Point of no return

Published on Sunday 9 December 2007 01:05

FARAH barely raises her voice above a whisper.

She has learned to keep quiet, keep herself to herself - and, besides, she doesn't have many people to talk to. As she awaits the outcome of an appeal against her failed claim for asylum, the 26-year-old lives alone in a small flat on the 12th floor of a tower block in the north of Glasgow. She's pretty, smart and speaks fluent English, and as we talk, her thick mascara only just manages to stay in place despite tears that seem never more than a blink away.

"I feel as if I haven't slept for seven years," she says. "Every day you are just waiting for something to happen, waiting for them to take you away or detain you or arrest you or send you back. It's like a hell. When am I going to find my life?"

As a teenager in south-western Iran, Farah's life was fairly straightforward. She finished school, started college and met a boyfriend. Then it all began to fall apart. She was arrested for sitting on a park bench with her boyfriend in the middle of the afternoon, and then again soon afterwards, for being unaccompanied in her boyfriend's house.

Hardly the worst crimes in the world, but under sharia law, Farah faced 20 lashes and ostracism from the community. Worse, she was afraid no one would stop her father killing her to restore the family's honour. Seven years on, the last words her mother spoke to her are still clear in her memory. "Get as far away from your father as you can," she said. "Even if you are starving on the streets, do not come back to Iran.''

Her mother arranged her escape and after 20 days and nights in the back of a lorry, Farah finally arrived in Britain. With no windows in the dark container, she didn't know where she was going and, when the journey eventually came to an end, no idea which country she had arrived in. "After the journey and all that had gone on before, I just felt finished," she says. "I didn't think things could get any worse, but they have. It just gets more and more harsh."

Farah has repeated her story many times to lawyers and immigration officials, who, she tells me, fail to grasp the reality of the threat of honour killings in her country. Before she secured the flat in Glasgow, she was homeless for several months. Now she gets by on 35 a week. Not permitted to work or study until her appeal for asylum is decided, her life has effectively stopped since the day she was arrested in Iran. "I say to the Home Office time after time, 'I don't want to come here and take your money. I don't want to beg, I don't want to cause trouble. I just want to work and be good. I just want to stay here and stay alive.' "

It has taken Farah some time to come to terms with the cold, damp climate and the cultural differences but, slowly, she has started to integrate into her new society. And, although she misses her family, there are glimmers of hope in her new life. She has friends now and she can share with them some things that were not allowed in Iran. Her love of clothes and make-up forms an innocent bond with friends here - but back at home it was forbidden. "Life is so different for young women in Scotland. It is so much freer than it is in Iran."

THOUGH you rarely see them in the city centre, there are many women like Farah in Glasgow, women waiting years for a decision to be made on their claims for asylum and humanitarian protection. They are scattered across housing estates in Scotstoun, Sighthill, Pollokshaws and Govan, in tower blocks where occupied flats are outnumbered by those whose windows and doors are sealed with sheets of aluminium. You see them pushing second-hand prams across boarded-up shopping arcades and silently praying in empty churches.

Like Farah, many of those seeking asylum in Scotland come from countries where the state offers no protection for women against abuse; states that turn a blind eye to, or even sanction, violence against women. In 2006-7, the highest number of applicants for asylum in the UK were from Somalia, Afghanistan, Eritrea, China and Iran, countries with devastatingly poor records of human-rights protection for women.

Recent figures suggest that there are around 1,500 asylum-seeking families in Glasgow - less than 1% of its overall population. Four in ten asylum-seekers in the city are women and their countries of origin, including Algeria, Rwanda and Uganda, are more often than not suffering ethnic and religious strife, civil war, political repression and human-rights abuses.

The majority of asylum-seekers in the UK initially arrive in London or south-east England. To alleviate the pressure on social services and housing resources in that region, the government has established a system of dispersing the new arrivals across the UK. Glasgow City Council is the only local authority in Scotland to offer accommodation to asylum-seekers, who are given no choice in the location or type of homes available.

Lamula Mutalaga, a 30-year-old mother of two, is scared to open the door of her sixth-floor flat. When the buzzer goes, she gathers her children and hides in the kitchen. If she sees a police officer in the street, she starts shaking and feels sick. At night, she can barely sleep.

Lamula came to the UK from Uganda, where an estimated two million people have been displaced by the 20-year conflict between government and rebel forces that has devastated the country.

