Human Cargo Page 19
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THE FIRST REACTION of most asylurn seekers sent to the Byker area of Newcastle is one of astonishment. They have come from all over Africa, from the Balkans, Southeast Asia, and South America, expecting a sense of order, predictability, tranquillity, a tangible feeling that there is someone in charge and that that person is benevolent. This was what they had grown up imagining, a Britain in which things happened in an orderly and safe way; and because what little news trickles home from people who have preceded them into exile is always cheerful—those who have sacrificed so much, endured so much to go abroad, tend not to report poverty and failure—nothing has shaken their faith in all things British. Theirs is a curiously old-fashioned view, surprisingly little shaken by the realities of modern migration. What they find, in Byker, in derelict housing estates up and down the country, is very different from anything they expected. It is frightening, shabby, and unpredictable.
When Gaby arrived in the northeast in May 2000, he was among the first Africans ever seen in Byker, apart from the few who, over the years, had jumped ship in Newcastle or been smuggled into local ports in containers. In the streets, people asked him why he was there, and how long he was planning to stay. He felt ashamed. He wanted to explain that he had lost his honor as a human being, and that being a refugee had never been among his plans. He wanted to point out that he was thirty-two, alone, separated from his wife and children, and that he was aching to work, to give something to the country that seemed willing to look after him. “I wanted to ask them,” he says now: “‘When am I going to start my life?”‘ No one, back in 2000, when the Interim Dispersal Measures took effect, had thought to prepare the local community for the sudden arrival of Zimbabweans, Sri Lankans, North Koreans, and Iraqis, with their longing for different food and their languages and accents no one could understand; the far-right British National party was quick to make gains among residents perplexed about what this influx might spell. The northeast has some of Britain’s most disadvantaged communities; unemployment, already high through loss of jobs in mining and the docks, created further strains. There were clashes, broken windows, thrown rocks. In Byker, Gaby was called a monkey and told to go back to the trees. Some asylum-seeker children were given urine to drink by boys in the street.
Though much has certainly improved in the three years since Gaby began his long wait in Newcastle, not least in the form of a consortium of organizations that tries extremely hard to broker good relations and better understanding for asylum seekers, everyday life for those who wait remains extremely tough. And it is growing worse. There have been discussions about sending asylum seekers to camps in western Europe as part of a “no nonsense” regime to prevent “bogus” refugees from flooding into Britain, while, in the wake of September 11, the shadow home secretary, Oliver Letwin, has been demanding that Britain derogate from the European Convention on human rights, to underline the right of Britain to deport failed asylum seekers if they represent a “threat to national security.”
Not long ago, a report from the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia found Britain to have some of the most hostile attitudes in Europe toward asylum seekers. Racial harassment is increasing, and with it the number of actual physical assaults, much promoted by the scaremongering that has become the habit of the day. The Web site of Migration Watch UK, a one-man research group run by a former British ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Sir Andrew Green, has warned that “we can expect at least 200,000 and perhaps 250,000 non European Union immigrants a year,” figures that have little grounding but that have been much quoted. The Richmond (Yorkshire) MP William Hague, campaigning for the Conservatives not long ago, spoke of sorting out “criminals and asylum seekers.”
None of this process has been helped by an explosion of ill temper in the tabloid newspapers, viewed throughout the rest of Europe with wary disbelief as responsible for a climate of xenophobia toward refugees nowhere justified either by numbers or events and not matched by the media in other countries. Because the tabloids, which portray asylum seekers as parasites, scroungers, criminals, and terrorists, do so in English, they are followed with interest by the rest of the world. (And some are copied: in Switzerland not long ago, the Swiss People’s party won 26.6 percent of the popular vote in a general election, partly, so it was said, on the strength of its poster campaign, which showed a black face with the slogan “The Swiss are becoming Negroes.”)
It was at the turn of the millennium that the Sun, the Daily Mail, and the Express sharpened their campaign against immigrants. (A survey not long ago revealed that every time one of the tabloids put asylum on its front pages, with warnings of Britain in the throes of losing control of its borders, circulation rose by some 10,000 readers.) Headlines have included “Swan Bake—Asylum Seekers Steal Queen’s Birds for Barbecues” (the Sun), “Official: Asylum Tearing UK Apart” (the Sun), and “Widow, 88, Told by GP: Make Way for Asylum Seekers” (the Mail on Sunday). As the feeling grew that reporting in the British media gives undue prominence to scaremon-gering claims from fringe groups, portraying asylum seekers as threatening young men with contacts in the criminal underworld, so in the spring of 2003 the anticensorship organization Article 19 carried out a research project on media reporting of refugee matters. They found that fifty-one words of a disparaging nature were regularly used to describe asylum seekers, words like bogus, fake, cheat, and failed. They also concluded that statistics were “frequently un-sourced, exaggerated or inadequately explained,” that the tabloid press failed to distinguish between economic migrants and asylum seekers, and that the hostility of media coverage was provoking a sense of alienation and shame among refugees, who are rapidly being perceived as “untermenschen,” the unwanted underclass, non-people, victims at best. UNHCR and the National Union of Journalists joined forces to produce a memorandum on good reporting, and in October 2003, the Press Complaints Commission issued guidelines to counter inaccurate and inflammatory stories.
