LONDON: Thousands of asylum seekers living in hotels provided by the UK government fear they could lose their places as hotels aim to offer their rooms to tourists and other travelers.

A letter seen by The Guardian sent to a group of asylum seekers in a central London hotel provided by the Home Office said: “Dear guests, we would like to kindly inform you that your accommodation with us is going to end on 31 January [2022]. We advise you to get in touch with your local council for alternative accommodation.”

However, a later note by Clearsprings, the company hired by the Home Office to manage the accommodation, contradicted the first letter sent.

The second letter said: “Under the law [hotel owners] cannot ask you to leave the premises forcefully. Please note that if for any reason your entry card is cancelled and you cannot gain access to your apartment please call the police immediately as this will be classed as an illegal eviction.”

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants is supporting asylum seekers in this accommodation who received the letter. They say they are vulnerable and include a mother with a newborn baby and a survivor of domestic violence.

Minnie Rahman, the campaigns director for the JCWI, told The Guardian: “Nobody should have to fear they’ll be kicked out on to the streets on a cold winter’s night.”

She also said the number of eviction threats asylum seekers have been receiving is increasing.

“Our lawyers have been on the phone to young mums and families who’ve been terrified they were going to end up homeless, and unfortunately we know these kinds of threats are widespread,” said Rahman.

“The Home Office needs to be granting people who’ve sought safety here decent, stable accommodation so they can rebuild their lives.”

The Home Office acknowledges that asylum seekers are entitled to long-term accommodation but said that it could not yet locate enough housing for the thousands of asylum seekers currently in hotels.

Visit Britain is predicting a significant boost in tourist numbers this year, and London hotels have reported a surge in tourist bookings as pandemic travel restrictions ease.

Meanwhile, the Home Office has already said it is spending £4.7 million ($6.4 million) a day on hotel accommodation for 12,000 Afghans being resettled in the UK and 25,000 asylum seekers — a total cost of over $2.3 billion per year.

A Home Office spokesperson said: “The letters were sent to a small number of people in one accommodation site in error and without approval from the Home Office. We are liaising with Clearsprings to make sure this does not happen again.

“The use of hotels is only ever a short-term solution and we are working with local authorities to find appropriate long-term accommodation across the United Kingdom.”

BEIRUT: Skiing in Lebanon has long been a luxury for the well-off, but the eastern Mediterranean country’s financial meltdown has thrown most people into poverty and made taking to the slopes even more exclusive.
The Lebanese pound has lost more than 90 percent of its value since 2019.
“Skiing is a hobby for the dollar class, not for us,” said Mohammad Atwi on a recent visit to the mountains. “We came here to sit and have shisha. The most we spend is 200,000 pounds ($10).”
Prices for ski passes at the Mzaar ski resort, which boasts panoramic views over the Mediterranean, are listed in dollars in a country where the vast majority earn in pounds.
An all-day pass runs at $35 on weekdays and $50 at weekends, according to a website listing prices. That equates to between 700,000 and a million pounds — more than the current monthly minimum wage and a sizeable chunk of an average salary.
Lebanon is mired in its worst crisis since the 1975-90 civil war, with banks imposing tight restrictions on how much cash savers can withdraw, forcing even those with money to think more carefully before they spend.
Still, the slopes are packed at weekends with those who can afford it.
“Skiing has become expensive, especially if you have many kids, but at the end we want to live,” said Delphine Markarian as she walked through the snow with skis strapped to her back.
“When the weather is nice like this, you ski with your children, they enjoy it and that is what we look for — an experience to be happy with our children. That’s the most important thing.”

DUBAI: Photographer and activist Lana Haroun, 34, was in Khartoum in 2019, at the epicenter of the revolution in Sudan. She helped to document the rage and optimism of the movement that brought an end to the 30-year rule of dictator Omar Bashir in April that year.

Like thousands of Sudanese people who had long dreamed of political change, Haroun was hopeful as the country subsequently began a difficult transition to democratic civilian rule. Those hopes soon turned to despair.

Abdalla Hamdok, a respected UN diplomat who was appointed prime minister in August 2019, offered a vision of peace and prosperity. But with the economy in crisis, Sudan soon began to run short of food, fuel and medicine.

He acknowledged the hardship arising from the austerity measures he had adopted, but expressed hope that their positive impact would be felt very soon.

However, as daily street protests became increasingly violent, Haroun decided it was time to leave the country. In November 2020, she and her family packed up and moved to Dubai, where she now works for a petroleum company.

“The economic situation was very bad in Sudan and there are many things I want to do in my life,” she told Arab News. “I had to leave.”

Sudan’s democratic transition stalled in October 2021 when military chief Gen. Abdel Fattah Al-Burhan staged a coup, toppling the civilian government and removing Hamdok from office.

In response to the international condemnation that followed, the military proposed a power-sharing deal and reinstated Hamdok as prime minister in November. The agreement proved unpopular with pro-democracy groups, however, leading Hamdok to resign on Jan. 2.

“No one knows what will happen now,” Haroun said. “Many people are leaving Sudan because they are afraid to lose their lives, not just because there is no food or money but because they are afraid of being killed.

