Sanctuary no more

The message is clear, says Hasan Suroor. For people in search of a safe haven, Britain is the wrong place.

TWENTYTWO-YEAR-old Firsat Yildiz, a Kurd, arrived in Britain over a year ago to claim political asylum and like hundreds of other refugees braved various forms of humiliation as he awaited a decision on his application. Last Sunday, he was murdered in a racist attack while on his way to his bleak tenement in a grim and hostile housing estate in Glasgow.

On Tuesday in Hull, hundreds of miles away from Glasgow, another young Kurd refugee had his throat slit by a group of white youths, though fortunately he lived to tell his tale. Next day, an Iranian asylum seeker was stabbed - again in Glasgow, home to some 2,000 refugees, mostly from the Balkans, Africa and Afghanistan.

Meanwhile, it has been reported that more than a thousand asylum seekers are languishing in British jails - many in high-security prisons meant for hardened criminals - while their claims are processed. Allegations of torture and abuse have not been denied and the weak explanation offered for forcing innocent people to serve prison sentences is that there is no other place to put them up as detention centres for refugees are full.

The message is clear: for people in search of a safe haven to escape from real or imaginary hardships at home, Britain is the wrong place to come looking for it. First there are tough immigration rules which openly discriminate against certain nationalities - Kurds, Iraqis, Tamils, Somalis, Afghans and a host of others identified as the most common source of illegal immigration.

Gypsies from eastern Europe are so unwelcome that British immigration officials recently parked themselves at Prague airport to prevent U.K.-bound gypsies from taking off. While the arrangement was made with the cooperation of Czech authorities, there was outrage when the media exposed it as a breach of human rights and this week Britain was forced to abandon the scheme.

The extent of the British Government's paranoia over asylum is evident from the way it refused visas to a Sierra Leone drama troupe to stage a play at the ongoing Edinburgh festival on the plea that its members might end up claiming political asylum once they arrive in Britain! Despite a personal guarantee by the troupe's director that he would ensure that no one stayed back in Britain after the play was staged the British High Commission in Freetown refused to relent.

Lately, immigration officials have been given vast discretionary powers overriding the new British Race Relations (Amendment) Act claimed to be the most enlightened human rights legislation in Britain. Getting past the czars and czarinas of immigration control is usually more than half the battle; and then begins the ``war'' that can even end the way Firsat Yildiz's did. Though the cold-blooded murder of refugees is rare, their harassment and humiliation are not. The 1,000-odd refugee ``prisoners'' are a living proof of it.

Yet, the flow of refugees remains unabated. Poor and often illiterate asylum seekers, unable to speak or understand English and with no idea of the life ahead, continue to pour into Britain - having begged and borrowed to pay criminal gangs to smuggle them in as stowaways. Many die, and many others are routinely deported but the lure of a ``better life'' is too strong to deter them. Britain is said to be the most popular asylum destination in Europe and according to official figures, 23,000 applications were waiting to be cleared at the last count but the actual number is believed to be higher.

The Tories made it a major issue in the general elections promising a crackdown on asylum seekers in what was seen as a bid to whip up xenophobia. Remarks of leading Tory figures on asylum and Europe were seen to play on the fear of the foreigner. The race riots in Oldham and Bradford may not have been directly related to the anti-asylum campaign but they happened in a racially surcharged climate built up in the run-up to the election.

Asylum is very much a race issue. A Tory candidate who unsuccessfully contested the general elections says that at every doorstep he came across concerns over ``race, immigration and asylum''. ``I heard it whatever the race of the person'' and the refrain, he says, was invariably prefaced with the remark:``I am not a racialist but all these people are coming over here...'' etc., etc. Writing in The Times, Mr. Daniel Finkelstein, who contested Harrow West, warns that Britain has a ``very serious race relations problem'' and asylum is ``one of the most visible components of immigration''. ``We complacently assume that this country is so stable and tolerant that we don't need to get too excited about such things. It is isn't.''

Yet, as The Times editorially commented, the murder of Firsat Yildiz must ``deepen national disquiet about the failures of officialdom to deal efficiently with the tides of human hope and misery rolling up Britain's shores''.

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