Even so, hostile and bigoted reporting continues, with continued casual disregard for any distinction between asylum seeker, refugee, failed asylum seeker, or economic migrant, and totally neglecting a very simple but important fact: that in 1999-2000 alone, according to Home Office research, migrants, including asylum seekers and refugees, made a net fiscal contribution to Britain of approximately £2.5 billion.
In the Daily Mail, Ross Benson has been running a series of stories about the Roma, warning of an invasion of Gypsies as the European Union is enlarged. The Roma are one of the most despised of all European ethnic minorities. In January 2004, the Sunday Times took up the theme, suggesting that up to 100,000 Roma were on their way. The next day, the Sun added that after three months in the UK, these Roma would be “entitled to health, education, pension and welfare benefits.” The Daily Express then inflated the figure to 1.6 million: GYPSIES PREPARE TO INVADE BRITAIN. Though two days later the Express amended this figure to 40,000, it predicted an “economic disaster” just the same. Even the Economist spoke of the “coming hordes.” On January 22, 2004, the Mail’s front page covered a report by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, saying that Britain, which was taking one in five of the Western World’s asylum seekers, had “failed to turn the asylum tide.” The article, it later turned out, ignored the fact that the UK is currently eighth among western European nations in the number of refugees as a percentage of its population, well behind Austria, Norway, Sweden, Switzerland, and Ireland. By contrast, there are very few articles describing what asylum seekers are fleeing from, the violence and terror and loss that they have left behind.
It was at least in part because the mood of the country encouraged such intolerance that Jack Straw, when foreign secretary, suggested that Britain might decide not to reaffirm its commitment to the 1951 Convention. Britain thereby became the first government in the world to threaten to pull out. Other countries, unsure whether the threat was real or tactical, watched what became known as the “nuclear opt
ion” with interest. Though, eventually, Britain did uphold its commitment, Straw followed up his hesitations when he was made home secretary, proposing that, instead of processing asylum seekers and their applications on British soil, they be sent to “offshore” centers, either on the fringes of the extended European Union, or in the regions from which they had come, where the whole procedure could be done in a consistent and orderly way. An exception might be made for some special groups, such as children. Coming so soon after Australia announced its Pacific Solution, Straw’s proposals provoked strong and angry reactions in the refugee world, and were eventually rejected by other EU countries, though not before Denmark, Ireland, and Austria had expressed interest. Soon, the UK government came up with another idea: to pay Tanzania £4 million in aid in return for taking all the UK’s failed Somali asylum seekers and putting them into a zone of protection; this of course would shift still more responsibility to the poor countries that are already housing most of the world’s refugees. Though striking bargains over refugees is far from unknown, Tanzania declined. The enormous inherent problems that would be posed by Straw’s “offshore” centers and “Zones of Protection”—Will people in flight from persecution be able to proceed in an orderly manner to a designated center? Who would run the show? How would compliance with international standards be guaranteed?—were all too obvious. What frightened the human rights world was that these proposals had been made at all.
In Byker, in his community center, Gaby warns new arrivals not to expect too much, to take great care not to antagonize their British neighbors, to make no fuss, to provoke no one. “It’s very hard,” he says, “for us Africans to accept abuse and say nothing. We knew it wouldn’t be like home here, but we didn’t expect to be made to feel so useless.”
Gaby has reserved a small, airless room at the back of the community center, a windowless area that was once a storeroom, as his office. Among the crammed desks and computers, he listens, day after day, like a doctor with his patients, to the fears and bafflement of those scheduled for deportation. Whether, like Dialo, they came from violence and persecution, or are refugees from lives so impoverished and hopeless as to make the dividing line between economic necessity and physical safety lose all meaning, their response to forthcoming departure is fear. They come in search of the impossible, a postponement of the evil day.
On a Monday morning in the middle of August 2003, Gaby had two visitors. Claudette was from Rwanda, a round, nervous woman with three young boys. She is a Hutu, from a prominent Hutu family, and before the birth of her sons she worked for the Ministry of Commerce in Kigali. Toward the end of the war in 1994, after the massacres of the Tutsis by the Hutus were largely over and when the Tutsi soldiers were closing in on the capital, Hutus suspected of supporting the genocide were rounded up. Claudette’s sister-in-law and a niece, both Hutus, were killed in a local skirmish. Soon afterward, her parents were killed, and with them one of her brothers and a sister. After threats were made against her Hutu husband, who was accused of having led a group of Interanhamwe killers to their victims in the genocide, what was left of the family fled to the Congo, where they spent two years in the relative safety of a refugee camp. But then rebel fighters overran the camp; Claudette, her husband, and the children found themselves forcibly repatriated to Kigali, where she and the boys were led one way, and her husband another, into prison.
