The hell of being an asylum seekerMeet Sergey. He’s a doctor. He’s also
an asylum seeker who is forced to survive on £35 of Asda vouchers a
week. Award-winning novelist Mark Haddon discovers the horror of being
a refugee in the UK today

The Observer/UK
Sunday June 15 2008

Last year Oxfam asked whether I’d visit one of the projects they help
fund, then write about it for The Observer. It’s exactly the kind of
thing a liberal, Guardian-reading novelist should be doing. Except that
I don’t fly. Because I know with absolute certainty that I’ll die in a
fireball of aviation fuel shortly after take-off. And visiting one of
the projects that Oxfam helps fund would doubtless mean landing at some
jungle airstrip in a 30-year-old Tupolev, possibly dodging mortar
rounds on the descent. The amount of Valium I’d have to take to get me
there would probably eradicate all memory of the trip.

So they put me on a bus instead. To Victoria. In London. So that I
could visit the Migrants Resource Centre and meet a group of asylum
seekers. Victoria not being Cambodia I wouldn’t get much exotic local
colour (run-down boarding houses round the corner from green squares
ringed with large, cream Georgian town houses, if you’re interested).
But the bus was going to stay on the ground the whole way, which was
good for me.

I had a rough idea of what we’d be talking about. I knew a number of
refugees who’d come to the UK in the past. And I knew something about
the UK’s current asylum system, from newspapers, from TV and from the
radio. In particular I knew that it was neither generous nor efficient.
But I’d never met anyone on the receiving end.

Now I have. And nothing has made me this angry in a long time. We
bellyache about the abuse of human rights overseas. But there are
thousands of people living here, right now, in one of the richest
countries in the world, forced to live in poverty. They are denied
basic rights and services which the rest of us take for granted. And
this is not an accident. This is government policy. And we should be
ashamed of it.

The first person I get to meet is Sergey. Sergey is a doctor from
Armenia, 47 years old, a married man with two sons, aged 10 and 11.
I’ve seen photographs of Sergey before we meet. He is square-jawed and
good-looking, with close-cropped black hair. But the photographs were
taken a year ago and when he comes into the room I don’t recognise him.
He has lost several stone. He walks slowly and has trouble breathing.
Every so often he has to pause and gather his energy before carrying
on. When he talks, however, his eyes light up. He is passionate and a
lot funnier than most of us would be in his position. He is not only a
good man, but good company, too. He apologises repeatedly for his poor
English and tells me that he would not be here were it not for the
kindness of the staff at the centre.

This is his story.

‘When I was in Armenia I was very happy. Everything was OK for me, for
my family, thank you God. I have a new car. In the city I have a good
home. I have four hectares of land. I have horses. With my friends
every week I have a picnic, a barbecue. I was lucky, lucky, lucky. I
had popularity because I help many people to survive. It is my duty as
a doctor. So everybody knows me. In the street they say, "Hello,
Doctor." The police know me. They say, "Hello, Doctor." Even the
Russian KGB, they say, "Hello, Doctor."

‘But after Soviet Union break up, there is life without law. There is
mafia. There is killing, many times. My friends. My neighbours.
Tomorrow maybe me.’

Quite by chance Sergey was witness to the murder of a politician. He
tells me the details but asks me not to print them in case it puts his
family in danger.

‘Police officers, they come to me and ask what I see. I say nothing. I
am afraid. I have wife and children. I cover everything up. After that
my life was worst, worst, worst. My friends tell me, KGB looking for
you. And if KGB want to kill you, they will kill you.’

With the help of friends, Sergey managed to escape from Armenia hidden
in a truck, sending his wife and children to stay with relatives. He
reached England after nine days and assumed that he would finally be
safe. He was refused asylum and became homeless.

‘I sleep in road. I sleep in park. In playground for children. And I
catch this killer illness. One time, this person wake me up and say,
"Hey, how are you doing?" I look down and see all this blood. Ambulance
come and take me to hospital.’

While sleeping rough, Sergey had contracted Hepatitis C, one of the 10
per cent of sufferers who get the disease for unknown reasons, though
living on the street cannot be good for anyone’s health. He got no
treatment and, as often happens, the disease led to cirrhosis of the
liver. Sergey will be dead within two years. A transplant could save
his life, but he doesn’t qualify for one because of his asylum status.
Eventually, Sergey found his way to the Hounslow Law Centre. They got
him registered with the National Asylum Support Service. He was given a
room in a shared house and seen by a doctor who told him he should eat
three meals a day, with plenty of fresh fruit and vegetables. Sergey
has to do this on £35 of vouchers each week. These have to be spent on
food and basic toiletries and nothing else. They have to be spent in
one supermarket and that supermarket is not allowed to give him any
change. He is not allowed to earn any more money.

