On Monday 4 August 2003, K. and E. received a letter from Britain’s Home Office, the government department which deals with immigration matters. It informed them that, together with their two sons, A. and C. (12 and 8 years old), they were to be deported. After four years in Britain, they were given ten days to pack their few belongings, say goodbye to their friends and get ready to be collected early in the morning for a flight from Heathrow to Pristina.
The letter itself, though shocking, was not unexpected. K. and E. had known for some weeks that their final appeal for refugee status in the United Kingdom had been rejected, and that there was nothing now to delay their departure. In fact it had already been delayed: K. is pregnant and, having been obliged to terminate an earlier pregnancy because of a chromosome abnormality, she was permitted to remain under the care of her consultant at least until the danger moment in her new pregnancy had passed. It is what this ordinary, close, diligent family have come from, and what they will return to, that makes their situation hard.
Hard, but not
unique. About half of all refugees
requesting asylum in the UK are ultimately, after varying amounts of time
and different legal stages, turned down. Over 100,000 people, from some 90
different countries applied for asylum in 2002, and some 50,000 of them will
have their case dismissed. In such cases, the immigration officers and judges
and adjudicators involved decide that their story lacks credibility, that they
have in fact nothing to fear from return to their own country, or that their
reason for coming to Britain is nothing other than a desire for a better life.
Many will have
suffered
from lazy or exploitative solicitors, poor interpreters and clerical errors.
Rejection means the end of all financial help. Deportation – ticket to home
country paid for – may follow immediately. But for all those who leave, collected
at dawn, taken to a deportation centre and put on a flight – though not, it is
said, in the mid-summer months, when the planes are full and tourists going on
holiday might be troubled by the spectacle of such anguish – there are dozens
more who vanish into Britain’s black
economy, sleeping on friends’ floors, working for low wages in factories,
farms and garages.
In time of war
It is K. who
tells their story: “My family are Roma,
and as such we were always persecuted in our village in southern Kosovo. We
kept ourselves to ourselves but even so other children laughed at me at school
and people threw stones at us. None of the women in the village ever spoke to
me and they wouldn’t come to my house to have coffee with me. It didn’t get any
easier when I married E., who is half-Serb and half-Albanian.
When the boys
were born and went to school, E. had to go with them every morning because
otherwise the other children would stone them. When E. was called to fight with
the Kosovo Liberation Army, he refused. We had to run away from our village and
hide. When the war
was nearly over, he went to see what had happened to our house. His cousin had
warned him that he would be in extreme danger if he went there, and he was in
fact picked up and held for seven days and questioned about why he had refused to
help his own people. When they let him go, with a warning never to show his
face again, he was covered in bruises, and he could hardly move his leg where
they had injured his sciatic nerve”.
With two small
sons to look after, K. and E. fled to the latter’s father and asked for help. His
father gave them his savings and urged the family to find safety in another
country. By now, K.’s own family, her parents and brothers and sisters, had
themselves fled to Greece, to escape harassment and persecution
as Roma, and were living a precarious life on the edge of a small town. There
was no room, nor any money, to take in four extra people. E. is a builder and
had some savings of his own. Pooling these together with his father’s savings,
he found that he had $16,000. Hearing that they might find a way to leave the
region by travelling first to Macedonia, the family packed what they could
carry and left.
“In
Macedonia”, says K., “we met up with an agent who told us he would transport the
four of us to France. We didn’t want to leave but by now we were terrified for
our children. We sat in the back of a lorry, stopping at night. Somewhere in
France, we were put out, and our first agent introduced us to a second man, who
told us that there was no life for us in France, and that we should make our
way on to Britain. He took the rest of our savings, and brought us here, by
lorry and by bus and by ferry. C. has bad asthma and on the journey he suddenly
fell ill with a fever and a high temperature. I was very scared and just prayed
to God.”
A moment of hope
Before leaving
the family in Dover, in England, the agent told them exactly what to do. He had
taken away their passports and given them false papers, and he now explained
how they should find a policeman and ask for asylum. “I had just brought two
small bags, with a few clothes, some clean things for the boys” says K. “We
didn’t speak a word of English. But we were very lucky. People were kind to us.
We stayed for two nights in Dover, then two more nights in a hotel in Brixton.
Then we were given a flat in Tottenham, north London, where we lived for two
years. The boys went to school and A., who had always done badly in his school
at home, now began to settle and do well.”
