginning of this year to find a rather apprehensive, but certainly still welcoming, reception. “People were already suffering from the economic crisis and they felt that they could not put up with newcomers who could challenge them in an already very small job market. But they were still quite welcoming and they sympathised with the ordeal of the Syrians who had joined other Arab nations, including Egypt, in calling for democracy but had been brutally put down by the Al-Assad regime,” Ahmed said. However, today Ahmed, Talal and others are suffering enormously as they have experienced verbal and physical attacks by individuals who blame them for the involvement of some Syrians in the sit-in at Rabaa Al-Adaweya that assembled in Nasr City after the removal of Muslim Brotherhood President Mohamed Morsi. Talal and Ahmed had never been to the sit-in, they told the Weekly, and like other Syrians they cannot comprehend why they are being blamed for the presence of some other Syrian refugees there. Talal said that when he and his family had chosen to come to Egypt at the beginning of the year, “our destination was Egypt — not Morsi. Egypt was the destination of the Syrian refugees right from the beginning, way before Morsi came to power and way before anybody would have thought that he would have been the president of Egypt,” Talal said. Adnan, Ahmed and Talal, however, have had an easier time in Egypt than those Syrians who have been trying to reach the country since 8 July. Today, all Syrians attempting to come to Egypt have to have entry visas first. CHANGE OF RULES: Hamdi Khalaf, a lawyer and activist who has dedicated much time and effort to championing the cause of the Syrian refugees in Egypt, laments the “restrictions imposed by the authorities on civilians who are trying to escape a miserable armed conflict. By virtue of international humanitarian law, to which Egypt subscribes, these refugees should be offered a safe haven and should not be forced to return to their place of origin, as has been the case recently with several groups of refugees.” Khalaf has been working on behalf of refugees who were asked to leave on their arrival, either back to Syria or to any other destination that would accept them. Lawyers and activists working with the recently established Facebook group Solidarity with the Refugees Movement offer accounts of Syrian and Lebanese planes that were ordered to return Syrian passengers who had either come directly from Syria or through neighbouring Lebanon. Khalaf said that some Syrian refugees who had been denied entrance to Egypt had managed to find refuge either in Turkey or in Lebanon — although the latter was more difficult due to its sensitive political history with Syria and the positions of the diverse Lebanese factions towards Syria. “Those who have no choice but to go back to Syria are not just going back to a fierce armed conflict in a country where they had possibly already left behind destroyed houses and fear and agony, but they are also having to return to face possible persecution by a security apparatus that shows no hesitation in giving returning refugees a very hard time,” Khalaf said.
DOUBLE REFUGEES: The ordeal is much harder if the refugees in question are already refugees in Syria itself, having found haven there from the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories or having been born to a family that has been living in one of the many refugee camps in Syria for decades, either following the Nakba in 1948 or following the Six Day War in 1967. “Palestinians who are refugees in Syria come to Egypt with not many choices if they are asked to leave or if they are forced to leave to escape hardship,” said Mahinour Al-Masri, a lawyer-activist working with the Syrian refugees. Last week, Amr Daloul, a Palestinian refugee in Syria who had come to Egypt to escape the conflict that has been taking a special toll of the Palestinian refugees, was killed. The Palestinians in Syria are perceived by the Syrian authorities to be on the side of their adversaries because of their often Sunni Muslim affiliation. Khalaf said that “unlike the other refugees coming from Syria, those of Palestinian origin suffer especially. Malaysia used to allow them access, but this is no longer the case. They are also not allowed into Turkey, despite the lip service paid by Ankara to the Palestinian cause.” Earlier this month before the killing of Daloul, some Palestinians were stopped by the Egyptian authorities because of their illegal entry and stay in Egypt and were deported after a failed attempt to board a ship that would have taken them to Europe and possible refuge in Sweden or Germany. Al-Masri said that the Palestinians had been told to either go back to Syria or to go to the Rafah border, where they could have been taken into Gaza should the Hamas authorities have allowed it. “But they were not Gazans, and Hamas did not allow it. As a result, they were forced to flee to Lebanon where they will either have to go back to Syria or go through Jordan to join other Palestinian refugees.”
