Human Cargo (24 page)

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 hoodlums, 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.

•   •   •

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.