“Sudan is now worse than in Bashir’s time. We don’t have what we need to live normal lives and more people are being killed than ever before.”

In a televised address following his resignation, Hamdok said the country was at a “dangerous turning point that threatens its whole survival.” This was no exaggeration; with rising inflation, shortages of basic goods, and deadly unrest in Khartoum, the outlook has seldom been gloomier.

“Sudan has unfortunately fallen from the grace of being a rare positive story in the Horn of Africa into the hands of another military regime,” Mohamed Osman, a Sudanese former journalist and an independent specialist on the region, told Arab News.

“This is history repeating itself for the third time since the country’s independence. But this time it’s a poignant combination of tragedy and farce.”

One major challenge for international observers is the lack of reliable information from inside Sudan, in large part because of frequent internet blackouts.

As a result, responsibility for the killings of protesters — whether the result of factional infighting, criminality or deliberate targeting by the feared Rapid Support Forces — is hard to ascertain.

“No one knows who is doing the killing in the streets,” said Haroun, who tries to follow the events as best she can from her self-imposed exile in Dubai.

“It’s crazy. But for sure this killing is from the military themselves because they are running the show in Sudan now.”

Since October, the value of the Sudanese pound has depreciated alarmingly, compounding inflationary pressure. Sudan’s removal from the US State Sponsors of Terrorism list in 2020 was expected to stimulate financial flows that could benefit growth. By all accounts, the advantage has been squandered.

“The economy was already struggling to recover,” said Osman. “Now this coup has worsened its situation, making life in Khartoum very hard. Many people are running out of money and trying to leave the country.”

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, about 14.3 million people in Sudan, almost one in three of the population, will need humanitarian assistance this year — about 0.8 million more than last year.

Further complicating matters, disputes over land, livestock, access to water and grazing since October 2021 have triggered a spike in tribal clashes, lootings and rape in the vast, arid Darfur region.

The World Food Programme has suspended operations following looting at its warehouses in North Darfur state, an act which “robbed nearly two million people of the food and nutrition support they so desperately need,” the agency said.

Though the main Darfur conflict has subsided, the parts of Darfur bordering Chad are awash with guns and home to most of Sudan’s three million displaced people.

“The situation in the short-to-medium term is very bleak,” Rashid Abdi, a Horn of Africa analyst at Nairobi-based think tank Sahan Research, told Arab News. “The army, digging in, has refused all ideas about a resolution. They want a solution on their own terms.

“I think they understand that they are not going to continue the strategy of Bashir and hope that a military government will be acceptable in the long term.”

But Abdi believes the public in Sudan will not accept this status quo, so army chiefs probably want to install a civilian administration that is weak, that they can control. If that is the military’s game plan, he said, it is unlikely to fly with the Sudanese public.

“Their hope was that Hamdok would be the person to steer the country to better days,” he said. “I think he became trapped by the military and could not maneuver and did the decent thing, which was to resign.”

On Jan. 26, the splits in Sudanese society appeared to widen further when thousands of pro-military protesters gathered outside the Khartoum office of the UN Integrated Transition Assistance Mission in Sudan demanding an end to “foreign interference” and for the UN’s special representative for Sudan, Volker Perthes, to “go back home.”

Perthes, who was appointed head of UNITAMS in January 2021, has been trying to bring Sudanese stakeholders to the negotiating table to discuss a peaceful political solution and get the democratic transition back on track.

He has said that the UN itself “is not coming up with any project, draft or vision for a solution.” But Sudan’s military-led government has rejected his efforts, arguing that he should be working as a “facilitator and not a mediator.”

Meanwhile, Sudan’s overwhelmingly young anti-coup protesters have continued to march in the streets of Khartoum, where they routinely clash with security forces amid a ferocious crackdown on dissent. Since the coup, at least 79 people have been killed and hundreds more injured.

The daunting task of restoring the democratic transition has fallen on a population fed up with unending internal conflict, displacement and impoverishment.

“The protests are not just in Khartoum but also in Darfur and other parts of the country,” Erika Tovar Gonzalez, communication and prevention coordinator at the International Committee of the Red Cross, told Arab News from the Sudanese capital.

“There’s a humanitarian crisis, there’s armed and criminal violence and tribal clashes that continue to displace thousands of people. The youth are depressed. Some even have suicidal thoughts. They feel they have no future.”

The result is two seemingly irreconcilable visions, with the nation’s fate hanging in the balance.

“Even the Sudanese political parties that would have been willing to give Al-Burhan the benefit of the doubt for pragmatic reasons are more careful now,” said Gonzalez.

“Because once they get into bed with the military, they damage their credibility and won’t get any support from the public. Al-Burhan has become more toxic as an ally.”

Analysts therefore believe it is unlikely that Al-Burhan and the military will be able to maintain their grip on power.

“I don’t think the military (strategy) has clarity,” said Abdi. “One speculation is that the military is aware that it is not going to be accepted but what they are trying to do is to buy more time to make good their promise of exit.”