Some time after he escaped from Armenia, Sergey’s wife managed to get
to Italy. She works as a cleaner there and lives in a single room with
their sons. They are forbidden from visiting their father, and Sergey
is forbidden from visiting them.

Sergey could be saving people’s lives. He is not asking for money. He
wants to work. He is an innocent man who has committed no offence. His
only mistake was to hope that when he reached the UK he would be
treated like a human being.

And Sergey is not alone. My host at the Migrants Resource Centre (MRC)
is the indefatigable Nazek Ramadan, who herself fled the war in Lebanon
in the mid-Eighties and runs many of the projects at the centre. Nazek
is like a particularly efficient big sister, and when Sergey lists the
people to whom he is most grateful over the past few years, Nazek comes
in just behind God, and just in front of Mario Marin Cotrini, the MRC’s
legal adviser.

The centre does exactly what it says on the tin. It offers refugees and
asylum seekers advice, practical help, language lessons, a crèche,
computer access and a place to meet other people in the same boat.

Nazek and her colleagues, however, realise that one of the biggest
problems asylum seekers have to face is the way they are portrayed in
the media. Everyone I spoke to at the centre said they were treated
well by the public until they admitted that they were asylum seekers.
One of them said he was relieved when he became destitute because the
public treated homeless people better than they treated asylum seekers.

Most of those who write about asylum seekers have never met one. So
Nazek set up a media group, in order that journalists could talk to
asylum seekers, and asylum seekers who wanted a voice could talk to
journalists.

Nazek hasn’t yet risked exposing the members of the group to anyone
from the tabloid press, but they have had a fair number of cynics
through their doors, all of whom have gone away converted, one of them
so moved that they asked a homeless refugee to come and live in their
spare room. Most of what we read and hear about asylum seekers is
wrong. For a start, there is no such thing as a ‘bogus’ or ‘illegal’
asylum seeker, no more than there is a bogus or illegal mortgage
seeker. Everyone has the right to apply for asylum. If they have a
justified fear of persecution then the host country is obliged to
protect them. This is set down in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention. No
country has ever withdrawn from the convention.

Consistently, however, the British government and its officials attempt
to define its obligations to refugees as narrowly as possible.
Sometimes they do this with breathtaking frankness, as in this refusal
letter from the Home Office to an Algerian woman: ‘You claim that you
were ill-treated during detention, tortured and raped. The secretary of
state does not condone any violations of human rights which may have
been committed by members of the security forces… [but]… to bring
yourself within the scope of the UN Convention, you would have to show
that these incidents were not simply the random acts of individuals,
but were a sustained pattern or campaign of persecution directed at you
by the authorities.’

It’s worth reading that paragraph again. The Home Office is telling
this woman that they don’t care if she has been raped, tortured and
imprisoned. It will help her only if she can prove that this was done
repeatedly and according to some kind of plan.

Sometimes the government mounts legal battles to rid itself of
refugees, as it did recently when it was condemned by the UN for
winning a high court case to return refugees to Baghdad and Basra,
thereby setting a precedent for removing refugees to other war zones.

Sometimes, the government alters the law itself to make it easier to
remove asylum seekers. In 2004, for example, it became an offence for
asylum seekers to fail to provide a proper immigration document to
establish their identity and citizenship. This was hugely
controversial. It is almost impossible to obtain a passport in
countries such as Somalia, Afghanistan and Iraq. Many asylum seekers
have no choice but to travel using false documents. And most have no
knowledge of UK asylum law.

The second person I talk to is Mariam from Ethiopia. Mariam does this
rather unnerving thing that Philip Pullman’s witches do. She’s in the
room for a good 10 minutes before I realise she’s there. And it’s not
because she’s shy and retiring, either, because when she finally
appears from beneath her headscarf she radiates warmth. I suspect it’s
a combination of personal talent and a skill that’s been acquired by
all the asylum seekers I talk to, the ability to blend into the
background, to become invisible, to avoid trouble.

Mariam’s daughters reached the UK long before she did and she spent the
first few weeks in this country tracking them down, with help from the
Red Cross. I ask her why the three of them chose to come here as
opposed to anywhere else. ‘Outside the UK, you ask people and they say
the UK is the father of the world, the carer of the world.’

