Having fled Iraq six years ago, Aso Salm is now a British citizen. In this short film Aso reflects on how it felt to get his first ever passport and his new life in Plymouth.

This story is from www.opendemocracy.net and was written in December 2005 by Jason Parkinson.

“I was persecuted, accused of supporting the LRA,” said Harriet with a weak voice. She was still recovering from five weeks of hunger strike. Harriet escaped and hid at a friend’s house in Opuru, where she was reunited with her children, a boy of seven and a girl aged three. That night the UPDF came for her. Certain she would be killed Harriet leapt from the rear window of the house and hid in the bush land, watching the soldiers search the house, abduct her children and burn the home to the ground.

Aided by an Italian priest, Harriet managed to join a flight to Heathrow airport, west of London, where – after a night of sleeping rough – she declared herself to the airport authorities. At first things went well. The Refugee Council found her a solicitor, arranged a home office interview, and organised accommodation and state benefits. But after several months the benefits stopped without warning. “I became homeless,” she explained, “I had nothing.”

In desperation, a friend arranged a job for Harriet under a false name. She used it to work for five months. This is against home office rules. In May 2005, police officers arrived at Harriet’s workplace with immigration officials and sent her to Colnbrook detention centre near Heathrow airport. Her room was small, dark and cold, with a camera in the wall inspecting her every move. The bath leaked, she was often refused toilet access, suffered extreme pain when given wrong medication – and had her telephone access removed when she tried to complain.

“In there I cried for days,” Harriet recalls. “I was very depressed. We were allowed outside our rooms for twenty minutes a day and were not allowed to talk. Even criminals are not treated like this and I am not a criminal.”

The home office found her asylum claim “not credible” and told Harriet she would be deported. She was sent to Yarl’s Wood removal centre, near the town of Bedford, in preparation for this. On 16 July, immigration escorts took Harriet to Gatwick airport where she joined a long queue of failed asylum-seekers awaiting their removal. “They were lined up with their belongings in black bin-bags, like slaves”, Harriet says. “One man stripped naked and refused to board his plane. The guards grabbed him by the neck, dragged him to the floor and handcuffed him.”

Harriet refused to board the plane, stating she would rather die than return to Uganda. She was sent back to Yarl’s Wood. A week later she started refusing food; nine other female Ugandan detainees in the Dove unit at Yarl’s Wood joined her in solidarity.

On the morning of 13 August, Harriet spoke live by telephone to BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour programme about her deportation, the crisis in Uganda and her experiences in Britain’s UK immigration system. Later that day, she found that her 71 pence-a-day phone account had been closed. Yarl’s Wood officers said she was being moved to Colnbrook that night, refusing Harriet’s explanation that she was expecting a fax from a medical examination stating that she was unfit for deportation.

Harriet was escorted to the Kingfisher unit, Yarl’s Wood solitary-confinement ward, to await removal to Colnbrook – but at the last moment a home office phone call reprieved her by saying that her deportation was cancelled.

The next day, 14 August, Harriet witnessed an attempt lasting several hours by her colleagues physically to prevent guards from attempting to seize and transfer her friend Charity Mutebwa – a survivor of rape and torture at the hands of the UPDF in Uganda, and considered one of the hunger-strike ringleaders. Harriet used a telephone to report the incident to campaigners at the Crossroads Women’s Centre and Women Against Rape.

Early on Monday morning, 15 August, guards entered Harriet’s room to move her back into solitary confinement on grounds that she was “non-compliant and obstructive to staff”. Harriet was put in a room near Charity – cold, damp with no mattress or bedding, but unlocked. Harriet went to Charity’s room and they talked for a while. A guard halted the conversation, but not before she could see that Charity’s wrists and ankles were visibly injured. By this stage both women were in the fourth week of their hunger-strike.

Charity was later moved to Dungavel detention centre, near Glasgow, but returned to Yarl’s Wood several days before a removal scheduled for 18 October. On that day, immigration escorts put her on the plane and the engines roared before the removal was halted. Charity remains incarcerated at Yarl’s Wood.

