Red Road to perdition

Published on Saturday 13 March 2010 19:32

IT'S a bright sunny day and just through the doors of the Red Road flats there are two YMCA Glasgow ladies manning the concierge desk. Both are pictures of efficient bonhomie, croaking with laughter at a shared joke and then turning to greet visitors with a welcoming smile.

The dark heart of one of Glasgow's most deprived suburbs will never qualify as a halcyon oasis of happiness, but on this sun-drenched spring morning in Springburn it's just possible to forget they are again in the news. It's difficult to believe that just days earlier three Russians shoved a wardrobe through anti-pigeon netting so that they could plunge 15 floors to their deaths just yards from where these women are now chatting.

Much has since been learned about the trio that caused the national spotlight to be turned on to this Glaswegian backwater. Forty-three-year-old Serguei Serykh claimed to be an agent for the FSB, the successor organisation to the KGB; he believed that the Canadians were swapping top-level secrets with Vladimir Putin and using "psychotronic drugs" to control his mind; he proclaimed that he had uncovered a plot by Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper to assassinate the Queen.

If Serykh's contagious delusions hadn't had such tragic consequences, then they would have been mildly comic. But when he and his wife Tatiana and his 21-year-old stepson took a paranoia-powered step into the black void in the early hours of last Sunday morning the bizarre asylum case in which they sought refuge from the right to live in Canada, a prize craved by many in the developed world, became a harrowing tale that focused new attention of the plight of Glasgow's asylum seekers.

What's clear is that while Serykh's benefits had been stopped and he had been asked to leave Red Road, he wasn't a man living in fear of deportation back to torture and death. In fact, he had lost both his accommodation and cash simply because he simply hadn't taken the next step in the process to be allowed to apply to stay in Glasgow.

Yet if Serykh's was a highly unusual case, it was nevertheless one which highlighted the lives of the 1,000 or so asylum seekers living on the notorious Red Road estate, a collection of garish Sixties tower blocks which were declared unfit for human habitation as far back as 1980 and which are shortly to be pulled down. These flats, however, are home to a community which includes people like Mohammad Ilyas, a well-spoken former Pakistani businessman and journalist from Lahore who was run out of his country by Muslim fundamentalists.

After a series of death threats because he wore a shirt and tie and refused to grow a beard, he was eventually kidnapped for three days and beaten so badly that most of his fingers were broken. When even a move to Karachi couldn't help him escape the zealots, he fled to Glasgow to hole up until things got better at home, but instead of getting better he says they've got worse and, with his meagre funds now exhausted, he's found himself stranded thousands of miles from home.

For people like Ilyas, the death of the three Russians crystallised the frustrations that can build up when life is on hold waiting for a verdict from the Home Office. "Last Sunday I heard a lot of noise at four or five o'clock in the morning, and my wife said 'there's something wrong, someone's screaming'," says Ilyas. "We could see people in the next building and at first I thought it was drugs people. My four kids haven't slept all this week, they haven't talked about anything else. People are very scared. We can all picture the bodies lying at the bottom. We can imagine how painful it was to jump. I don't know what to say to my daughter when she asks about it so I lie: I say that they fell.

"People here are saying that it's better to die here than to die back home with the bombs and the bullets. We had two bomb explosions back in Lahore this morning, with dozens of people killed. How could we even think of going back there?"

If the Red Road flats are a desperate place to live, then it doesn't feel like it once you're inside them. Each of the flats is undeniably well-worn, but they're also spacious and warm. The views over to the Campsie Fells are remarkable, and were these flats a mile closer to the town centre, they would be worth a fortune. More importantly, the landlords, the embattled YMCA Glasgow – the original YMCA, and one that sticks to its mission statement of helping society's most obviously dispossessed citizens – has made huge strides in developing a community in the high-rises. Each tower block has a much-used communal area on the 28th floor, where mothers & toddlers groups, English classes and a whole array of services are on offer.

Yet for all the sense of solidarity among the asylum seekers, there's also a far stronger force that afflicts these newcomers to our shores. Most of them may be very different from Serge Serykh, but they all share the Russians' palpable sense of disconnect from the society around them. That much became clear speaking to Nemja, a "single mum" from Gujarat in the Punjab who fled her country in fear of her life and broke a cultural taboo by taking her kids with her.

