Human Cargo Read online

  Why, I asked Bertrand on one of our meetings under Grey’s statue, did Dialo chose to jump over a bridge? “He wanted to make certain he would die. He was not silly.” Dialo’s death has sent Bertrand’s own life in a new direction. He has become more aware of his own blackness in a white country, more conscious that to be black in northeast England is most often to be an asylum seeker, and that to be an asylum seeker is hardly to be a person at all. He wishes that he had known then what he knows now, that there are a number of Fula speakers in London, and that some way might have been found to bring them together with Dialo. In the weeks following Dialo’s death, he began thinking about the isolation and apprehension that had weighed so heavily on his friend, and he started an organization with his friends to bring together Newcastle’s African refugees to help them with some of their immediate difficulties. He has called it Baobab, after the West African tree under which villagers traditionally sit to discuss their problems; Baobab has its own soccer team and Bertrand talks of opening a club where the Africans can dance.

  • • •

  SUICIDES ARE NOT unusual among asylum seekers in Britain. Not all are committed by men and women who have reached the end of the legal line and are facing imminent deportation, for the life of an asylum seeker is precarious, confusing, beset by contradictions and reversals, subject to sudden uprooting and dispersal, and most of it is conducted in a foreign language. For some, the waiting and the uncertainty are already too much. For others, the loneliness is more than can be borne. When, early in July 2003, a young Iranian used a knife to try to hack himself to death in Bigg Market, just in front of Monica Bishop’s offices, he left a note: “You have to kill yourself in this country,” he had written, in large scrawled letters, “to prove that you would be killed in your own country.”

  Katherine Henderson, in the summer of 2003, had two clients she feared would not survive the wait: one was a South African woman, gang-raped by soldiers in front of her family, whom she was then obliged to watch being murdered; the other, an Iranian, who learned that he had been refused asylum even without an interview, and who had already attempted suicide once when the Home Office mistakenly stopped answering his letters and cut off his benefits. She believes that some 50 to 60 percent of her clients, frantic and highly confused, traumatized by fear and grief for those they have left behind, are in need of some form of mental help. Monica Bishop has a handful of others she is keeping a close eye on. People working with asylum seekers have become attuned to this particular despair.

  In 2002, according to official figures, 110,700 people asked for political asylum in the United Kingdom on the grounds of persecution and justifiable fear of return, under the 1951 Refugee Convention to which Britain is party. This was the largest number that had ever applied. (In 1993, for example, there had been 22,370.) It was also the highest number of applications in the developed world; the United States came in second, with 81,000, Germany third, with 71,100, and France fourth, with 50,800. But the numbers have been dropping. Only 2 percent of the world’s asylum seekers, however, are currently in the UK, and as a country, Britain is not generous with its contributions to UNHCR, to which it gives half what the Netherlands gives. (Nor is it generous with resettlement, recently announcing that it would be offering places to five hundred people, but then allowing the plan to stall.) Just why Britain is such a magnet for asylum seekers is not easily explained, but it is generally attributed to a mixture of things: a cumbersome appeals procedure (which gives asylum seekers the hope that they may enjoy longer periods in the UK, while their case is being considered, than in other countries); smugglers’ awareness that border controls are weak; the draw of already established communities; the fact that Britain retains its reputation as a place of welcome to persecuted people and that English is a language many people speak; and the realization that when it comes to deportations, the Home Office is relatively lax.