For three days Harriet lay in her room in the Kingfisher unit without water. She became ill, and her mouth bled. Medics measured her blood pressure and found it dangerously low. On 18 August, she was removed from solitary and taken back to her room on the Dove wing. She lay in her room for four more days. On 22 August a guard came to her room, and said: “Harriet, you’ve been released”. “I started to cry”, Harriet remembers.

She was taken to the exit of Yarl’s Wood removal centre and given a one-way travel card back to London. Even though she had no strength and could barely walk, officials told her: “you’re not our responsibility anymore”. She was picked up in a friend’s car and taken to Bedford hospital, where she was immediately given vital medication. By 9pm that evening, she was back in London, staying at a friend’s house.

Harriet Anyangokolo is not giving up. “I am going to carry on campaigning for all other women in the detention centres and at home”, said Harriet after her three-month detention. “In Uganda there are women being raped, children are in the streets. This must stop after nineteen years. We need peace. We are all children of God.”

This short video was made for BBC’s Video Nation in November 2006 by Mahamed Ismail.

Mahamed Ismail has been in England for three months. He escaped bombings and death in his home city of Mogadishu and although homeless in Manchester is determined to make a life here.

We can’t embed the video so please click here to watch it.

Afshin, an Iranian asylum seeker in Manchester tells his story at the Independant Asylum Commission in Manchester on 17th October 2007. Video from www.humanrightstv.com.

This story is from the BBC News Website as was published on 8th April 2002.

A businessman who was forced to flee Iraq because of his political party’s attempts to topple Saddam Hussein’s regime has told of his terrifying escape to Britain.

The man said he had no choice but to leave his pregnant wife and two children because his membership of the country’s main opposition party meant his name was added to a hit list.

The 33-year-old said he crossed the Iraqi border, walked into Iran and then Turkey where, with $6,000 of savings, he managed to board a lorry bound for Britain.

He now lives in a tiny Reading bedsit, surviving on tea and bread so he can send £10 a week of his benefits home to his family with whom he desperately wants to be reunited.

He said his fears for their safety are heightened by UK Prime Minister Tony Blair’s backing for possible US-led military action against Iraq.

BBC News Online met Abdullah - whose name has been changed to protect his identity - at the constituency surgery of Labour MP Jane Griffiths.

Smartly dressed and armed with a white envelope full of documents and a headed letter from the Reading East MP, he appealed to her for help in bringing his family home.

Abdullah, whose wife has since given birth to a second son, told the BBC how he had been a successful Iraqi businessman, owning four companies, but as the economy faltered, his firms closed.

Distraught by the way Iraq was falling apart around him, Abdullah decided to join the Iraqi National Congress.

It was a decision that changed his life.

“I had a construction company, a hospital, I sold glassware and I had a factory making clothes,” Abdullah told BBC News Online in broken English.

“The businesses stopped after 1994. There was no money. The economy was destroyed. Everything was changed to badness.

“I joined a party to destroy Saddam Hussein’s regime. We failed. We wanted to control the north of Iraq. The plan was to change the system.

“We fought for three years, but without any success. We were broken and I had to leave everything.

“It was too dangerous for me to stay. All of the party ran to Iran and Turkey.

“I walked through Iran for seven days and then nine days through Turkey.

“I got here by lorry. I paid $6,000. I don’t know if I went through the Channel Tunnel.”

His eyes well up as he says: “It’s very hard being here without my family. Every night I cry. I haven’t anything else.

“All I have is dreams.

“Europe was like paradise to us. But when I came here I was shocked. Life is very hard here and back home is very dangerous for me.

“I haven’t got the proper papers to get a job. How can I get a job to run this family?

“I have four years exceptional stay. I do nothing. I have income support. My knee was broken.

“At the moment, because I am not in employment, the British government won’t allow me to bring my family here.

“Maybe after I have a scan and the hospital finds out what kind of problem I have, they will decide what kind of operation and then I can work.

