No sanctuary
LEVEL PLAYING FIELD
The Hindu, 19 April
Despite an average of 40 violent deaths a day in recent weeks, Iraq, the British Home office insists, is a safe place. Accordingly, 1,400 Iraqi asylum seekers have received letters informing them that they must return home or face homelessness and destitution in Britain. Those who agree to go back will be required to sign a waiver accepting that the U.K. government bears no responsibility for what happens to them or their families after their return.
The 1,400 will be airlifted to Baghdad and Basra. Previously, the government had deported Iraqi asylum seekers, mainly Kurds, only to the safer provinces of northern Iraq. On March 27, in the biggest operation of its kind, 60 Kurds were flown on a chartered aircraft from Stanstead airport in Essex to Erbil in northern Iraq. When they landed, guards from the Kurdish Democratic Party (one of the two Kurdish parties in the ruling coalition) boarded the plane. “They were armed with guns, and they beat people from Mosul and Baghdad who refused to leave the plane,” said one man on the flight, “They even hit them in the back of the head with their guns, many people were bleeding. The British security guards were also hitting people.” Another on the flight was 19-year-old Sherwen, a Christian whose father had worked for Saddam Hussein. “I don’t have anywhere to go, and I am not safe,” he said, “The British government said they would give us $100 when we arrived, but we haven’t been given anything. I can’t even buy myself something to eat.”
The coerced return of Iraqis living in Britain – and the continued refusal of entry to many thousands more – exemplifies the ethical bankruptcy of British policy on asylum seekers. Many come here from places whose societies have been turned upside down by British or Western intervention. The wars, repression, economic and social turmoil from which they seek refuge are part of a global order for which the U.K., both historically and currently, bears a hefty share of responsibility.
Last year, Britain received 23,430 asylum applications, the lowest for 14 years, and a quarter of the record high set in 2002. (The top five applicant nationalities were Afghanistan, Iran, China, Iraq and Eritrea, with significant numbers from Zimbabwe and Somalia.) At the same time, 12,525 asylum seekers were deported. Meanwhile, at any one moment, some 1,600 (including 50-60 children) were kept in detention, mostly in the government’s 10 Immigration Removal Centres (IRCs), seven of which are run by private contractors.
Unlike most European countries, and contrary to the recommendations of the U.N. Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, in Britain there is no legal limit to the time a person may be held in immigration detention. Periods of up to six months detention – for people who have not even been charged with a crime – are not uncommon. The IRCs are overcrowded and lack medical and recreational facilities. Communication with the outside world is severely restricted. Many detainees claim to have been insulted and assaulted by immigration staff. A recent study found that excessive force was used against a number of detainees who had already suffered torture in their countries of origin.
“I came to England because my political activities in Zimbabwe meant my life was in danger,” said Yeukai, a middle-aged woman detainee, “But when I was locked up in Dungavel, having committed no crime, I wasn’t sure whether this was Britain or Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.”
Britain is the only European State that detains asylum-seeking children, a policy condemned by Amnesty and a host of other independent observers. On April 10, a group of mothers held in Yarl’s Wood IRC, in Bedfordshire, protested outside the staff office, removing their clothes to mark their disgust at the imprisonment of their children. “I took my clothes off because they treat us like animals,” said Mercy Guobatia, 22, from Nigeria. “We are claiming asylum, we’re not animals. They treat us as if we’ve done something terrible.”
Asylum seekers are also increasingly subject to “dawn raids” in which their homes are invaded by immigration officials looking for people liable to detention or deportation. In 2006, 8,100 “enforcement operations” were carried out before 8 a.m. – roughly 22 dawn raids a day. Of those, only 2,009 led to arrests of any kind, which means that three out of four raids served no purpose but to intimidate law-abiding asylum seekers.
The dawn raids are one facet of a policy that aims to deter future asylum seekers by punishing those presently in the country. Those who escape detention face destitution. They are not permitted to work and must subsist on meagre hand-outs from the State, which also tells them where they must live. According to the Parliamentary Joint Committee on Human Rights, some accommodation provided to asylum seekers is so poor that it violates Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (on the right to home, family and private life).
It is estimated that 20 per cent of asylum seekers and refugees in the U.K. have severe health problems. Yet, since 2004, most have been denied access to free NHS secondary (hospital) care. Now the government is considering restricting access to primary (GP) care as well.
The casual cruelty of British immigration policy is illustrated by two recent cases, both tragic, both avoidable.
Ama Sumani, a 39-year-old Ghanaian widow and mother of two, had come to Britain as a student in 2002. She overstayed her visa but worked and paid taxes. She was diagnosed with multiple myeloma and treated by the NHS. In January, immigration officials removed her from her hospital bed in Cardiff and deported her to Ghana, where she died several weeks later. The Lancet, Britain’s leading medical journal, denounced the government’s behaviour as an “atrocious barbarism”.
Zarine Rentia was a 15-year-old Indian girl who had been severely disabled by an extremely rare disease. On a visit to Britain in 2005, she was diagnosed and began a course of treatment at Great Ormond Street, the world famous children’s hospital. In the meantime, she attended a local London School, where she impressed children and staff alike. With the support of Zarine’s doctors, her mother applied to the Home Office for leave to remain in Britain on medical grounds, but was refused. After an immigration judge turned down their appeal in February, mother and daughter returned to Gujarat, where Zarine died weeks later.
These women were two of the many victims of the British government’s approach to xenophobia, which is to appease it at all costs.
Much of the British media, including at times the BBC, depicts asylum seekers as threatening and parasitical. Any crime committed by an asylum seeker is blazoned in headlines, while the more numerous crimes committed against them are scarcely reported at all. Here the politicians follow the media and the media claims to be following the public. Yet the public’s confusions on the issue owe a great deal to its continuous misrepresentation by the media and the politicians. For example, in one survey, on average people thought that the U.K. has taken in 23 per cent of the world’s refugees. The actual figure is closer to 2 per cent.
Hearteningly, the atrocious treatment of asylum seekers has spawned a network of resistance. Community campaigns, aided by lawyers and activists, have stubbornly opposed deportations, detentions and the policies that lead to destitution. When asylum seeking children attending local schools have been threatened with removal, pupils, teachers and parents have rallied round them and exposed the injustice of government edicts. This on-going effort is a welcome corrective to the assumption – all too easy to make – that British people are universally hostile to refugees.
