Asylum debate alarms Sudanese refugees

By Nima Elbagir

LONDON, April 28 (Reuters) – The young woman lifts her top to show scars on her ribcage, the legacy of trying to collect testimony from rape victims in a camp in Sudan’s Darfur region.

A young girl listens to women talking in a counselling tent at Abushouk camp near El Fasher, the capital of North Darfur state November 7, 2004. The camp is home to more than 45,000 people who have fled fighting in western Sudan’s troubled Darfur region, where sexual violence against women is common. (Reuters) .

“We were caught leaving the camp by a group of Janjaweed (militiamen) and beaten with camel whips — it wasn’t the pain so much as the humiliation that still makes me cry,” said the woman, a Sudanese who had wanted to pass the testimony to human rights workers.

Having fled Darfur for Sudan’s capital Khartoum and then England, she has applied for refugee status and told Reuters she was following the election campaign with growing panic.

“I feel sick every time I read the word ‘asylum’ in a paper,” said the 22-year-old who asked not to be named, fearing a negative reaction to her comments from her English neighbours.

“I don’t leave the house. People on our street know my brother and I are seeking asylum and I can’t meet their eyes.”

Immigration and asylum have been the campaign’s most explosive issues. The Conservatives have made them central to their strategy, pledging to impose a limit on the number of asylum seekers the country would accept each year.

Prime Minister Tony Blair’s Labour party has promised to increase detentions and removals of failed asylum seekers.

Newspapers have also come under increased criticism by refugee support groups for their coverage of the subject.

Headlines such as “Asylum cheats” and “Britain has had enough” greet refugees on an almost daily basis.

“When we were in Darfur we would hear Tony Blair and (Foreign Minister) Jack Straw on the BBC say how Darfur was important and we felt glad but you come here and the way people treat you makes you realise we’re nothing to them,” the woman said at a house in London shared with other refugees.

“HOSTILE” REPORTING

The Refugee Council has called reporting and commentary on asylum seekers and refugees in the press “often hostile, unbalanced and factually incorrect”.

An independent report last year found police and refugee research agencies believed bad reporting contributed to racist attacks on asylum seekers and refugees.

The agencies viewed the media coverage as one of the biggest problems affecting refugees’ quality of life, the report commissioned by the Mayor of London found.

The woman said many Darfuris still in Sudan saw this country as the ultimate safe haven but those who manage to find their way here say the dream quickly becomes a nightmare.

The woman’s older brother came to this country on a student visa but says he now feels torn — unable to return to Sudan but increasingly unhappy here.

“I’m educated, I know what the papers here say about us,” he said.

“I remember reading them when the Darfur crisis began, I would read The Sun and others and think they cared. But now I know the British only care when we are far away. When we are their problem we are dirt.”

The United Nations refugee agency UNHCR says that — contrary to popular perception — there are only 250,000 refugees in this country, two percent of the 10 million worldwide, and has attacked politicians for “the propagation of asylum myths”.

“UNHCR is terribly worried as among some quarters the crisis rhetoric and lumping of asylum with migration issues continues, often fuelled by thinly disguised xenophobia and political opportunism,” said UNHCR representative Anne Dawson-Shepherd in a statement aimed at political parties.

“The number of people claiming asylum in the UK has dropped 61 percent over the last two years, back to levels not seen since the early 1990s.”

The woman and her brother said they were not reassured that things would get better after the election furore had died down.

“Sometimes I think I’d rather return to the ashes of my village,” she said.