“My solicitor said a recommendation from Ms Griffiths would be very helpful for my case.”

Before leaving the surgery in the middle of a canteen at Tesco Extra in Reading, Abdullah looks respectfully across at the MP, who by now had another case to deal with.

Wistfully he said: “I hope she help me. I really hope she can help.”

This story is from the BBC News Website as was published on 30th March 2007. 

Courage Shumba, 30, is currently awaiting a decision from the Home Office on his application for asylum.

Here he tells how he was forced to leave his home country and seek refuge in the UK and how he feels the asylum system has, so far, failed him:

In 1999 I enrolled at the University of Zimbabwe to study law; soon after I was elected to the students’ Executive Council as Vice President.

I was the first branch chairman for the Movement for Democratic Change at the university and heavily involved with the National Constitutional Assembly.

I wasn’t a part-time political activist - I was fully involved in trying to liberate our country from the barbaric and brutal regime of Robert Mugabe.

In 2001 I was expelled from the University for political activism. I’d studied law for three years but they refused to give me my results or grant me a hearing.

I became victimised and targeted by the state system, the central intelligence organisation and the police.

On three occasions the police raided the house I was staying in with other activists, at gun point. They would blindfold us, load us into a truck and drive us to the law and order maintenance section in Harare.

They would beat us, pour water on us, make us simulate sexual positions on the floor and threaten us with death.

We couldn’t get any protection from the police because they were the ones doing it. We couldn’t get protection from the MDC because they were also victims of the system.

In 2002, two of our close comrades were murdered by the state system. Batani Hadzizi was brutally assaulted and murdered in his room at the university. And Lameck Chemvura was strangled with a shoelace before being thrown from a moving train.

There was a warrant out for my arrest and fearing for my life I went to hide with an aunt. But she was too fearful and turned me away.

A couple in the UK told me they had been following the situation in Zimbabwe and had read articles and literature on my website. They offered to assist my escape and invited me to stay with them in the UK.

However, when I arrived in England I discovered that my hosts were not a couple as had been represented in our communications, but a single elderly man.

He was expecting some way of compensating for his kindness that I was not able to provide.

He kicked me out. I was destitute. I slept on the streets of Croydon for three days.

Eventually a Zimbabwean businessman gave me a place to sleep but said he would not be able to employ me because of my status.

All the while I was thinking that the situation would get better in Zimbabwe. I was hoping to go home, finish my studies and graduate as a lawyer. But things got worse. There was infighting within the MDC itself.

I submitted my formal application for asylum, rather reluctantly, in September of 2006. I am sure that the asylum system is designed to deter people from using it.

You can wait forever; there is no feedback, no progress update. You have to go to a reporting centre or police station once or twice a week. You are fingerprinted like a criminal.

Plus, financially, you are restricted in what you can do. What kind of society can you join when you only have £30 per week to live on?

If people know that I am an asylum seeker they look down on me. I feel very vulnerable because I have no established right to be here. And so, you see, the whole situation is so humiliating.

I don’t know anything about what happens next. I have written to the Home Office four, five times but they do not reply to my letters. I’ve made several calls but they won’t tell me anything. I am in limbo.

The whole problem is in the delay itself because without knowing when a decision is going to be made you can’t plan your life.

Many times I’ve contemplated suicide because I feel useless and am unable to provide for my family.

My parents in Zimbabwe are wondering why they wasted their time educating me at all. They feel like I have abandoned them.

This is a continuation of the persecution I received in Zimbabwe but without the violence. It’s more of a mental torture.

This story is from The Independent Newspaper and was published on the 5th February 2007.

Abdullah Tokhi fled Afghanistan in fear of his life. He asked for sanctuary in Britain. We sent him back. Within a year he was dead

They shot Abdullah Tokhi dead at midday, in a crowded street in a bazaar. It was a very public “execution”, a message to show that his killers knew they would never be brought to account for their crime.