After all she has been through, Mariam still thinks highly of this
country. ‘There are human rights here. There is democracy here. The
government is also a good government. The law is good. But when they
put it into practice…’

The supposed reason for a tough asylum policy is to prevent the UK from
becoming a soft option for people seeking asylum. But Mariam is no
different from anyone else I talk to. She simply had no idea how asylum
seekers were treated here. Just as you or I have no idea how asylum
seekers are treated in Ethiopia, or Armenia. Neither Mariam nor Sergey
came here expecting to be supported by the state. But neither did they
know that the state would stop them working to support themselves. In
truth, the numbers of asylum seekers who come to the UK, or to any
other country, rises most dramatically when major conflicts erupt
around the world, the break-up of Yugoslavia, for example, or the war
in Iraq.

Mariam found her daughters and applied for asylum. Soon after this she
was told by the Home Office that she was being ‘dispersed’ to Glasgow
with only one of her daughters. Dispersal is intended to be a way of
sharing the job of housing asylum seekers among councils throughout the
UK. But it is often used in a way that seems designed to make staying
in this country as uncomfortable as possible.

Mariam is not allowed to do paid work, but not working is clearly
impossible for her and she devotes much of her time to voluntary
organisations around London. She is also known as a source of good
advice, and while we are talking a young man from Zimbabwe shows her
his own letter from the Home Office saying that he, too, is being
dispersed to Glasgow in two weeks’ time. Mariam, being an indefatigable
optimist, tries to get him to look on the bright side. Yes, it rains in
Glasgow. It’s cold. But the Scottish legal system is slightly less
draconian and there are some activities laid on for asylum seekers. If
you are positive you’ll find people to talk to and things to do. Later
in the day I find myself remembering this conversation when Nazek tells
me about a string of attacks on asylum seekers in Glasgow over the past
few years, including two separate murders.

Mariam and I talk about politics and I ask who she’d vote for if she
was eligible. She says, ‘Labour. Because I am on the side of people, of
the working class.’ It sounds odd, coming from Mariam, because there is
something of the old-fashioned conservative about her. As there is
about Sergey. As there is about all the people I speak to. These are
people who believe in the importance of family, of duty, of
self-reliance, of hard work. I am reminded of Norman Tebbit saying, ‘I
grew up in the Thirties with an unemployed father… He got on his bike
and looked for work, and he kept looking till he found it.’ These
people have done something a great deal harder than getting on their
bikes and I can’t help thinking that if they were a few shades whiter
and born this side of the Channel then Norman Tebbit would hold them up
as shining examples to the rest of us.

Getting to the UK takes money. It takes connections. It takes
determination. The sheer difficulty of the process acts as a brutal
filter. These are not just ordinary people in trouble who deserve our
sympathy. These are extraordinary people who have done something
momentous to save their lives, or the lives of their families, and who
deserve our admiration for it. Nazek sometimes looks around the room
during classes and meetings and is amazed by the qualifications of the
people she is looking at. There are journalists, dentists, engineers,
teachers, civil servants. Some are homeless. All of them are
desperately poor. None of them is allowed to work. Forget that they’re
human beings for a moment. In purely economic terms this is a
ridiculous waste of money and skills.

The third person I meet is Margaret. She is broken and sad and I feel
bad that she’s travelled across London leaving her children with a
friend in order to see me. She is nervous and can’t bring herself to
meet my eye. She stares at her hands or glances over to Nazek for
reassurance.

I start by asking why she had to leave Uganda and I regret it
immediately. It’s a horrible story and she has to stop several times
because she is crying. I tell her we can talk about something else, but
she insists.

I realise later what a stupid question it is. It’s the one every
refugee gets asked when they apply for asylum. It’s the one asked in
every newspaper article about the subject, every television report,
every radio programme. Is this person’s claim justified? Did these
things really happen to them?

You couldn’t spend five minutes with Sergey, or Mariam, or Margaret
without believing their stories. But to ask whether they might be lying
is to miss the point. The point is this… Imagine what it must be like
to live this kind of life, to leave everything behind, your job, your
family, your home. To travel to Stuttgart in the back of a truck. Or
Oslo. Or Rotterdam. Any place where you don’t speak the language. You
have no friends. You sleep in the street, or share a house with
strangers who speak yet another language. Imagine living on £35 of Asda
vouchers a week. Imagine not being able to see your family. Then ask
yourself what kind of experience would make this kind of life
preferable to going home?

This is the situation in which asylum seekers find themselves. For
those with children it is worse.

In 2005, Margaret and her two children were taken to Yarl’s Wood
detention centre. Her youngest was a year old. ‘They told me they were
deporting me. I didn’t know what was going on. My daughter was taken
out of school. It was a very difficult time for us because they don’t
tell you when you are going to come out of detention. You have to
communicate through a solicitor. It was like a prison. If you have kids
it is difficult because you cannot go outside. They can only play in
this one big room with everyone. But kids need to run around. They need
their freedom.