‘AN ETHNIC CALL': Arab and Western diplomats who have served in Syria say that when the demonstrations against al-Assad started, they had been an across-the-spectrum call for democracy. “It was not at all about a show of anger by the Sunni majority against a ruling minority. It was the Syrians as a whole calling for democracy,” said one European diplomat who had arrived in Damascus in the early days of the anti-Assad protests. Al-Assad, he added, “was smart, however. He knew how to evade wider calls for democracy, and he turned the revolution from the beginning into a sectarian struggle. He targeted Sunni demonstrators and attacked Sunni districts that already had grievances.” As a result, the uprising has become increasingly sectarian-based, especially because of the thousands of Sunni jihadis that have targeted Syria and joined the civil conflict there, once the revolution took a military curve in the wake of the endless killings and demolitions. Talal also argued that the uprising had taken on a sectarian character. “There were always a few Christians in the beginning and a few secularists and so on, but the majority was always from the Sunnis who had suffered endlessly at the hands of Al-Assad and who had shown enormous bias towards the Druze and other Shias, whether in Syria or in Lebanon. In the latter country, Al-Assad sided with Hizbullah in order to serve the will of the main Shia power in the region, Iran. It did not take long before the struggle in Syria evolved into a Sunni versus Druze/Shia conflict,” he said. While “Al-Assad was allowing Hizbullah fighters into Syria to help him with his war against the Syrian people, he was forcing the Palestinians to escape hell as their refugee camps have been subject to recurrent attacks.” This account has been confirmed by foreign diplomats serving in Syria. Many of the Palestinians who escaped from one refuge in Syria to another in Egypt come from the Yarmouk Refugee Camp, the largest in Syria, which was built in the late 1950s. Most of these people are financially challenged and have to go through a complicated process to access assistance in Egypt as they cannot be registered with the UNHCR and have to be registered with the UNRWA instead under Egyptian government regulations. Foreign Ministry officials say that all Palestinians across the Arab world have to be registered with UNRWA because if they were registered with UNHCR that would mean they were recognised as the residents of another country. If this were so, their names would be omitted from the lists of those Palestinians who have the “right of return” to Palestine. “Realistically speaking, we know that this right of return is almost impossible to fulfil, but pragmatically speaking it is useful for the purpose of negotiations to keep the lists as they are. Even if there is no repatriation, there may at least be compensation,” said a Foreign Ministry source. Acknowledging the large numbers of Palestinians who are fleeing Syria due to the sectarian issue and who will find it very difficult to settle in Jordan due to Jordanian concerns over the already very large Palestinian portion of the population or to Lebanon also due to the sectarian issue that has even prompted some anti-Palestinian killings, an Egyptian foreign official said that the UNRWA versus UNHCR rules would nevertheless apply to the Palestinians “no matter what”. “This is state policy. It has to be observed by those Palestinians who are in Egypt until they decide to go elsewhere in search of a better future,” he said.
A FORCED EXIT: The search for an exit out of Egypt is not just something that the Palestinian refugees are obliged to have. It has increasingly become something that many ordinary Syrian refugees are finding themselves forced to look for, as they are becoming increasingly unwelcome in the country. “We have to try to find a way out. It is not a matter of choice: we cannot keep on living here. It's alright for those who have financial flexibility, but not for us with limited financial means,” said Kawthar, who had used all her savings to arrange for an exit for her and her family. The boat that Kawthar, who is now desperately short of money and has not been able to find employment in Egypt, found that was supposed to take her to Europe was intercepted by Egyptian harbour guards, however, and today both her teenage sons and her middle-aged daughter are being held in police custody for violations of residency rights for foreigners. “We don't know what is coming next. We live in fear of being attacked and of being deported. We fear being deported back to the conflict zone that we narrowly escaped from before being killed under the rubble of our own houses,” Kawthar said. According to Al-Masri, these fears are not only something that has set in after the deposition of Morsi. “People tend to think that under Morsi there were no Syrian refugees deported from Egypt, but this is not true because it did happen even if it did not get any media attention at the time,” he said. Al-Masri and Khalaf added that things got worse during the last weeks of Morsi's rule for the Syrian refugees, especially after the so-called “Syria support conference” held at the Cairo Stadium that was attended by many jihadis. Ironically, things got even worse after Morsi was removed, however, amid the rumours suggesting that the Syrians in Egypt were supporting Morsi. “Today, under the state of emergency regulations national security agents can arrest or deport anyone they like, leading to huge problems for refugees,” Khalaf said.