Mr Tokhi and his family had long feared this would happen. He repeatedly pleaded while seeking asylum in Britain that his life was in danger in a sectarian and political blood feud back home . But the Home Secretary at the time decided that Afghanistan was now a safe place thanks to the intervention of Britain and the US, and Mr Tokhi was sent back to his home, and his death, after the appeal process failed.

The murder of Mr Tokhi, 35, was one of many that happen every week in this country, six years after “liberation”. But this was one death that could have been prevented if the officials in London who turned down his plea for refuge had acknowledged what is really going on, instead of sticking ridgidly to the official position that the rule of law prevails in Afghanistan.

A week after his father’s death, 10-year-old Nasratullah was on his way to school when he was shot from a car. The bullets hit him on the arm and legs. “I was very sad about what had happened to my father,” said Nasratullah. “I knew there were bad people who had killed him. But I did not think that they would try to attack me. It hurt a lot when I was shot. Now I am very scared, for myself, and also my brother and sisters. We would like to move away from here, but we do not know where to go … I miss my father very much.”

Today Mr Tokhi’s widow, two sons and seven daughters live in fear at a farm in Paghman, south-east of Kabul. They say the police were complicit in the death and the suspected killers can be seen in the area, walking around with impunity. Amanullah, an elder brother of Mr Tokhi, has been killed, as well as one of his sons, Sayed Agha.

The account given by Mr Tokhi in his asylum application stated that the family originally lived in the village of Bangarak in the Kalakan region in the north at a time when the ruling Taliban, overwhelmingly Pashtun, carried out widespread persecution of the Tajik population in the area. After the American and British invasion of 2001, the Northern Alliance, predominantly Tajiks and Uzbeks, took control and began hunting down those who had helped the Taliban.

Mr Tokhi, from a prominent Pashtun family, was one of those accused of funding the Taliban, a charge his family denied. He was arrested by the Northern Alliance and spent eight months in jail. While there, his brother Ameenullah and nephew Sayeed Agha were murdered.

The Independent, while investigating Mr Tokhi’s account, could find no evidence he had been an active member of the Taliban. Some Tajiks, however, voiced suspicion that he may have given money to the Islamists. His family insists that this was coerced from them.

Mr Tokhi and his family had moved to Paghman after his release. A little later he went to Peshawar in Pakistan and was smuggled from there to Dover, arriving in November 2002. After applying for asylum he moved tosouth London.

As Mr Tokhi continued his efforts to stay in Britain, the situation in Afghanistan deteriorated, with regions falling into lawlessness. The Taliban moved back into this vacuum. Mr Tokhi’s apprehension about his family’s safetyincreased after reports that his enemies, who he believed to be Tajiks from Kalakan, had tracked his family to their home in Paghman.

Mr Tokhi’s application for asylum was turned down by David Blunkett, when he was Home Secretary, as was his appeal. He returned to Afghanistan in September 2004 and was killed in autumn 2005 .

In January last year, John Reid, as Defence Secretary, announced the deployment of almost 6,000 troops to combat the growing insurgency in Afghanistan. And the Government has just announced that a further 800 would be sent in anticipation of continuing violence.

Mohammed Shapur, Mr Tokhi’s brother-in-law, said: “Abdullah’s wife still cries every day. But there is nothing we can do. The police have done nothing, and we don’t expect them to. I used to speak to Abdullah on the telephone and at first he was full of hope.

“He used to say that England was a good place and one could build a life there away from all the trouble. But then he became more depressed because the English authorities would not believe him. They told him Afghanistan was safe, and he should go back.

“His enemies killed him and they do not fear anything. We see them and no one does anything to arrest them. I fear for the young ones. I pray that Allah protects them.”

Hannah and her two teenage children are all HIV positive. Hannah herself is at quite an advanced stage of her illness and very weak. Since fleeing Rwanda in 2002 she and her family have been in severe need of specialist care and accommodation – but a catalogue of delays, problems and errors has left her practically homeless and with no medical support.

Hannah has always complied with the system provided by the National Asylum Support Service (NASS), ’signing in’ regularly as required – but because her visits haven’t always been recorded by NASS staff, she hasn’t met their regulations; even through this is no fault of her own. This has led to her and her children losing out on vital support payments.

