Human Cargo (25 page)

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 option” 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.

•   •   •

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.

Looking for someone to talk to about life inside Angel Heights, I found Madina, one of the two non-African women in the hostel at present; the other is an older Belorussian woman in her fifties, confined to her room with severe diabetes. Madina is a geologist from
Azerbaijan with a master’s degree, a dark, thin, bony woman in her early thirties, her hair lank and very black, her clothes black. She has a thin, awkward smile and speaks some English. Her story told me everything I wanted to know about Angel Heights.

Madina last saw her eleven-year-old son, Kolya, on January 12, 2003. He was then in a hospital in St. Petersburg with severe frostbite to his face and hands, having been thrown from a police car into the snow and found by a passerby. Kolya is half black. He was in shock and unwilling or unable to say much about what had happened to him, beyond the fact that the police had picked him up as he was walking to a school party and that in the scuffle he had lost the present he had been carrying. Madina was told by the doctors that he would be fine, and that she could return to collect him on the fourteenth. When she returned, his bed was empty. Kolya had been moved, she was informed, to a children’s ward in a psychiatric hospital, with severe mental problems. She hastened to the hospital and was refused entry. Kolya was far too ill to see her.

Though terrified and baffled about what to do next, Madina had long expected trouble—but not this kind of trouble. For almost a year, she had been involved with a group of campaigners protesting against the war in Chechnya and what the Russians were doing to Chechen refugees. She already had to flee her home town in Azerbaijan because of death threats against her second husband, Salimov, a Chechen, and because of her own work with Armenian refugees, and she was no stranger to violence. Her first husband, Kolya’s father, who was Congolese, had been killed in a bomb attack when he returned to Brazzaville after completing his studies in Azerbaijan, and Kolya had endured many racist attacks as a small boy. Since arriving in St. Petersburg, the city chosen carefully by her as the most liberal in Russia, Madina had been harassed by the police; her office had been ransacked and her computer and files confiscated, and she had been hospitalized with concussion and severe bruising after being arrested. “I’m not the kind of person who can sit back and do nothing,” she said to me, sitting in the empty dining room in Angel Heights, reminding me again how often I feel surprised by the instinctive
and apparently unhesitating courage of political activists. “I feel suffering like it’s mine.” A second attack by the police had left her with two broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder. And on September 19, almost four months before Kolya’s abduction, Madina was again hospitalized, this time with severe depression. Soon after she was released, Salimov was arrested and charged with spying.

By this stage, not surprisingly, Madina had lost what little faith she had ever had in Russian human rights. Even liberal St. Petersburg was turning out to be dangerous for dissidents. But the abduction of her son was more than she could bear. Having been refused permission to see him on January 14, she went home in despair. The telephone rang as she entered the apartment. Her caller did not give his name. “We have taken your husband and your son,” the voice said, “and now it is your turn.” Madina fled to her nineteen-year-old sister’s apartment. Later, they went out because the sister was going to the dentist. As they left, there was a shot: Madina’s sister fell into the snow, dead. Madina saw a policeman run away. “Next time,” said the telephone caller that night, “we will not miss.” Again Madina fled. Friends helped find an agent who provided her with a ticket for London and a visa for Italy, where the plane was landing. She reasoned that she must stay alive for Kolya’s sake. At Heathrow, she asked for asylum. She was put into a small hotel near the airport and, three months later, sent to Newcastle.