‘There was no education and the food was really horrible. Burgers and
chips almost every day. And it was served at one time, so if your child
is sleeping they don’t eat. And when my baby was sick I was not allowed
to have Calpol in the room because they said I might kill him.’

Margaret’s lawyer applied for judicial review and after six weeks she
was finally released. The following year she was detained again. By
this time she was receiving psychiatric treatment. ‘They came to my
house very early in the morning and they packed everything I owned. I
told them I was sick. They said, "We are not here for a joke." They
took my kids to another room and called the police to help them take us
to Harmondsworth detention centre. I was there for 10 days. They took
my kids away and didn’t say where they were taking them. Then they
locked me up. They don’t speak to you. They just bring you food. They
think you can eat without seeing your children. I told them I wanted to
see my children, but they would not talk to me.’

Margaret was eventually told that she would be reunited with her
children at Gatwick airport on the flight which was to take her back to
Uganda. ‘There were five big men and two women who came carrying my
children. When we reach the plane I tell them I am not going. They
start abusing me, using all kinds of words. They wanted to put
handcuffs on me, but I refused. I was screaming and the kids were
crying because they did not understand what was happening. One man got
hold of my head and another sat on my back and forced me down. Then the
pilot came and told them to offload me.’

Pilots have intervened in this way on a number of occasions. Many
people, when they are manhandled on to a plane, become distraught, as
well you might if you were raped, tortured or imprisoned in the country
you’re being sent back to. But people who act in this way can be
charged with various offences, resulting in criminal records which will
seriously undermine any asylum claim.

Margaret was put into a van and driven to a police station. ‘I could
not even sit because of the pain in my neck and my back. They were
using all this kind of language: "You fucking idiot. Why did you refuse
to go?" They said they would tell the police I had hit them. They said
I would be arrested and get a criminal record. We got to the police
station and they said I had assaulted them. But the police were so good
to me. They said, "We are going to listen to both sides. And we have to
take you to a hospital to get photographs of your injuries in case
there is a court case."’

Margaret and her children were taken back to Yarl’s Wood and kept there
for another four months. ‘The place was so dirty. It was horrible. My
kids used to cry. My daughter kept on asking when we would leave. I did
not know what to tell her.’

When she was eventually released Margaret was given accommodation by
the National Asylum Support Service (NASS) and she found her daughter a
place at a local school. NASS then told her they were going to move her
to new accommodation in another borough. This would mean removing her
daughter from school all over again. Margaret decided her daughter’s
life had been disrupted enough. So she and her daughters now live on a
friend’s floor.

How did we end up treating human beings in this way?

Mario, the MRC’s legal adviser, came to the UK in 1978, with his wife
and sister-in-law, after escaping from Colombia, where the government
had 68,000 of its opponents behind bars. They were terrified and knew
nothing about asylum law. All the immigration officials who dealt with
their claim, however, were helpful, courteous and surprisingly
knowledgeable about Colombian politics. The three of them were granted
temporary admission. The following year they were given full refugee
status. ‘I can only be grateful to the UK for the protection offered to
me and my family during those difficult days… After nearly 30 years
here, I have two children and one granddaughter. We feel British. When
I come back to the UK after visiting my elderly parents I always feel
as if I am coming home.’

Mario’s is not an isolated case. I’ve spoken to a number of refugees
who arrived in the UK 10, 15, 20 years ago. Most were impressed and
surprised by the warmth of the welcome they received, and none of them
went through the demeaning experiences that many of today’s asylum
seekers go through.

What happened during those intervening years? Of course, there has
always been racism and intolerance, but only in recent times have these
sentiments been allowed to drive and shape official government policy.

Most people don’t know the number of refugees seeking asylum in this
country (in 2007 there were 23,000; a tiny fraction of the 700,000
people from overseas who were allowed to register for work in the UK).
Most people don’t know an asylum seeker. Most people can’t point to a
way in which the presence of asylum seekers has affected their lives in
any way, for better or worse. Consequently the prejudice asylum seekers
face is based on almost total ignorance.

The government could change this. It could treat asylum seekers well
and present this as a badge of national pride. It could let them work
and celebrate their contribution to the economy. It would be cheaper.
And it would have little effect on the numbers of people seeking asylum
here.

The government does not do it, in large part, because it wants to curry
favour with the editors and readers of the tabloid press. And the Mail,
the Sun, the Express, the News of the World, together with their
competitors, have done more than any other body to stir up hatred of
asylum seekers. Here is a tiny selection of ‘asylum’ headlines from the
past 12 months: ‘Asylum seekers turn to attacking Britain’, ‘Asylum
rejects to get NHS for free’, The Asylum Seeker Opera’, ‘Asylum per
left in the UK to attack girl, 7’ , ‘100 years to sort asylum’, Now
even yanks claim UK asylum’.

