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Just returned from a month helping destitute refugees at the border in Calais, Alex Holmes updates us on what life is like there now for those at the very margins of our society.  #Blog.

Fireside. Hamid is drawing. A broad highway tapers across the paper towards the mid-distant horizon. He uses the side of his phone to draw the tall walls that cut the road from the surrounding landscape. ‘Like here’, he says, pointing to the 4 metre high, UK funded, ‘security wall’ beneath which the small Eritrean encampment nestles. ‘When I get to the UK, I will be an artist or I will have a restaurant. That is my dream’. 

Providentially, just metres away, Rue Pasteur Martin Luther King runs as straight as the road in Hamid’s drawing towards the city centre. 58 years ago, Martin Luther King led the Walk to Freedom in Detroit where he gave the first of his ‘I have a dream’ speeches. He spoke of the Right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, of ‘dark yesterdays’ being transformed into ‘bright tomorrows’. Calais’ Collège Martin Luther King proudly displays the 3 worded icon of French identity: Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité. Liberty is in short supply for this exiled community. They have no documented identity, they’re deemed to have entered the country illegally, and are evicted from their encampment every day. But there is egality (every 2 weeks there is a change of the leadership group) and a deep fraternity. 

‘There are good times here and I can be happy. We look after each other’. Beside the fire, Yusef tells me of his most intimate experience of fraternity, when imprisoned in Eritrea after attempting to flee the country to avoid indefinite military conscription. A 2015 UN inquiry into gross human rights violations in Eritrea states that ‘thousands of conscripts are subjected to forced labour that effectively abuses, exploits and enslaves them for years’* According to the Global Slavery Index, ‘Eritrea has the highest prevalence of modern slavery across Africa (and the second in the world’)** ‘We were so close to each other in prison; we might fight but the next day we were best of friends. I will always remember those guys’. Yusef escaped in a mass breakout. He walked 6 days with no food, no shoes, terrified he would be informed on if he knocked at a door to ask for help. He eventually made it home, only to be caught and imprisoned after a second failed attempt at escaping the country. We discuss happiness. ‘If you listen to your body, you are never satisfied’, he tells me, ‘the body always wants more. You must listen to your soul. Your soul is with God. If you listen to your soul, you will want to do good to others, and that will make them happy, and make you happy’. Suddenly he’s gone, reappearing a few minutes later with a black bin bag which he slits open and puts around my shoulders. It has started to rain.

Fireside, the wind is relentless, in perpetual self-combat. A paper cup pirouettes around the fire. ‘Tiki (smoke in Tigrinya) is your best friend, it always comes to you’ jokes Mewael. Rats scuttle out from the undergrowth in search of food. Mewael picks up a stone and hurls it towards a stationary rat sniffing the air. He misses his target by a whisker. His English, like Yusef’s, is good. ‘I tried to read ‘The Power of Now’ by Eckhart Tolle, but it was a bit hard. Now I am reading ‘Think and Grow Rich’. I ask him what he will do if he grows rich. ‘I will have a chain of hotels all around the world’. Like Hamid, Mewael too has a dream.

Fireside. Milk heating over the flames. At last a feel of summer. Fikru, his hair freshly dyed black, grins as he points at my head, ‘I used to look like you…and now I am a young man again.’ Each day, I’m taught a new phrase in Tigrinya. Today Fikru’s offering is ‘alam dirfo’, (the world is a chicken). ‘Explain!’ I ask. ‘The world is a chicken, to one person it gives an egg, to another, poop’. There is much laughter. I share news of Eritrean friends I first met here in Calais, Isaias who has just graduated in chemical engineering, Sheshy who is about to study pharmacy, Anbesa, dentistry. Dreams materialising. Hamid joins the fireside gathering. ‘This is for you’, he says, handing me his now completed drawing. The walled-in road arrows into the mid-distance; once there, a new world opens, hills, the sun, birds, a plane. Still a dream for Hamid, but one that he’s determined to birth. ‘You go to UK tomorrow’. He punches the air. ‘I will get there before you!’  

In this last blog before the weekly blog takes a break for the summer,  Danny Sweeney gives his personal reflection on the latest news that asylum seekers may be transported from the UK to camps in Rawanda to have their asylum claims assessed. 

This question is one of many cries of despair which I have seen over recent months. As a volunteer with Care4Calais I found myself interviewing people accommodated in a hotel outside of Leeds by the Home Office. The “her” in this case was a manager of the hotel who had been threatening the asylum seekers living under her care with sanctions against their claims for asylum and with physical violence. Care4Calais’ involvement collecting testimony of mistreatment to force a judicial review, along with distributing much needed supplies had previously been undertaken at Napier Barracks in Kent. This camp along with Penarth in Wales is where the Home Office had been detaining asylum seekers in unsafe, COVID non-secure facilities. The use of these camps had been condemned by human rights groups since their inception, and the transfer of asylum seekers to these sites has since been declared unlawful by the Supreme Court. Sadly, the evidence of all these failures appears to have done nothing to stop the Home Secretary in pursuit of increasingly cruel policies. 