After four and a half years in Scotland, Nemja has just got leave to stay here permanently. She hopes one day to become a home help for old people, but for now she lives her life through her four boys, and listening to her she could be any proud Scottish mum: her 18-year-old is a car mechanic, her seven year-old loves boxing, one of her 11-year-old twins is a Manchester United fanatic, and his brother is the family swot. Yet while she is demonstrably desperate to fit in and assimilate, Nemja is scared to walk the streets at night: the Red Road flats are her prison and the neds of Springburn her jailers. "They throw rocks at you all the time," she says. "There are lots of good people in Scotland, but there are lots of racists too."

That experience is backed up by Ilyas. "Back in Lahore the religious fanatics give you no peace; they wait for you, target you, it's not safe," he says. "And it's not safe here either. I was attacked here a year ago. I just went out for some naan breads and a newspaper and I heard a lot of noise behind me, lots of banging. Then someone started hitting me and knocked me out; I was unconscious for 20 minutes. When I woke up my money was there, my mobile phone was still there and so were these people. They were just making fun of me. They were drunk and having fun – 'oh look, the black man is coming, let's kill him or stab him'. It's their idea of fun, so I don't go outside in the night-time. It makes you feel very isolated."

As Hassan, an Eritrean geologist with five children at the local school, said: "When I went to the parents night, I got to talk to the headmistress, and once the First Minister even turned up – you would never see this in my country, and it's why I love Glasgow and will stay here if I am able."

Many of the asylum seekers have little choice but to pour their time and resources into their children. In an effort to stop economic migrants claiming asylum, the system has been tightened up to an extraordinary degree, so that only once applicants gain leave to stay here can they work. Even their kids are affected: the highest qualification the child of an asylum seeker can study for is an HND, and with some of the residents of Red Road still waiting for a verdict ten years down the line, that's a lot of sitting around.

The hard line has arguably worked: the number of applications for asylum in the last quarter of 2009 was 4,769, which is 30 per cent lower than the period for the previous year. The processing of applications is also speedier than it once was and, contrary to popular perception, most applications are unsuccessful, with 77 per cent being turned down compared to 68 per cent from the year before. In the last three months of 2009, only 13 per cent of applications were granted compared to 20 per cent the year before.

The sense that it's getting harder to stay in the UK, plus the isolation of life in what is effectively a Red Road ghetto, makes life hard for the asylum-seekers. Not only can they not work, but the dawn raids that were so unpopular have been replaced by an equally insidious tactic where failed asylum seekers are grabbed when they go to claim benefits and whisked straight into a waiting van.

Shortly before I arrived at Red Road, a Yemeni family who had gone to London to sort out some benefits issues had returned to general whooping and hollering; everyone thought they had been called in to be deported.

The waiting game is another source of isolation. Ilyas has been waiting for a verdict from the Home Office since 12 November 2007 only to find out just before Christmas that because of a computer blunder his case was no further forward. He is finding the inactivity hard to take.

"Although I do volunteer work for the Red Cross a couple of days a week, all I really want to do is to work and to begin to make a life here," he says. "I've worked hard all my life and now I'm sitting around doing nothing. It's painful. My loss of status has also been very difficult, and I've lost all my family and friends. I feel really blessed to be here otherwise we'd probably have been killed, but we're really isolated and just sitting there thinking, thinking all the time. This is the hardest thing."

I ask Ilyas whether he's managed to get out and look at the country yet, and he just sighs as if I haven't been listening. "I've been to the YMCA's house at Stroove in Ayrshire and I went to Loch Lomond once, but I've never really had a chance to go around Scotland. It's difficult to go on holiday when the biggest decision each day is whether you can afford a pint of milk."

There's one word that keeps coming up in a day at Red Road, and it's "isolated". The asylum seekers are pitifully grateful for all they receive, but all they really want is to get out into the community and get on with their lives, which means knowing whether they can stay. That is the common strand that connects them all to each other and to the Russians. Their feelings of exclusion and the drastic action which resulted could affect anyone in the towers, says Hassan.

"What happened affected us all because what affects your neighbour affects you," he says. "The worst thing is when the kids start asking about it because you don't want them to think this (suicide] is an option, so I've concealed the truth from them. Being in limbo, things are difficult enough for them already, and the longer it goes on the worse it's going to get."