It’s not simply that many of the stories are false, and that most of
them are deliberately misleading. It is the relentless negativity of
the whole campaign. And the depressing fact that this is where the
majority of people get their information about asylum seekers from.

We have become so used to this kind of rhetoric that it seems almost
normal. But turn the clock back 40 years and replace the words ‘asylum
seekers’ with ‘blacks’, or turn it back another 30 and replace them
with the word ‘Jews’, and you start to see how poisonous it really is.

There have been a number of sympathetic headlines in the past year.
Most of them sat above articles about Gurkhas who had been refused the
right of resettlement in Britain, articles about interpreters working
for the British army whose lives were in danger if they remained in
Iraq, and articles about Al Bangura, who plays for Watford FC and was
threatened with removal to Sierra Leone. All of these articles talked
about injustice. All of them treated their subjects as honourable
people. And all of them demonstrated how simple it is to transform an
abstract hate figure into a living, breathing human being.

At no point has the government made serious efforts to do something
similar. On the contrary, it has consistently tried to keep the most
influential tabloids onside. These papers would have us believe that
this is a story of ‘us’ and ‘them’, of British citizens besieged by
foreigners wanting a share of our hard-earned wealth. But there is no
‘us’ and ‘them’. There have been refugees coming to this country for as
long as records have been kept: Huguenots, Jews, French Catholics,
Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Ugandan Asians… If you can’t find any in
your family you’re probably not looking hard enough.

We forget about these people because yesterday’s refugees no longer
look like refugees. They’re our neighbours, our colleagues, our
grandparents, our in-laws.

When I came home from my day at the Migrants Resource Centre I got out
a large sheet of paper and wrote down the names of all my friends and
family. Then I imagined an alternative world in which no one had ever
been granted asylum in the UK. One by one, I began crossing people out.
More than a quarter of them vanished. Most of them dead in
concentration camps. Or unborn because their parents had died in
concentration camps. Shortly after Sergey was told that he had a fatal
illness he received a letter from the Home Office informing him that he
was being removed from the country. The MRC got in touch to explain
that he was seriously ill. The Home Office wrote back saying that this
was no problem. They would provide a medical team to fly with him back
to Armenia.

Sergey was taken to Colnbrook detention centre where he was put in a
room measuring 8ft x 12ft. He was locked up for twenty three and a half
hours a day and let out for 30 minutes to exercise. There was a camera
in one corner monitoring his movements.

With only days to go before Sergey was put on a plane, Mario Marin
Cotrini threatened the Home Office with judicial review and they
released him.

Until a couple of weeks ago, Sergey was living in a shared house with
two other men. One of them had serious mental health problems. When
this man received a letter saying that he was going to be evicted he
became distraught and decided to set light to the house. This happened
at night. Sergey was sleeping. He had been prescribed tranquillisers to
help with the constant anxiety from which he suffers. Thankfully, being
a doctor, he knew that the pills were bad for his damaged liver, so he
refused to take them. Consequently, when he smelt smoke he woke up
immediately and was able to get out of the house in time. He rang 999
and two policemen arrived along with the fire engine. They asked him to
come back to the station to answer a few questions. He was more than
happy to help. They handcuffed him, locked him in a cell overnight and
told him to report back with a solicitor.

I ask Sergey what he wants from life. ‘For myself I want to be kind. If
you are cold I can give you this jacket. But this jacket, it is
rubbish. If you say you need money I have no money to give you. What
has happened to me? I try to be kind, to be kind, to be kind. I want my
two sons learning that. To be kind. To be polite. To be gentlemen. I am
their father, I am the head of the family, but I cannot help. I am like
a dead man here.’

Just before I leave the Migrants Resource Centre, Mariam comes up to me
with a folder with all the certificates and awards she has received for
her voluntary work. We look through them together. At the back of the
file, however, are all her letters from the Border and Immigration
Agency concerning the progress of her asylum case. I ask if I can read
them. She tells me to go ahead. They are mostly boilerplate stuff,
acknowledging the receipt of papers and informing her of delays. But I
notice that at the bottom of every letter is a slogan written in
capital letters: ‘WORKING FOR A SAFE, JUST AND TOLERANT SOCIETY’.

· The MRC publishes The New Londoners newspaper for Refugee Week, which
starts tomorrow. For details, see

About this articleClose This article appeared in the Observer on Sunday
June 15 2008 on p18 of the Comment & features section. It was last
updated at 00:10 on June 15 2008.