REFUGEE REGULATIONS: UNHCR Cairo bureau director Mohamed Al-Dayri mentions another problem he says is facing the Syrian refugees: the harsh media campaign that has tended to portray the entire community as Morsi supporters at a time when most Egyptians are against the former president. “As a result of the worsening humanitarian crisis in Syria, it is inevitable that there should be more and more people who would want to escape the conflict, and it should therefore be made easier for the refugees to find a safe haven where they can live safely and with dignity,” Al-Dayri said. At the beginning of the conflict there were not that many refugees coming to Egypt, the refugees targeting the closer countries that share easier borders with Syria instead, especially Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey, all of which now host considerable numbers of Syrian refugees. “But we all know how things have deteriorated, and we know that even the very poor are now trying to seek financial support to be able to buy tickets that will bring them by plane or by boat to a safe haven away from the armed conflict,” the UNHCR official said. At the beginning of the conflict it was essentially the well-off that took off from Syria to neighbouring countries where they settled pending what they thought would be their swift return to their country. Later, it was these early refugees who managed to provide job opportunities for the professionals who left Syria a year later after the conflict had escalated. Another year on, it was time for refugees with limited financial means and mostly registered with UNHCR for financial assistance to try their turn. Al-Dayri said that there were around 124,000 Syrian refugees who were either registered or being registered with UNHCR. This is about half of the community of Syrian refugees in Egypt. This population, Al-Dayri suggested, could have been bigger had it not been for the new regulations implemented on 8 July. “We were promised by the government that these restrictions would be only temporary and that they would be promptly removed. We hope to see this happening soon, because this would mean that more people could escape from the armed conflict in their country,” he said. Spokesman for the Foreign Ministry Badr Abdel-Atti said that Egypt “has always welcomed its Syrian brothers and is trying its best to provide maximum support within its means.” “We cannot deny the ordeal that the Syrian people are facing, nor do we wish to underestimate our responsibility towards them,” Abdel-Atti added, saying that “the position of the government is not to blame all the Syrian refugees in Egypt for the involvement of a few in violations of Egyptian law.” However, one informed security source acknowledged that “scores of Syrian refugees” were under arrest for their alleged involvement in “anti-state activities” — a euphemism for participation in the Rabaa sit-in and other Muslim Brotherhood marches. There was “considerable concern over a possible infiltration of jihadi elements by Syrians and others who have come from Syria” amongst the waves of refugees, with some of them possibly “carrying out acts of terror”. “We will be very careful, of course. It is already good that despite its economic problems, Egypt is accommodating the refugees. This is not to say that we should compromise the security of society, however, even if even very remotely,” the same source said. Al-Dayri said that all the regulations set out by the Egyptian government would be observed. “During the first week of July, the Interior Ministry asked UNHCR to call on the Syrian refugees, as well as the Iraqi refugees and others, to refrain from joining any demonstrations. We urged the refugees registered with UNHCR to strictly adhere to this demand, but ultimately some refugees seem to have violated the rule,” he said. Some of those, the security source said, were expelled from Egypt, while others were still being interrogated and would eventually be expelled. Meanwhile, Al-Dayri lamented the fact that “the overall amicable atmosphere that once surrounded Syrian refugees seems to have been dissipated for the moment.”