In 2004 a typing error caused her to receive a month’s allowance instead of a year’s payment. She can’t get her children in to school because one of them was too ill to attend an interview.

Earlier this year NASS withheld a payment after she missed an interview – a meeting she couldn’t attend because, after registering to sign up for an asylum seeker Application Registration Card (ARC) she and her children were forcibly held at a detention centre.

Hannah receives no allowance for clothing herself and her children, and looks after them –despite her debilitating illness – in emergency accommodation. Her situation is truly desperate, made immeasurably worse by flaws and clerical errors.

From www.refugeecouncil.org.uk

“Living at home with my family in Somalia I didn’t even know the word ‘refugee’. Then my husband was thrown in jail. The rest of my family were killed. Everything I had has been taken from me.”

Before their lives were devastated by civil war, Amina and her son Mustafa lived in a villa in Mogadishu. Her family owned property and several successful businesses. In April 2002, Amina and Mustafa, now five, were forced to flee persecution from ruling militia. They now live in a hostel in Bristol.

“Men and women live together in the hostel,” says Amina. “I have no privacy and I do not feel safe. The keys can open any room and the men tend to open the doors. I keep my son with me 24 hours a day, even when I go to the bathroom.”

When she steps outside of the hostel, Amina feels lost. “I feel isolated. I can’t say whether British people are friendly or not because we don’t intermingle. Mustafa needs to learn English and mix with other boys.”

Amina was very ill when she arrived in Bristol, but finding medical attention for herself and her son was a struggle. She was sent away from a local surgery several times because there was no interpreter available.

“I went to the GP about problems with my eyesight. He said, ‘We don’t treat eyes here.’ He was very rude. He could have sent me to someone who could help me. In the end I went to a supermarket. I don’t speak English so I just pointed at my eyes. They told me where to get help.

“One night my baby woke up screaming. A discharge was coming out of his ears. I went to the GP and the receptionist said, ‘Who sent you here?’ She said I needed documents from the Home Office. After an hour the doctor said, ‘We can’t do anything for you.’ He gave me antibiotics and sent me away.”

Amina’s application for asylum has been rejected by the Home Office. She is appealing against the decision.

© Refugee Action 2002. Photograph by Andrew Lamb. Used with permission.

This article is from The Independent Newspaper and was published on 1st February 2007. It is written by Austin Mitchell, the Labour MP for Great Grimsby.

Hearts must have been uplifted by the news that Liam Byrne, our Immigration minister, and his team are deporting failed asylum seekers at a record rate of one every 27 minutes. Our borders defended at last. Particularly against women, children and anyone who’s easy to grab.

This good news is very different on the ground as is shown by the deportation of the Bokhari family, wife, husband, and four lovely kids aged between eight and 14, from Grimsby. Sibtain Bokhari was a rights lawyer in Lahore, a Shia in a Sunni dominated area, where Wahhabi extremism flourishes and terrorist attacks on mosques and the minority are regular. He came to Britain in 2001 to a rights conference. On his return he was accused of being a Blair stooge, something not as career-enhancing there as it is here, and a spy. His office was set on fire, his wife fired from her job, his home stoned by students from the local madrassa.

The police, who had arrested his brother-in-law on a charge of mosque bombing, offered no protection. So Bokhari brought his family to Britain and to Grimsby, applying for asylum within three days of arrival in September 2003.

So far so normal. His application was rejected. The tribunal concurred on the grounds that the Pakistani police would protect him. He appealed through various lawyers but the response was a dawn raid in June 2005, carting the family to a deportation centre. At this point I took up the case, intervened with the minister on the grounds that he hadn’t had representations from me, had them brought back to Grimsby and began to put up the case.

The children, all at Grimsby schools, were model pupils. The parents were school governors, model citizens and well loved. Minister McNulty replied that this was very nice but didn’t count. He also rejected all my evidence from Pakistan about the dangers they’d face on return, though a stray note from an official sent me by accident revealed that documents in a foreign language were not translated for ministers. Perhaps he spoke Urdu, though I don’t think he even saw them.