  Since 1997, the rules and regulations governing the asylum process have been changed three times, on each occasion becoming tougher and more restrictive, and adding to the impression, as the Refugee Council observed not long ago, that the system is not working. Asylum seekers today (as has always been true under the Convention) may enter the country illegally—there is no other way—and claim asylum either at the port of entry (airport or seaport) or directly at the Home Office, but they must do so “as soon as is reasonably practical.” Failure to do so means forfeiting all financial support, the assumption being that only a bogus asylum seeker would not apply on landing, but this rule, which is known as Section 55, is now being challenged in the courts as being in breach of the Human Rights Act article on “inhuman and degrading treatment.” Having completed a statement of evidence—a history of what has happened to cause flight—then been interviewed and submitted any further evidence, the asylum seeker may be given refugee status, and eventually allowed to apply for citizenship. (Initial decisions are widely agreed to be made in an ill-informed way, and to rely on confusing and out-of-date country information.) Alternatively, he may be offered humanitarian protection for varying amounts of time, which means that though he has failed to qualify as a refugee under the 1951 Convention, valid concerns about danger and security prevent him from being sent home. If refused on both counts, the asylum seeker can launch the first of four possible appeals to various authorities and tribunals. A proposed “ouster” clause, which would have removed the right to judicial review or appeal to a higher court, was recently rejected by the courts. After appeals of various kinds, some half of all those who ask for asylum are refused leave to remain, and are then meant to leave the country. Not all do so. Many slip into the underground economy, or simply wait and hope to escape deportation.

  It is not easy for people who have fled violence and persecution, or even poverty and despair, to stick to the strict truth. When their story is their only real passport, when they have thrown away their documents and tried to reinvent themselves, it is hard not to embellish the hardships of the past. Refugee life is rife with rumor. Among those waiting to be interviewed, word circulates about how some nationalities are more likely to get asylum than others, about how some stories are more powerful than others, more likely to touch the hearts of the interviewers. The buying and selling of “good” stories, stories to win asylum, has become common practice in refugee circles, among people terrified that their own real story is not powerful enough. How easy then, how natural, to shape the past in such a way that it provides more hope for a better future. Traffickers and smugglers, transporting clients to the West, are known to recommend identities, to advise assumption of an origin in one of the countries to which people asking asylum cannot be returned without breaching the Refugee Convention clause about nonrefoulement.

  In recent years, as the numbers of people arriving in the West and claiming asylum began to grow steeply, and pressure mounted on immigration officers to turn away as many applicants as they reasonably could, the idea of what is truth and what is a lie has acquired a very particular potency in refugee matters. Credibility has become a benchmark on which everything depends. Asylum seekers found not to be telling the truth are automatically rejected, however genuine their need may be. “Lack of credibility”—that is to say, the supposition that the person asking for asylum is lying—has become, in most of the West, the main reason for refusal. For asylum lawyers, convincing their clients that they must tell only the truth has become of major importance. And spotting a lie, however trivial, has become a challenge for immigration officers, who admit that a falsehood, even one concerning method of travel or date of departure, enables them to throw out a case. The tragedy comes when the real story, the true story, is stronger than the made-up one, and would guarantee refugee status while the false one does not; this is particularly poignant in the case of those who receive poor legal advice or whose experience of torture makes telling their stories painful. The situation is not easy for the asylum seekers, certainly; but not easy for the interviewers either, to be forc
ed to be so vigilant for lies in the stories of desperate people, knowing that there are among them people, using the asylum route, whose pasts contain no persecution, and others again, whose stories are indistinguishable in terms of pain and anguish from those of true refugees, but who fall outside the narrow definition of the Convention.

  • • •

  THERE MAY BE as many as 25,000 asylum seekers in Britain who, like Dialo, have reached the end of their legal road. They have been turned down on their first interviews and lost their appeals; some have tried and failed to win a reprieve under the Human Rights Act or before a tribunal; and some have been able to take their cases before the High Court. In every case, the immigration officers, judges, and adjudicators involved have decided either that their stories lack credibility, or that the applicant has in fact nothing to fear from return to his own country, or that his reason for coming to Britain is only a desire for a better life. Many will have suffered from lazy and exploitative solicitors; Katherine Henderson says that more than half the clients who have been sent to the northeast and come to her for help bring their entire life stories, including accounts of torture and prolonged family persecution, reduced by their first solicitor to three quarters of a sheet of A4 paper. Others, like Dialo, will have been offered poor or inappropriate translation, and been victims of clerical errors and misfilings. All, at the end of a process that will have lasted somewhere between four months and four years, will have been notified that their case has been rejected and that they are to leave the UK; in June 2003, the Home Office’s list of “safe countries” (nations to which asylum seekers can “safely” be sent back) stood at twenty-four. Deportation—ticket to home country paid for—may follow immediately, or may follow a period in detention, in case the failed applicant absconds. The number of people for whom there was room in detention centers stood at around 2,000 in 2003 and 2004, but the government announced not long ago that they were increasing the number to 4,000.