In the months that followed, Claudette was repeatedly visited by soldiers from military intelligence, eager to get evidence against her husband. She was raped, beaten in the small of her back with rifle butts, kicked in the stomach, and forced to kneel on gravel while soldiers whipped her, tortures designed to extract from her a confession that she was indeed an “enemy of the state” and that her husband had been a leader in the genocide. In October 2002, Claudette was detained for a fortnight and told that unless she testified against her husband, she would be held in prison indefinitely. She agreed, and was released pending her husband’s trial; but she knew that the deal was meaningless, as she had no evidence to give, and other women who had agreed to testify had sent their husbands to their deaths and remained prisoners themselves. From earlier travels in the area, she knew the surrounding countryside well. Disguising herself as a peasant woman and taking her three small children, she walked several days through the bush toward Uganda, where a friend of her husband’s helped them to escape, first to Kenya and then to Britain. Claudette and her sons reached London on a cold winter’s morning. They knew no one, but were treated kindly and with respect. The three boys were now at school and doing well. Claudette recalled with appreciation how her neighbors in Byker took pity on the family and brought them, in the first days of confusion, food to eat.
On July 4, 2003, Claudette learned that her appeal had been turned down. Refusing her case, the Home Office allowed that her account of persecution up to her return from the Congo in 2001 was probably true; but went on to say that her assertion that the family had been targeted because they were Hutu intellectuals was not credible. Taking this together with her account of her escape— which he found improbable—and the reasons she gave for her husband’s detention—that he had written a hostile thesis on Rwandan prison conditions—the Home Office interviewer concluded: “I cannot find her honest as to the core of her case.” Hard as her life would surely be in Rwanda, he said that he believed that the country was indeed returning to normality, and that she and her children were unlikely to be mistreated again. Furthermore, given her past employment, Claudette was obviously a clever and resourceful woman, and she would manage. “How can we go back?” asked Claudette. “What chance would the children have with a father in prison in connection with the genocide?” While waiting and dreading the knock on the door that will spell deportation, Claudette has dreamed of finding ways of leaving her children in England, where they could at least survive.
Gaby could do little for Claudette. He was trying to find her a new solicitor, willing to take her case to the High Court, but knew that this was unlikely. Nor could he do much for Nsamba, who talked in careful, measured sentences, with the precise enunciation of those educated in the French system, and whose right leg was so badly injured during torture that the muscle had withered away and he now walked with a limp. Nsamba was a professor of economics at the University of Kinshasa in the Congo, a man too interested in opposition politics to remain safe for long, and whose account of his five-day trek to freedom in Zambia had been disbelieved by the Home Office on the grounds that no one with his injuries could have walked so far, and that, as an educated man, he would have described his journey more articulately had it been genuine. Nsamba, who had spent his months in Britain building an effective political opposition to the government at home in the Congo, learned at the end of June that his case had been rejected. As he saw it, choosing his words with care, Britain was once a country where respect for human rights was absolute. He came, admiring what he thought he would find. Now, having lived among the refugees for many months, he was not so sure.
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BRITAIN’S ASYLUM WORLD is a busy, anxious place, full of currents and hopes, misunderstandings and deferments. Nothing is as it seems to be, and nothing stays the same. Rules change, in response to surges of hostility in public feeling, then change again, as they prove unworkable, or simply too harsh to implement. In the confusion and uncertainty, those whose daily work brings them into contact with refugees—the doctors, lawyers, refugee organizations, churches, human rights campaigners—are buffeted by a discourse that becomes more unpleasant day by day, as politicians make mileage out of scandals, as faraway countries drive political opponents into exile, as droughts and famines destroy communities, as travelers and television programs continue to peddle the image of a safe and welcoming West.
Before leaving Newcastle, I heard about Angel Heights, a former nurses’ hostel opposite the main hospital. An imposing manorlike building, it was once the pride of 1930s town development and is now a home for “dispersed�
�� asylum seekers. Angel Heights is all that is wrong and all that is right in British policy; it is both decent and dreadful, both humane and cruel. For a while, it was home to 140 single Afghan men, but not long ago, in response to new waves of arrivals and departures, the building was turned over to single African women sent up from London and the south to await the results of their applications for asylum. There are relatively few such hostels for single women, reflecting the fact that few young women have the courage and money to make the journeys in search of safety, that they often have children or elderly parents to care for, and that their movements are far more restricted. As a place to visit, it is impressive: brightly painted corridors and large meeting rooms hung with prints of fruit and plants; comfortable single rooms, each with a television and a kettle and a small fridge; a large inner courtyard with plants and benches. But Angel Heights is also a waiting room, a building in which nothing happens. Few of its inhabitants speak English, and few can speak to each other. Because it provides full board and lodging, the women receive just £10 each week. Forbidden to work, they have, literally, nothing to do; nothing, that is, except to worry: about those they were forced to leave behind, of whom they seldom have news; about the torture and rape most have endured; about their cases and their lawyers; about themselves. They sit, alone, in large rooms, full of cobalt-blue chairs in rows; they stand in the corridors; they queue by the single pay phone. Angel Heights is quiet; when the women speak, they speak in whispers. Outside the window is a forlorn garden with an abandoned greenhouse and an unkempt volleyball court, reminders of the days when nurses strolled on the grass and organized matches against each other.