I was advised by people more expert than I to keep representations flowing. So I did. But legal advice was hard to get in Grimsby. The Humberside Law Centre went bankrupt, Grimsby lawyers stopped taking immigration cases (there’s no money in it) and the lawyer the Bokharis hired repeated my representations and evidence and charged them for it.

In October last the whiz-kid new minister, Liam Byrne, announced that they had to go. He declined to meet me but I insisted, though I knew the meeting wouldn’t be urgent because the Home Office is incredibly slow. I’d asked for a meeting with Byrne on trainee immigrant doctors in June. It didn’t happen until December when Byrne “arrived late, looked bored stiff, and left early” - as I wrote in the House Magazine. I wish I hadn’t.

A second dawn raid took place on 9 January at 6am. Used on Ruth Turner this appalling practice produces howls of protest. With asylum families it’s an everyday part of the game. Vicious and cruel but a good way of catching kids before they go to school. Public protests had forced an end to dawn raids in New Zealand when Labour came in in 1984. Here New Labour sees them as the norm.

Mrs Bokhari rang a friend but was cut off. The friend went round but wasn’t allowed to speak to the family who were dragged off, Mr Bokhari kicking and screaming to the horror of the neighbours who liked the family and disliked the din.

Bokhari is a diabetic but no health check had been made beforehand so the raiders didn’t believe him and his insulin was left in the fridge. They were taken to Yarl’s Wood, arriving unfed and uninjected at 6pm. Next day Bokhari was taken off, I hoped, for treatment, though the family weren’t told where, and it was three days before he was brought back with bad bruising.

I consulted immigration barristers and a lawyer who all came back with the answer that every legal redress was exhausted. I appealed to the minister who should have met me before the raid, and now needed a meeting to cover his backside. At first I asked that the Bokharis be taken back to Grimsby because I didn’t want the meeting to be as perfunctory as it turned out to be, but on Monday 15 January I met Liam Byrne, elected in 2004 and risen without trace. I presented him with a full case, emphasising that the young children were little Grimbarians and shouldn’t be carted off to an alien country. Had they been here seven years, or come in before the last amnesty for families in 2000 they’d have been OK. As it was they weren’t.

Liam listened coldly, promised to consider the case and left me with a week of anxious phone calls from the Bokharis, who’d been told they were scheduled on a plane at 8.25pm on 22 January, though Byrne’s office told me that this was a formality and wouldn’t go ahead before the minister had decided. I told the family this and they believed it as I did. Big mistake.

On the morning of 22 January at midday the eldest boy rang. “We’re being deported at 8.25 tonight.” The phone went dead. Later Mrs Bokhari rang to say they’d all been handcuffed, put in a car and carted off to Heathrow. I went back to the minister. Not there. “Who’s running this department?” His secretary told me he hadn’t yet made the decision and promised to get on to Heathrow. I did too. My last phone call came from the plane to a background of Mr Bokhari shouting, Mrs Bokhari sobbing, the kids all crying. They took off at 8.25.

The fax from the minister saying he’d rejected the case was sent to my Grimsby office after it was closed and his e-mail reached me next day. Cunning that. Three days later the Bokharis arrived in Lahore to find their house daubed with the sign of the cross and occupied by squatters.

It leaves a nasty taste. An out-of-control Immigration and Nationality Directorate is doing what it wants to get deportations up. The minister goes along, ratifies its decisions (he hardly ever rejects them), observes its deadlines and strings MPs along, pretending to listen while doing nothing. Perhaps scarring young souls will teach them not to come here when they grow up.

Perhaps it will win votes to Labour from the lumpen lunatics who’ve deluged the Grimsby Telegraph’s website with abuse of their soft, immigrant-loving, geriatric, fool of an MP. Perhaps we’ll win enough National Fronters to compensate for the loss of the many liberals this has alienated. I don’t know. But I do know how I feel. Ashamed.