A COSMOPOLITAN HISTORY: Egyptian novelist Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid, who has written extensively about the cosmopolitan history of Alexandria of which the Shawam once made up a good part, laments the current anti-Syrian sentiment in Egypt which he says is “simply incompatible with the long history in which Egypt always managed to assimilate newcomers and add another layer to its culture and customs.” In his book The Immigration of the Shawam, Lebanese professor of history Massoud Daher describes the inspiring history of Egypt's Shawam. Prominent names include singer and composer Farid Al-Atrache, born in Syria before he took refuge with his mother, elder brother and younger sister from the persecution of the French occupiers of the country, and Asmahan, born Amal Al-Atrache, who left the country for Egypt when her family fled after falling out with the ruling Ottomans. Other famous Shawam names include those of artists and entertainers Naguib Al-Rihani, Bishara Wakim, Georges Abyad and Badiaa Massabni. The Takla family, who established Al-Ahram, and the Zeidan family who established Dar Al-Hilal, also head the list of Egyptian Shawam who made generous and progressive contributions to Egyptian culture, journalism, and business and trade. In the latter field, the name of Sednaoui is famous. According to Daher, some of the Shawam ended by taking Egyptian nationality, and these include the Kanaans, the Khouris and the Sabbaghs. As much as the Syrian refugees of today are escaping war and tyranny, the Shawam of the 19th century who came to Damietta in Egypt were also escaping harsh Ottoman rule for a more tolerant Egypt. Today, refugee workers say, a large portion of the Syrian refugees is finding a helping hand extended to them from some of the originally Syrian families in Egypt, especially in Damietta, once the leading port of Egypt before Alexandria gained its present role. For the original Shawam who came to Egypt, according to Daher their immigration was not all about escaping Ottoman tyranny but also about searching for a more prosperous life. While the majority of Syrian refugees in Egypt today are Sunnis, the majority of the Shawam of the 19th and 20th centuries were Christians who integrated into the society through marriage either to Egyptian Christians or to Egyptian Muslims. The marriage of Henriette Sakakini, a Roman Catholic and Mohamed Al-Bakri is an obvious example. Unlike the Syrian refugees of today, the majority of the Shawam in the 19th century were not poor. However, like their descendants today they managed to keep up their traditions and customs, particularly related to the Syrian cuisine that has made such an impact on Egyptian cooking, even as they never lived in Shawam ghettos. Also unlike the Syrian refugees of today, the Shawam of the 19th and earlier 20th centuries were skilled in foreign languages, many of them speaking English and French along with Arabic and others mastering Italian and other languages. This granted them a wide range of job opportunities and allowed them easier access into the then large and influential European communities in Damietta, Alexandria and Cairo. According to the Egyptian historian Ilham Mohamed Zohni, author of a book on the Western orientalists' accounts of Egypt, the impact of the Shawam in Egypt could not have been missed, even by people who only noticed it in trading activities in Damietta and Alexandria. The Shawam presence was important enough for them to build various churches in Egypt, as well as a riwak (study area) close to the 40 riwaks of pre-World War I Al-Azhar. With the end of World War I and the subsequent fall of the Ottoman Empire that led to the establishment of the Arab states, new restrictions curtailed the flow of Shawam to Egypt, but it was with the nationalisations introduced in the 1960s that some of the leading Shawam finally left Egypt either for Syria or Lebanon or to Europe or Latin America. They left the same way as they had come, across the Mediterranean, this now once again carrying Syrian refugees to Egypt but today to a less welcoming society. Abdel-Meguid argues that the way Syrians are now sometimes being treated does not mean that Egyptians are turning into xenophobes, or that the country's cosmopolitan history has been forgotten. Syria has always been particularly close to Egypt, if only because of the union between the two countries during the rule of former president Gamal Abdel-Nasser.