Osman thinks the military badly miscalculated how events would play out after it launched last October’s coup.

“Who will give them money now?” he asked. “Western assistance is suspended. Gulf countries won’t give them enough cash. You cannot stabilize a regime without money. The military shot itself in the foot. The economic situation can only get worse as they move forward with this coup.

Osman added: “There can be no hope for a political compromise unless the military stops its deadly crackdown on protests first.”

JERUSALEM: Israel will allow unvaccinated tourists entry for the first time since the pandemic began as infections and deaths caused by the coronavirus decline, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett announced on Sunday.

“We are seeing a consistent decline in morbidity data,” Bennett said.

Israel shut its borders to travelers in early 2020 as the coronavirus spread worldwide.

“It is time to gradually open what we were the first in the world to close,” the prime minister said.

The Jewish state was also an early trailblazer of a national vaccine rollout and among the first countries to demand a vaccination certificate, which it called the green pass, to enter a range of facilities.

Under new rules taking effect on March 1, tourists will need to take a PCR test before boarding a flight to Israel and a second one upon landing.

Israeli citizens will only be required to take the test upon arrival.

On Thursday, Bennett cited a decline in infections when he announced an end to the green pass. More than 10,000 new cases of Covid-19 were reported Sunday in Israel, down from a high of more than 85,000 daily cases in late January.

A total of 9,841 people have died from the illness, including seven reported Saturday.

An attempt to open the borders to vaccinated visitors last November foundered after just a few weeks because of the fast-spreading omicron coronavirus variant.

AMMAN: Jordan’s Muslim Brotherhood movement has received a huge setback after losing control over the Engineers Association in recent elections.

By losing in places such as Zarqa and Irbid on Friday, the Islamists have lost their last stronghold in Jordan.

Numo — which won Friday’s governorate elections — represents a wide range of engineers who are “unhappy with the way the union worked after 25 years of Islamist influence,” said long-time union activist Mutaz Shawareb. 

Shawareb, a civil engineer, is a nominee on the winning Numo list.

“For years, we have been trying to change the election process to allow for proportional representation and to lower the age of nominees. Despite earlier agreements, the Islamists have rejected the reforms for as long as they have been in power.”

Making accusations of electoral meddling and forgery, the Islamists announced on Saturday that they were withdrawing from elections for the engineering sectors, the office of the head of the union, and the secretariat of the union.

A leader from the Islamist Unified List claimed that Friday’s elections included “the usurping of the will of the engineers as a result of external interventions, bad management, and lack of guarantees for the freedom, integrity, and secrecy of the polls.” 

Engineer Badi Rafia of the Unified List told Arab News that the withdrawal from any further participation was done as a protest against “blatant, rude and direct interventions.”

Rafia, also a prominent leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, added: “What happened is a violation of the basic rights of freedom and secrecy of the elections.

“Therefore, we have decided to stay away from this farce comedy so as to keep our professional union independent and to protect the integrity of Jordanian engineers.”

Rafia said that “unprecedented interference by all the parties in the elections led to the forgery of the will of the engineers and their free voices.”

Veteran unionist Shawareb, however, scoffed at the accusations by the losing Islamists.

“Their reaction to the loss was withdrawal from the elections, and this is the kind of excuse that losers make when they are unable to win at the ballot box.”

Zaid O. Nabulsi, a strong critic of Islamists in Jordan, told Arab News that their excuse for the loss was “laughable.”

Nabulsi said: “They are objecting to the fact that their opponents lobbied and united against them.”

He added: “Well, Islamists have been lobbying since the 1970s against us in mosques, schools, universities, and even on street corners.

“Now that they lost, they are playing the victim role, claiming — without proof — that others have forged the results.”

Nabulsi said that the “Muslim Brotherhood are fighting for survival after they were exposed.”

“Ironically, the only place in the region that they have found a foothold is inside the Israeli Knesset, where they have allied with the nastiest right-wing Zionist in the history of the entity,” Nabulsi said.

On Jan. 26, the Islamic Action Front, which is considered the political arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, announced withdrawal from participation in the local council elections planned for March 22.

Murad Adaileh, director-general of the Islamic Action Front, told Arab News that authorities had failed to take advantage of the “positive results of the recent royal commission for the modernization of political processes.”

A number of prominent Islamists were nominated to the commission, including the head of the fifth Shoura Council Hamzeh Mansour, the former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Abdel Rahim Okor, and former MPs from the Islamic Action Front Dima Tahboub and Ibrahim Al-Izz.

“Although we agreed to some of the results of the royal commission and rejected others, there was premeditation in passing constitutional changes,” Adaileh said. “These changes aimed to transform the country into an absolute monarchy while weakening the authority of the government and instituting policies based on limited freedom, as has been demonstrated in action against a member of the Islamic Action Front in parliament and the arrest of protestors against normalization with the Zionist enemy.”

The Islamists were also sharply criticized by Omar Kullab in an op-ed on Sunday for the Jordanian daily Al-Rai: “What has led to the losses in the Engineers Association elections is a result of their attitude of denial — a refusal to admit the problems that they are facing.”