Living In Fear: My Week With The Hidden Asylum Seekers

[Liqaye]

As the police crack down on the trade in illegal jobs, Anushka Asthana reports from Salford on the reality of life on the immigrant front line, and three refugees tell of the struggles they have faced

 

Anushka Asthana

Sunday March 28, 2004

The Observer

 

In a street in Salford, the man at Number Seven has been asking the council for years to fix his fence. It hangs away from the garden, swinging in the wind, with only a few patches of splattered paint left to show it was once white.

 

As I park my car I notice him looking suspiciously across the road. Following his eye-line, I find myself staring at a house that has all the curtains drawn tight. The front window is covered with smears from dozens of eggs. At another house there is a hole in the glass where a stone has broken through.

 

Later I find out why the man is peering at these houses. He is bitter that the council, which, he says, has given him so little, has provided two properties on the street to house families seeking asylum.

 

Inside one of those houses is a 21-year-old woman called Leyla. She came to Britain from Somalia in search of a better life, but has failed her claim and appeal. Her hopes for the future were wiped out six months ago when she returned home to find her keys no longer fitted the lock to her door. Since then she has moved from family to family, staying on floors until they ask her to move on.

As a failed asylum seeker, she has no benefits, no home and no right to work. Were it not for the kindness of families offering her shelter, she would be destitute.

 

The man across the road is not alone in feeling bitter. Asylum seekers are an isolated group in the UK. Vilified in fear-mongering headlines and subject to increasingly draconian measures by the Government, they are the latest in a long list of scapegoats.

 

I went to live with Leyla because I wanted to find out what life is really like for people who have traveled thousands of miles to escape a country - to discover their motivations and to understand how it feels to step out of Somalia and find yourself in a predominantly white and working-class Northern suburb.

 

It takes less than five minutes to drive up the A6 from Manchester to Salford, but it feels like a different world. For, while Salford has benefited greatly from the regeneration of the Quays and the opening of the Lowry Arts Centre, it remains one of the more deprived cities in Britain, sitting in the shadow of its thriving neighbor.

 

In this part of Salford, there are no squares filled with beautiful sculptures and fountains and no streets lined with multi-cultural restaurants, delis and designer shops. Instead there is row upon row of worn-down and boarded-up terraced housing.

 

I knock on the door of the house that Leyla is supposed to be in, but there is no answer. I try twice more before the door-handle turns and a shy-looking woman peeks her head around it. She looks younger than 21.

 

I walk into a room with three women and a man - everyone seems nervous. On the television is a video of Somali women singing.

The small lounge has basic furniture sitting on thin blue carpets. The seats are pushed up against the walls. The house has heating and water, but the wallpaper is peeling and there is damp on the ceiling. There is only a dull light and it is cold.

 

A kitchen chair becomes a table when one woman brings me a cup of tea. She has a deep scar across her face, which looks as though it was made by someone taking a bite out of her cheek.

 

The women begin to talk. They say they fled Somalia because they were raped, they saw their sons, husbands and fathers killed. They lived every day in fear.

 

So far the Government believes one of them, Mariam, and has given her and her two daughters residence. One more, Fathia, is waiting with her three sons.

 

'Salford is OK,' says Mariam, who lives at another house near by. 'Some people good, some people bad.'

 

Leyla and I spend the days together. We sit in the house, talking, watching the children. Leyla has scars on her face and legs. She says it is irrelevant now whether her story is true, because the Government does not believe her.

 

She claims that she was raped as a child, lost her family and was taken into slavery. Eventually someone took pity on her and helped her to escape. She was put alone on a plane to England.

 

In her first attempt to gain asylum they said she was lying about being Somali. In her appeal, they conceded that she was Somali, but denied that she was from a persecuted minority clan.

 

In her final attempt, they said it was unlikely that someone would have taken pity on her.

 

Now she is not sure what to do. The future seems bleak. There is nothing for her here, but there is nothing for her in Somalia. They have not tried to deport her - they have made her homeless, then left her alone.

 

'I want you to know,' she tells me more than once, 'that I like Britain and I like the Government. I don't blame them, but now my life is useless.' When she arrived she could not speak English but now she is almost fluent because of the time she spent in a college.

 

On the first evening we go for a walk. At the end of the road there is a park where teenagers are making a bonfire. We pass them, but then Leyla says she prefers to avoid the area. As we turn to go I hear someone shrieking. A boy is leaning forward and screaming. To my horror, he is screaming at us. I can't hear at first, but it soon becomes clear. 'Asyyylluuum,' he hollers. 'Get the **** out of here. Blaacky.' His friends all start laughing. So does Leyla.

 

As we walk away she does an impression of the boy. She leans back her head, holds up her arms and yelps: 'Asylum, blacky.' She turns it into a joke, but it reminds me of the past.

 

My parents came to England in 1975 and I grew up only ten miles away from Salford. When I was a child people would sometimes scream 'Paki' at me and my brother. When I was six or seven I wished I was white and would ask my mum not to wear traditional clothes in public.

 

But that stopped years ago and I am proud and comfortable about my race today. The kids who shouted at us are a new generation. They also want to abuse those different to them. But the focus has changed from anyone who is not white to asylum seekers. Being sworn at by a stranger always upset me and I am surprised at Leyla's calm and amused response. 'It is not all right for people to do that,' I say. 'It is not all right for people to launch eggs at your window or scream abuse at you.'