Following the abduction of her husband by government troops, Lamula was repeatedly tortured by the authorities, until friends of her husband - who hasn't been seen or heard of since - arranged a flight for her out of the country. When she first arrived in London she wasn't sure which country she was in.

"I didn't know what to do," she says. "I was pregnant and in shock. The man who brought me here took me into the middle of London. It was a hot day and he said he was going to buy me something to drink. He said, 'Wait here, I'll be back in a minute.' I stood in the middle of a busy street and I waited and waited." She goes quiet at the memory. The man never returned.

After claiming asylum in London, Lamula was offered a place to stay in Glasgow. "I said, 'Where is Glasgow?' I'd never heard of it. They took me on a bus overnight. I was scared they were taking me away or sending me back to Uganda."

Glasgow turned out to be Parkhead and a small flat with a view of the cemetery and morgue. Her three-year-old son Louis enrolled in a nearby nursery school and quickly developed a Glaswegian accent. Gradually Lamula began to make friends with other young mums who helped her imagine that Glasgow could become her new home.

Despite clear evidence that she had been tortured, Lamula's initial claim for asylum failed. Awaiting the outcome of an appeal against this decision, she has been held in immigration detention centres three times in the five years she has been in the UK. Every day she waits for the knock on the door that will signal the end of her hope of finding safety in this country. "I don't know what is going to happen," she says, shaking her head. "Sometimes I feel I am nothing and wonder if it would be better to die."

By seeking asylum in the UK, Lamula and Farah were exercising a right we all have, enshrined in the United Nations' 1951 Convention on Refugees, to seek asylum from persecution in a foreign country of our choice. With around two-thirds of asylum claims in the UK receiving a negative decision, however, campaigners believe women like Lamula and Farah have an especially difficult time receiving a fair hearing.

Sally Daghlian, chief executive of the Scottish Refugee Council, explains why women are especially vulnerable to negative asylum decisions. "There is a lack of awareness among immigration officials about women's particular experiences of persecution, and therefore women's claims are at risk of failing. Many women are asked to disclose their reasons for seeking asylum as soon as they arrive in the UK and in front of their children, disclosures that are traumatic for the women and are not meant for children's ears."

Also, says Daghlian, a combination of shame, taboo and embarrassment, on top of a desire to protect their children, means that women do not tell the whole story, a decision that can wrongly lead to a rejection from the authorities. "Women don't flee their homes, uproot their children and travel halfway across the world for no reason," she says. "It's time those reasons were properly understood."

On a high-rise estate on the south side of Glasgow, I meet 36-year-old Dominique. Perched on the edge of a concrete bench in an empty playground, she looks ready to run at any moment. Like Lamula, she lives in fear of a knock on the door and, again like Lamula, is on long-term medication for stress. "My life has been nothing but war since 1994," she says.

Originally from Rwanda, Dominique has been running for the last 13 years; first from the soldiers who shot and killed her husband and family in front of her; then from the rebels who raped and tortured her; then from the refugee camps in neighbouring Congo and Tanzania where her two children were born and from where government troops began sending people back to Rwanda. Now, with her claim for asylum in the UK rejected, she has nowhere left to run. "I just feel devastated," she says over and over again.

In addition, there are the everyday difficulties of finding one's way in an alien country. When Dominique first arrived in Glasgow, she says, she found it difficult to differentiate the shops from the pubs, a health centre from a post office, as so often their faades were boarded up. Some women told me they didn't recognise the food in the shops and were unsure what to buy to feed their children. Others felt intimidated by the local environment and were too scared to leave the house. Many were frightened of the police and other authorities, as it was officials like these who had tortured them at home and were the very reason they had left in the first place.

Dominique supports herself and her two children on around 40 a week. She studies part-time when she can, but there is no crche at the college for her younger child and she has no money for transport or books. "I try to find a way," she says. "I'm able and willing to work, but I am not allowed to. I want to work and build a future for my kids. I have a brain and two hands. I know how to work. I don't want to just stay at home and I don't want to take money from the government."

This plea to be given permission to work is repeated by all of the women I speak to. Most of them had jobs in their home countries and are not used to sitting around doing nothing. They are desperate to restore some of their dignity through working and contributing to Scottish society. "Staying at home is so stressful," says Dominique. "If there's a knock on my door I think it is someone coming to kill me. I cry all the time. My Scottish friends help me and come round to support me when I feel I can't carry on, but I have seen thousands of people lying dead in front of me. Who in this country can imagine that? If people understood, they would give me safety here, but instead they give you more pressure, more torture. People see you alive on the street but inside you are dying. Nobody understands why you are here. I'm just waiting for them to knock on the door and take me away."

