I see problems with this on multiple levels.

CAIRO, Dec. 30 – Egyptian riot police officers rushed into a crowd of unarmed Sudanese migrants early Friday morning, killing at least 23 people, including small children, after the group refused to leave a public park it had occupied for three months hoping to press United Nations officials to relocate them.

The Sudanese – thousands of men, women and children – were packed into what amounted to a traffic island in an upscale neighborhood. They had fled war-torn Sudan, but the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees office in Cairo – across the street from where they camped out – told them that they were not eligible for refugee status or for relocation because it was safe for them to return home.

The police had tried for hours to persuade them to leave the small square, hosing them with water cannons, surrounding them with cordons of riot control officers, imploring the women and children to board buses, and repeatedly warning that they would be removed by force.

When the officers charged, women and children tried to huddle together, and to hide under blankets as some men grabbed for anything – tree limbs, metal bars – struggling to fight back, witnesses said. The police hesitated, then rushed in with full force, trampling people and dragging the Sudanese off to waiting buses, the witnesses said.

“They started hitting our heads with the sticks and dragging us,” said Napoleon Robert Lado, a leader of the group, speaking on a cellphone from a police camp where he and others had been taken. “They dragged me when I was trying to help a woman who fainted to stand up. They dragged me, and I was stepping over the old people and women and children. I was screaming and trying to step away, but could not.”

By nightfall, Muhammad Khalaf, head of the area’s emergency department, said there were 23 dead, 7 of them children, 8 elderly, and 7 more women. Rights organizations said others died after being taken to police camps and being denied immediate access to health care.

First of all, it doesn’t matter whether your were trying to get them out of the park for a few hours or a few minutes, you just don’t go massacring a couple dozen refugee — all of them women, children, and the elderly no less. And I bet the Egyptian government wonders why it has a bad rep. Second, there wouldn’t be any refugees to massacre if there weren’t a campaign of genocide going on in Sudan. That the UN office in Cairo tried to tell them that it’s safe to go back home is ridiculous, especially given that we know that people are still being slaughtered.