 

She tells me that Salford is fine, and has got better over the past two years. 'It gets really bad when it snows,' she says giggling. 'They throw snowballs at the house.' A month ago a boy covered a stone in snow and threw it at her.

 

We return and eat food with the others. That night we are both given beds to sleep in at Mariam's house. All night Leyla tosses and turns.

The next morning she tells me she can't stay here much longer. These families have been incredibly kind, but they are also scared. If anyone from the council comes round to the house, Leyla has to hide in the bathroom or a storage cupboard.

 

If she ends up on the streets it will be worse. 'I can't sleep at night,' she says hugging her knees, her eyes glazing over. 'All the time I worry about my situation. I want to get married, I want to have a family, I want to work. Now I can't do any of that. But Somalia is not safe to return to.'

 

We walk down to the house that she used to live in. 'When the key didn't work I tried for two hours before I realized what had happened,' she says. 'Life felt so useless from that day. At least if I had a husband or children, but I am so alone. That night I went to the Salford Rapar building and screamed. I just stood outside crying.'

Salford's Refugees and Asylum Participatory Research Project (Rapar) provides a place for people to go to for information and help and researches how dispersal is working. Inside Leyla is with friends. She passes me a piece of paper that outlines Fathia's story. It says her husband left her and her sons when she was gang-raped. Her family was locked into one room while four men attacked her with knives and guns. She claims to have been bitten in her cheek until blood was drawn.

 

That is the scar I noticed when I first arrived.

 

Listening to personal stories instead of statistics, I feel only sympathy. I ask them how they feel when they read that many Brits do not want asylum seekers here. 'Why would anyone hate me?' says one of Leyla's friends, who has also failed her claim. 'I have nothing, no food or money, nothing.'

 

But life in Salford has a positive side.

 

Each day at 3pm we go to pick up the children from school. They career around shouting and playing with the other children. In less than a year they are all fluent in English.

 

Mariam has two daughters who would have nothing if they were in Somalia. But here they have an education and are safe.

 

'For me, I thank God and I thank the British Government,' Mariam tells me. 'When I came here everywhere people were kind to me and my daughters. You can't say no to children.' She saw her son killed in Somalia.

 

'My life is finished,' she adds, 'but I am so happy to be here, because my children and their children can have a future.' I tell her about my school and university and her eyes light up: 'I hope my girls, they get to university. Without children life is nothing.'

One night Mariam puts back on the video of dancing Somali refugees in the Netherlands. After a few moments three women, five children and two men are dancing around the room.

 

Mariam wants me to know what they are singing: 'Men of Somalia listen to us, stop this civil war - you kill our brothers, fathers and husbands, and us women we cry.' Inside that room it didn't matter if we were in Salford or Somalia.

 

This is not a story of economic migration. The women would love to go home if it were safe. They reminisce about Somalia. 'There are animals everywhere, giraffes, elephants, donkeys,' says Leyla laughing. All of them have left close family members behind, and there is no contact to know if they are dead or alive. Whenever I ask Leyla if she would prefer to go back, she says 'no, Somalia not safe' and everyone agrees.

 

Fathia leaves the room and sits down in the kitchen to have a cigarette. I sit with her. She only speaks broken English: 'We smile to try to forget, so we don't cry any more - so the children don't see cry. They will be happy here.'

 

The phone rings and Fathia's youngest son picks it up. He holds his hands in the air and gasps 'police', and then bursts out laughing. At only six years old he is aware of their situation. His mum tells him I have come to take him to Somalia and he screams 'no'. The chances are he will be allowed to stay.

 

But Leyla has no hope left. Sitting in the lounge, I become very aware of the clock ticking by and try to imagine what it would be like if there was nothing to look forward to.

 

Every month Leyla is required to sign in at a local building to show she is still here. She never tries to deceive the authorities.

 

'People have been dumped in Salford, but without resources,' says Dr Rhetta Moran, a senior research fellow at the Revans Institute with overall responsibility for the Salford Rapar project. 'There was no additional support for local practitioners. There is not one immigration solicitor in the whole city. And it leads to bitterness because this is a place where locals have been making their own demands on the council for years.'

 

Moran thinks that adjusting to this situation is as hard for those seeking asylum as the indigenous population.

 

'They are the most vulnerable people in the country,' she adds. 'It is a waterfall of suffering and we just see a tiny part of it. Again and again we see feelings of isolation, loss and anxiety.'

 

During my time with Leyla, I have felt eyes looking at me wherever I go. Children are happy to scream abuse at asylum seekers.

 

But she doesn't mind being a scapegoat, she doesn't mind the screaming or the eggs. It is ten times better than being raped. At least here she was able to tell her story more than once. Where she comes from there was and is no appeal system - her boss just threw boiling water on to her legs if she ever complained.

 

As I leave Leyla, I tell her she must not give up hope. To that she simply laughs and says: 'I hope if you tell our story it might make everything better.'

 

Names have been changed.

[Thinkerman]

So much suffereing,

 

I just pray that things get better for the very many somali's trying to escape to a better life.

 

Thx for posting the article Liqaye

[Warrior of Light]

Pray for things may change and our ppl have the patience ans not lose hope. Its so inhumane.

[7_steps_2_Heaven]

subxaana malikul qudduus too much to be read!