The debate about asylum in the UK often assumes that refugees come to Britain to exploit our benefits system or simply to improve their lives economically. But, Dominique tells me, before the Rwandan genocide she had everything she wanted or needed from life. "I had my own home, a lovely house, my own family. I had a job, money, plenty of food." In Scotland, asylum-seeking women have none of these things. Instead, they face suspicion and stigma, destitution and deportation. Eighteen months ago Lamula's front door was broken down in an early-morning raid by immigration officials. With Louis screaming from his bedroom, Lamula was led away and later held at Dungavel detention centre. "They treated me like a criminal but I hadn't done anything wrong," she says. It's this knock on the door that causes the most fear among the women I speak to.

SOUAD GASMI is a qualified dentist who ran her own dental practice in eastern Algeria before the long-running terrorist and guerrilla war in her country forced her to flee with her husband and daughter. Now 37, she has been in Scotland for five years and is waiting for an appeal against her family's failed claim for asylum. "I always believed the UK was a tolerant, democratic society," she says. "I thought it would protect me from persecution and that I would have the right to work as a dentist and build a new life for us here."

Instead, she fears she is losing the skills she studied for six years to acquire. "You feel as if you are nothing if you can't work. You are not contributing, not giving anything back, just consuming. I've been active my whole life and I can't stand to sit around the house doing nothing."

Souad keeps herself busy with volunteer work and the responsibilities of being chairperson of three local community organisations. "When I'm doing my community work I don't feel there's a label on me, that I'm an 'asylum-seeker'. I just feel like a normal working woman. But when I go home I start to think about my situation and that's when I feel the frustration and the fear."

Souad is also spokesperson for the Refugee Women's Strategy Group, a group of around 20 refugees who work to raise awareness of the issues surrounding women's experience of asylum.

The group's members are accomplished, often professionally qualified, passionate and articulate. Souad lists the main concerns of her group - the fear of being sent back to their country of origin, the terror of being locked in a detention cell, the agony of waiting years for a decision to be made about their future, their concerns for their children's well-being and the terrible isolation of being vulnerable and poor in a foreign country. "A lot of women do just sit alone in their house for years," she says. "Sometimes this is because they don't have the courage to go out in a foreign society. Sometimes they don't have the language skills, and often they just don't have the strength to talk about what's happened to them."

Another concern raised by the group is the complexity of the asylum system and the assumption that refugees know what they're supposed to do. "Refugee women don't understand the asylum process," says Souad. "There is a great misunderstanding about this and an assumption that we know where to go and what to do. I didn't know anything about asylum or how to make a claim. In fact, I'm sure my claim was refused because I didn't know how to speak about my case or where to find a helpful lawyer who could advise me."

Women who are victims of rape, torture and persecution and witnesses of extreme violence and genocide are unlikely to have the resources required to fight the battle for asylum or humanitarian protection that the current system demands.

The Home Office added guidance on gender issues to its asylum policy instructions for case-workers in 2004. These address the considerations that should be borne in mind when assessing women's claims for asylum and include advice on how to take gender issues into account when looking at experiences of persecution.

However, Sally Daghlian lists further practical steps that she believes are essential to a fair and humane system of asylum for women: "Women suffering from trauma need to be given appropriate time and professional support to help them disclose their experiences, and account should be taken of the effects of trauma. Childcare should be provided during interviews, court appearances and lawyers' appointments. Immigration interviews should be rearranged if children are present in order to enable women to disclose their reasons for seeking asylum."

THE next time I see her, Souad has just received the news that her claim for asylum has been reassessed. She and her family have been given the right to remain in the country and can now begin rebuilding their lives in Scotland. Although they know it will be a struggle, they feel they had no choice but to come here.

"I left Algeria because I didn't want my daughter to become an orphan," she says. "It wasn't easy to leave. I had a good job, a good life, but I left everything. Even if I had been deported back to Algeria, I wouldn't have had anything to go back to. I lost my job, my husband lost his job, we lost our house, we left everything and we came here with two bags.

"Leaving your future isn't something you do easily or something we would do if we had any choice. People need to start trying to understand this."

• Some names have been changed.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and will be celebrated in events held across the globe