Next week the Home Secretary Priti Patel brings forward the “Borders Bill”; the legislation which was poorly consulted on earlier in the year. This week The Times revealed that the Home Office is planning to create a centre in Rwanda to process asylum claims. The intention appears to be that anyone who enters the UK through irregular means (which is most asylum seekers) will be removed and taken the 4,000+ miles to Rwanda to have their claim decided there. One commentator noted that removing asylum seekers from communities across the UK to camps in south-east England was idea number one. Now they are to be taken even further away from those of us who would seek to welcome them.

The UK government is not alone is pursuing these tactics. Australia’s policy of “offshoring” asylum with camps on Manus and Naura has been condemned by human rights organisations around the world, and even by the UK government which now seeks to emulate it. The costs of that policy have been reported as being equivalent of £2 million, per person, per year. While the costs and funding of the UK-Rwanda proposal are not yet public it is hard to imagine, given what we are learning about corruption and the funnelling of public money to close friends of Conservative ministers throughout the COIVD pandemic that opportunities don’t exist to take public money as personal profit while cutting further corners when it comes to the care of vulnerable people. Patel’s current policy also has chilling reminders of the Israeli government removing Eritrean and Sudanese people to third countries, Rwanda and later Uganda. Deemed illegal by the courts and condemned by the UNHCR this policy left many with irregular immigration status, unable to work, and at risk of being returned to their country of origin, the place which they are seeking protection from. A process known as ‘refoulment’. 

This week we celebrated the Feast of Saints Peter and Paul, the first missionaries of the church. The Book of Acts recalls Saint Paul being shipwrecked on Malta and the extraordinary welcome that he was shown. I doubt that next week in Parliament we will see any such welcome being planned for refugees in this new legislation. I live in hope, but sadly not expectation of an MP standing up and asking the Home Secretary; “where is her humanity?”.

Margaret Donnelly,  Justice and Peace Scotland's representative for Dungavel Immigration Removal Centre, has been involved with Dungavel since it opened in 2001, getting to know and keeping in contact with many of the detainees. Here Margaret reflects on  her latest involvement.

Thursday 24th May
A member of a Justice and Peace Group in Newcastle contacted the Glasgow Group though their Facebook page to ask for assistance with a young woman who was being moved from Newcastle  to Dungavel Removal Centre and was very frightened. Glasgow J&P contacted me.

Friday 25th May
When I received this information, I phoned the lady in Newcastle who had provided her telephone number and she gave me the information she had. The young woman was in her 20’s and had lived in Newcastle for several year she was Albanian, spoke good English and had contact with J & P through a centre for refugees which they were involved with.

On Wednesday 23rd of May while she was at home the Border Agency and police came and arrested her. The lady from J & P arrived later to deliver a food parcel she was not at home and phoned the Albanian lady to be told she had been taken to Glasgow. It was at this point I became involved. after checking it was okay to pass on her phone number, I called Dungavel and spoke to her. She was very frightened and told me she was a room on her own, couldn’t get the tv to work and had no money by this time she said her leg was sore. From our contact in Newcastle, I found out she had a long-term injury to her leg and had an appointment in July to attend Newcastle hospital.

Saturday 26th of May
I phoned Dungavel in the morning and spoke to the person on duty and told her what had been said to me. She had gone to see what the situation was and was able to tell me that:
1.     because the young woman had come from outside Dungavel she was in isolation and could be for up to 20 days.
2.  Money is put into an account at the shop which is in Dungavel and since she couldn’t leave her room, she could write a listen for things she wanted brought to her. I was able to pass the information onto her

The Following Days
I spoke to her several time over the following days she told me she saw the nurse who gave her paracetamol, but this wasn’t helping with her leg pain. She saw the chaplain who is Muslim as she is, and was able to speak with him. I did suggest that she contact a lawyer in Glasgow, and she told me that she had filled in a forum to contact one.

Several times when I tried to speak to her, she didn’t answer her phone, then I got a text message to say she had no money on it. I did phone her and say she could get money onto her phone via the shop at Dungavel. Then the contact at Newcastle told me she had a letter telling her she was going to be deported on Thursday 10th June and the following day she was being moved to Manchester. Two days later she would move to Colnbrook near Heathrow.

June 8th
The contact in Newcastle has spoken to her and found that she had not contacted a lawyer in Glasgow and so it is the lawyer who was assigned to her when she entered the country that is handling her case. It seems her leg injury has deteriorated, and she has had a visit to a hospital, and it is felt that this maybe be a reason to delay her deportation.

Whether or not the story has a happy ending, there is consolation in knowing that the J&P network is thriving, and we can call on one another for assistance.
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For more information on Margaret’s work with detainees in Dungavel, watch the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybiNpUFE3f4