THE UNITED ARAB REPUBLIC: In 1958 Nasser and Syrian president Choukri Al-Kouatli signed a pact of unity between their two nations in what promised to be the beginning of the wider unity of Arab countries fast gaining their independence from French or British rulers. By 1960, unity had been fully achieved in terms of government, but it was dissolved only one year later due to Cairo's attempts to impose political homogeneity on Syria that was incompatible with the country's heterogeneous society. The Egyptian nationalisations also caused unease on the part of many Syrian entrepreneurs living in Egypt, with some going back to Syria with bitter memories that are only matched by those of today's expelled refugees. “We dream of the day when we can go back to our houses, but this seems so far away and we see no sign of the end of the conflict there,” said Kawthar. Adnan, Talal and Ahmed are hopeful that there may be a US-led military intervention in Syria that will weaken Al-Assad and force him to seek a political settlement. “But it looks as if the US is going to let go, and we have to sit here and wait while Al-Assad kills more people and forces others to leave the country for God knows where,” said Talal. Egyptian and other regional diplomats share the view that there are no serious prospects of a deal with Al-Assad anytime soon. The maximum they say they are hoping to see is for the Syrian president to end his term in office next year and then take the decision not to run for a new term. “But we cannot even be sure about this,” said one European diplomat in the region. Abdel-Atti said that Cairo would remain opposed to any military intervention in Syria and would continue to work for a possible political deal. A military intervention, Cairo fears, would be bound to ignite a civil war that could leave Syria fragmented into multiple ethnic entities. Foreign Minister Nabil Fahmi has repeatedly said that the “territorial integrity of Syria is not something on which Egypt can compromise.” Egyptian diplomats say that a divided Syria, especially on ethnic lines, would be a serious threat to Egypt's strategic interests and a catalyst for renewed and wider ethnic tensions in Iraq and Lebanon, possibly setting the entire region ablaze. Egypt had also been apprehensive about the militarisation of the conflict in Syria and had advised world capitals against the unchecked flow of thousands of jihadis from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq into the country. “This militarisation has complicated the conflict and worsened the refugee problem, and it was never going to force Al-Assad out of power anyway because he has the army on his side,” said one Egyptian diplomat. “Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in general in Egypt were not part of the intense ethnic rhythm that has been played up in Syria. Even when Morsi decided to sever relations with Syria shortly before he was removed, he did not do it for sectarian purposes but rather to serve a home-front political agenda when he wanted to divert attention from the criticisms he was facing,” the same diplomat said. Former foreign minister Mohamed Al-Orabi said that even when Morsi was not subscribing to the sectarian war drums, however, he was inevitably acting in a war by proxy on behalf of other powers that wanted to remove Al-Assad even at the cost of Syria's wider stability and future territorial unity. “There is only one way to settle the conflict in Syria: a political solution that would take into consideration the interests and balance of power of the many parts of Syrian society. Otherwise, it will just be a matter of stopping one war in anticipation of another that is bound to follow,” Al-Orabi said. Having served as the Foreign Ministry's number two during the arrival of Al-Assad junior to power as the successor to his father Hafez Al-Assad in 2000, Al-Orabi has witnessed what he qualified as a determined show of self-restraint in Cairo against “many provocations coming from Damascus”. “This we did because of the key influence that Syria has over Egyptian strategic interests. Syria today remains of the same strategic value to Egypt and this has been manifested by the decision of Cairo to host the opposition coalition that is still operating,” Al-Orabi argued. Political scientist Hassan Nafaa said that it was essential for Egypt's strategic interests with regard to Syria to stop the hate campaign against the Syrian refugees. “I would venture to say that there is no orchestrated campaign ordered by the state, but rather that there has been an unwise and miscalculated initiative by some TV anchors and journalists who have been provoked by the involvement of a few Syrians with the Muslim Brotherhood,” Nafaa said. He added that once the mass media stopped the exaggerated association of Syrian refugees with the Muslim Brotherhood, things would go back to normal and the Syrian refugees would once again be well treated in Egypt.