  Rejection also means the end of all financial help. Those with special needs can apply for continued support as hardship cases, but must sign a form to say that they are willing to be voluntarily repatriated at any time. Only the Iraqis, in the summer of 2003, were not obliged to sign this form, Iraq alone being deemed, for the time being at least, to be a country to which return was not a possibility. For each one collected at dawn, taken to a deportation center, and put on a flight, dozens more are said to vanish into Britain’s black economy, sleeping on the floors of friends’ houses, working illegally for appallingly low wages in factories, farms, and garages. Their particular limbo, refused asylum, always fearing deportation, the limbo that Dialo could not bear to contemplate, is not describable in figures. “They do not sleep,” explained an acquaintance of Dialo, when asked by reporters about his friends who had been rejected for asylum. “They do not sleep because they know their futures.”

  In April 2000, “Interim Dispersal Measures,” created under the 1999 Immigration Act, were put into place to alleviate the pressure on London to accommodate asylum seekers waiting for the answer to their application. In theory, the Home Office, through the National Asylum Support Agency (NASS), disperses people in “clusters,” sending like with like, Iraqis with Iraqis, Angolans with Angolans, to cities around the UK where housing is available, either in council estates or with private contractors. In practice, people are dispersed as they arrive, with no time to match them up with others from their countries, which was why Dialo found himself with no other Fula speaker in Newcastle. When, in March 2003, NASS sent a first batch of asylum seekers to Stockton-on-Tees, they sent 675 Somalis, Algerians, Kuwaitis, Pakistanis, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Macedonians, Guineans, Zimbalweans, Turks, and Sierra Leoneans; all but a handful were young men, born in the 1970s and early 1980s. One result of this inchoate system is that they are now to be found everywhere, in ones and twos, these people who no longer exist, whose legal process has run out and who do not know what to do next; in the absence of some radical and farsighted solution, their numbers are set to grow all the time.

  Both Katherine Henderson and Monica Bishop talk of the future with apprehension, as a time of inevitably rising suicides. “It’s a bomb waiting to explode,” Mohamed told me, when I went to see him in his office in Sunderland. Mohamed, the general manager of a local refugee office, is a Sudanese chemist who applied for and was given refugee status and asylum in Britain fifteen years ago, but has never been able to find a job to match his qualifications. Until 2000, Sunderland had a small Bangladeshi community, but few strangers, and certainly no strangers from Asia or Africa, had ever settled in the town. In the spring of 2000, Sunderland was earmarked as a good dispersal town. Asylum seekers from sixty countries have since arrived. Month by month, rejections are increasing; in ones and twos, like Dialo, they are losing their homes and money. “The implications for putting so many lonely, desperate, and confused people on the streets are terrifying,” Mohamed said to me. “It will totally destroy the good work of all the refugee organizations in breaking the negative image of asylum. And what does it do to them? These people were active in their own countries. Even if they had been tortured and persecuted, they were people who had work and professions and positions in society. Here they are condemned to doing nothing. They were somebody at home. They are leftovers here.”

  In the summer of 2003, of the 50,000 official asylum seekers scattered by NASS in sixty-four cities, towns, and villages across the UK, about 5,000 were believed to be in the northeast. None, under legislation passed in 2002, are allowed to work, however great and necessary their skills—as doctors, for example, or chemists, or biologists—and however protracted their wait. Lack of work was, according to Bertrand, the single most painful thing for Suleiman Dialo to bear, since he had left behind him a good and profitable job as a trader; it is also mentioned most often, by those applying for asylum, as the single worst aspect of the waiting. Extrapolation from national statistics, however imprecise, suggests that at least 2,500 of these people in and around Newcastle will ultimately be refused asylum. For a long time, while Byker absorbed, first, some of the hundreds of Romanians who arrived suddenly from Timi§oara on Christmas Eve, 2001, then Zimbabweans fleeing Mugabe’s political madness, then Iraqi and Turkish Kurds escaping systematic persecution by their governments, then Afghans in flight from the Taliban, the housing estate experienced mainly arrivals; now, it witnesses many departures as well.

