So much of the chatter around refugee stories are from people who are neither refugees nor involved with the support of refugees. Refugee Radio Times: Voices of Asylum, Identity and Resistance, edited by Lorna Stephenson and Stephen Silverwood, is a welcome focus on the lived experiences of refugees from very different backgrounds and with different needs in terms of support.
All refugees deserve to be treated with dignity and respect not just as fellow individual human beings seeking assistance in extreme circumstances but as a special category recognised in international law as requiring specific protections. Britain, as a politically and economically stable democracy, has a moral responsibility to protect refugees and as a signatory of the 1951 Refugee Convention is legally bound to adhere to the terms which define specific protections required to be granted to refugees entering and living in the country. Sadly, there are no oversight bodies to monitor and enforce the Convention in cases of non compliance by signatories and the United Nations High Commisioner for Refugees has supervisory powers only.
Britain is currently failing refugees both morally and legally as the stories told in Refugee Radio Times expose. Refugee Radio is a registered charity and radio station in Brighton which aims to support local projects targeting issues of mental health, isolation and social exclusion among refugee communities. Refugee Radio Times is a collection of ‘perspectives on the issues of asylum, refuge and migration’ as experienced by people from all over the world and in different eras, including Burma 1958, Iran 1979, Cameroon 1990s who have encountered the British refugee ‘system’.
Every story is valuable but for me the most haunting was not of the dangers and traumas told first hand by those who have experienced them, although they are powerful and necessary, but the chapter entitled The Trial: Franz Kafka and the UK Asylum Process, by Stephen Silverwood. ‘Kafkaesque’ may be an overused term but is entirely fitting in describing the ‘nightmarish tales of individual helplessness in the face of a complex bureaucracy’ (Refugee Radio Times p.72) experienced by many refugees in this country. Silverwood deftly links Kafka’s stories to the actuality of life as a refugee in Britain. The Home Office and its Immigration and Visa department as faceless institutions where information, when it is available is fragmentary and often contradictory. Documents are frequently lost of misplaced and direct contact made impossible as internal phone numbers are kept secret and regularily changed.
Any human contact with the system or process is through uniformed enforcement officers and guards provided by private security firms, often in the event of detention and deportation. Refugees who arrive seeking asylum, in many cases already traumatised by what they have seen and experienced, are often man-handled, ill-treated or ignored by the officers and guards employed by private companies who provide these services as cheaply as possible. The toll on mental health is obvious in the statistics on suicide within these centres. It is a long list which includes Kimpua Nsimba, a 24 year-old Congolese man found hanged in Harmondsworth. In the last four days of his life no one had spoken to him.
There is much trauma in the lives of refugees but Refugee Radio Times also supports the building of resilience and mental health in individuals who have fled their own countries in search of safety. Pop over to https://refugeeradio.org.uk/ to listen. Buy the book which is available in the store with all profits going back into community projects supported by the charity. Read the book to learn firsthand about life as a refugee from refugees themselves. If you can, support them. The above link has a handy donate button on the top right of the screen.
Significantly Different 