WELCOME, STRANGER, TO MY DOORSTEP NOW…
"Beriwan Ay loves Mondays", Paul Kelbie of the Independent on Sunday tells us. "It's the one day of the week when her monotonous existence as a detainee of Britain's asylum policy is broken by a chance to play table tennis. If she's really lucky she might even get a banana".
14-year-old Beriwa is a Kurdish asylum seeker. She, her mother & three sisters are incarcerated in the bleak Dungavel Detention Centre in Lanarkshire, Scotland. They live in one 13'x13' room in an old hunting lodge, surrounded by a steel fence topped with razor wire & watched by surveillance cameras. The crime that warrants this sentence (which, incidentally, has no fixed term) is being a Southern Turkish Kurd who fled oppression.
There are detention centres all over Britain set up to contain men, women & children who have acted on the notion (surely the triumph of hope over observed experience) that the democracies of Europe will provide a natural harbour for those fleeing tyranny. Whatever the sources of this intelligence - television, videos, newspapers, glossy magazines, propaganda from the democracies that toppled Saddam Hussein, word of mouth - somehow a picture has been formed of nations free from fear in which children might be educated & an honest living might be made. Such is the clarity & potency of this vision parents will uproot their families &, leaving all that is familiar (sometimes all that is known), they will cross continents in appalling discomfort & constant danger, frequently having spent all their money on the venture. And them, on arrival in the target country, all reasonable expectations of a warm welcome are dashed. If briefly left to their own devices they encounter active hostility across the full spectrum of xenophobia. When in the custody of the state the insubstantiality of the democratic dream becomes fully apparent.
Why are we so afraid of these people? Whenever it is announced that an old hotel or a disused house is to be converted to accommodate asylum seekers, neighbourhood reaction is almost universally negative. When questioned local residents simply state that the location is unsuitable. Sympathy for the plight of these terrified aliens is declared but there is implacable resistance to the prospect of its being made practically manifest next door.
However, if pressed by a dogged journalist or TV interviewer an individual might just be manoeuvred into taking that extra step, that fateful forward motion from bland & non-specific concern into particular prejudice. Awkward reference might be made to reservations about cultural mismatch & language problems, these worries murmured with eyes averted. Further probing might provoke more assertive anxieties - a rise in the area's crime rate, property values plummeting, schools flooded with non-English-speaking children, these worries delivered with increasing emotional emphasis, both verbal & tonal. And when these individuals gather collectively that patina of respectable detachment peels away & the cheery, slow-talking guy who sells you vegetables or takes your cash at the filling station becomes someone else, someone ugly, someone scared & he doesn't know why.
What a very short distance we've covered from cave to castle to condo. Difference, just difference - not difference as in scales or fins or horns - pushes us straight back into that hole in the rockface. And it's not just the guy at the filling station who doesn't know any better. It's police officers, customs officials, judges, government ministers. It's Michael Howard, Tory Home Secretary under John Major, whose swingeing proposals concerning foreign immigration would, had they been imposed when his central European father
brought the family into Britain seeking asylum decades before, have denied him the opportunity to vote in this country, much less be a member of the Cabinet.
I wonder whether Beriwa Ay will be playing table tennis or eating her occasional banana in Dungavel Detention Centre in a year's time. Or will she by then have been returned to her Kurdish homeland in Southern Turkey? Whatever her individual fate, the certainty seems to be that institutional hostility to the huddled masses of the world will be even more secure in philosophy & practice than is the case now. And the corollary of that can only be that, as tyrannies fall, those that inherit power will remember our generosity well.
1:15:17 AM 
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