  It is said that in the UK in 2004 there may be several thousand Iraqis, most but not all of them Kurds, who have reached the end of their legal line and moved into the limbo that Dialo so feared. Because of the war in Iraq, their particular position, rejected yet not liable to immediate deportation, is more anomalous than most; though they may stay, they may not work. Cut off from the support that kept them going, they now work as ill-paid laborers or in factories, or they exist on the charity of those still supported by NASS. No longer asylum seekers, yet neither refugees nor deportable, they do not exist, except as names of people who should not be in the UK.

  Ali arrived in Dover on October 5, 2000, in a truck full of boxes. He does not know what was in the boxes, having been ordered by the smuggler not to look. He is a Kurd, from Sulamaniya, a short, wiry young man in his late twenties, with fashionably cut hair and a pleasant grin. He speaks no English, having had neither the desire nor the aptitude to learn while not knowing his future, and therefore never having profited from the variety of English programs offered by local council and voluntary organizations up and down the country. A prospering shoe shop owner, with a large family of brothers and sisters, Ali was driven from Iraq after he refused to work for a local akha, a powerful gang. Arrested on their orders by the police, detained in solitary confinement in a cellar, beaten up and badly scared, Ali emerged from captivity and fled to Istanbul; from there he found a trafficker to bring him to Britain. His first application for asylum was turned down; the immigration authorities pointed out that his troubles were not with the state but with local h
oodlums, which made him ineligible for refugee status. He appealed. On June 5, 2002, Ali learned that his appeal, too, had been rejected.

  Within a few days, the money that he had been receiving each week was stopped. He left the room rented for him by the NASS while he was an asylum seeker and moved in with friends. And there, fourteen months later, he remains. When I met him, under Grey’s column, he had a friend with him to interpret. He hoped I could get his money reinstated, as he was having trouble finding even casual low-paid work now that he had no papers of any kind. I asked him whether he thought of going home. He looked surprised. “Never,” he said, through his friend. “It will never be safe for me.” Like other Kurds in Newcastle, he is haunted by the story of another Iraqi Kurd who, hearing that he had been refused, hanged himself two years ago in the park, on a spring day in 2002, holding a daffodil in his hand. Hassan Omar Saloh was an older man of forty-seven, Ali explained, and he left a wife and eight children in Iraq.

  I asked Ali about his life in Newcastle. What sort of work could he find? He looked anxious, evasive. Did he have friends? Yes, he replied, he had many friends, nearly all of them Iraqi men like himself, waiting; they met when they could, they sat and talked, they watched television. Did he have a girlfriend? “How can I? There are no Iraqi women in Newcastle, at least, no single ones.” At night, when the Iraqis meet, they talk about work and loss and depression, and about Halabja, the city in Iraq where Saddam Hussein ordered 5,000 Kurds to be gassed; they remind one another of the fathers tortured to death in special centers, and the children whose corpses were still warm when their parents, in answer to a call from the police station, arrived to collect them. They discuss the Americans and the war, and whether Iraq will ever be a viable country again. They have spent their money, and their future is not so much empty as impenetrable. They stare at a vast blank wall. The legitimacy of their claim for asylum, in this world of nuances and degrees of persecution, has become almost irrelevant, and is certainly irrelevant to them. In escaping Iraq, in the long and frightening journey to freedom, in the imagination it took to conceive a new life and carry out the moves required to obtain it, they crossed some invisible barrier in their own minds. They are refugees, living in an alien land, but that land is immutably now theirs. They have no other. It is as if Iraq has become a chimera, a place of make-believe; the war, whatever its implications for the rest of the world, has no relevance to their lives. Going back to what was once home is not an option any longer. They have traveled too far.