Human Cargo (22 page)

But it was the scene around Behnam and his family that was memorable. They have made many friends during their time in Villawood, men and women who regularly make the long trip from
the city to talk to the detainees and to show support. To one side of the grassy compound, under a large eucalyptus tree, several plastic tables had been pulled together and a tea party was in progress, celebrating Behnam’s birthday. There was an elderly woman in an enormous red floppy hat. There were several middle-aged men, some wearing baseball caps. There were two or three lawyers, some nuns, a journalist or two, a few writers. There were two girl students, new visitors to Villawood. The atmosphere was festive. There was a fine cake with candles, and plates of Iranian food brought in by other Mandaeans already settled in Sydney. Rather late, a woman arrived out of breath, carrying in her arms a great many brightly colored balloons, which rose high among the branches in the breeze. Among them all, charming and collected, wandered Behnam, receiving his birthday greetings.

If you half shut your eyes, fixed them carefully on the cheerful tea party, avoided seeing the tall banks of razor wire rising steeply on all sides, the guards patrolling, the barracklike blocks separated by more wire fences, then you might just have believed yourself to be in an ordinary place.

——————

I
t was on New Year’s Day 2002, a still, cold morning, so gray that at nine o’clock it was barely light, that Suleiman Dialo, a thirty-year-old asylum seeker from Guinea, decided that the moment had come to end his life. Though the coroner, Terence Carney, would later record an open verdict for his death, saying that he had no way of knowing what was in Dialo’s mind when he jumped from Newcastle’s Redheugh Bridge to fall a hundred feet onto the towpath below, narrowly missing the waters of the river Tyne, Dialo’s friend Bertrand has no doubts.

Like Monica Bishop, area manager for the North of England Refugee Service in Newcastle, like Katherine Henderson, Dialo’s lawyer, like the city’s fast-growing population of African asylum seekers, Bertrand knows precisely why Dialo chose to die. Dialo had reached the end of a legal line he had been crawling along for the past eighteen months, and he had finally come to believe that he had nowhere left to go. Sometime in the middle of November he had
been informed that his appeal for asylum in the United Kingdom had been refused; and with it his accommodation, his English lessons at Gateshead College, his health care, his money, the £38 given to him each week by the government (calculated nicely at 70 percent of what is deemed the minimum necessary for a decent life, and therefore not a sum to be envied). He knew that any morning now
⁷
, probably around dawn because that is a good time to catch people in bed, there would be a knock on his door and police would escort him to a detention center and from there to a plane bound for Conakry. Several times, during the year of their friendship, Dialo had told Bertrand that, were he to be finally rejected by the Home Office and the courts, he would choose to die. He could imagine no existence for himself back in Guinea, however hard he tried; and sometime in those next few weeks the Tyne must have come to seem to him better than the torture and death he told Bertrand awaited him at home.

This is not a plaintive tale about a cruel bureaucracy condemning a vulnerable young man to death; rather, it is a story about the loneliness and fear common to asylum seekers everywhere, made worse perhaps in Dialo’s case by the fact that his native language was Fula, which is spoken across parts of West Africa, while there were no other known Fula speakers in the whole of northeast England; that his French was very poor and that he spoke scarcely a sentence of English; and that, in all his childhood in Guinea, he had never learned to read or write. Signposts, letters, instructions, telephone calls, the television and radio, ordinary daily conversation—none of this was available to him in England; his sense of aloneness was both overwhelming and shocking to him. He had not expected it. “He didn’t ever really understand what was happening to him,” says Katherine Henderson, the efficient and involved lawyer who had not long before taken up his case and was still hoping to redeem some of the earlier errors and misunderstandings, and so win Dialo, if not permanent leave to remain in Britain, at least some measure of breathing space. “The world about him had shrunk to almost nothing.”

Even Bertrand, perhaps his closest friend among the Africans in the northeast, was never able to get very close to him: “He didn’t speak much. It was as if he couldn’t bear to talk about himself if he couldn’t explain properly, if he couldn’t put into words what had happened to him and why he so feared to go home. He seemed frightened in case he said a wrong word, and there was no one to know or check.”

I first heard about Dialo in the early summer of 2003 from Gaby Kitoko, a medical student who fled eastern Congo in 2000, leaving behind him a wife and two children, after he was accused of spying for the United Nations. Gaby was one of the first asylum seekers to be sent to the northeast to await news of whether he would be accepted as a refugee, back in the days when Newcastle had no asylum seekers living on its housing estates, and before the Home Office in London started scattering young men and women from some ninety countries around Britain. Gaby walks with a limp, from what the Congolese soldiers did to him before letting him go. Three years later, he is still waiting to hear whether he may be granted leave to remain in Britain, and with it permission to apply to be joined by his family; but in the meantime, frightened on behalf of himself and other asylum seekers of the sense of isolation and incomprehension that afflicts all who wait, he has started a small local center for Africans in Byker, one of Newcastle’s housing developments.

Patrolled, back in the nineteenth century when it was still a country district, by one of Newcastle’s only two mounted policemen, Byker was once home to Newcastle’s thriving community of dock workers. Now it is all battered redbrick housing and desolate streets, with shabby terracing and occasional shops, protected by thick sheets of metal and iron bars. On top of the few taller buildings, where police have put closed-circuit cameras to catch signs of disorder and crime, razor wire has been fastened to safeguard the cameras from theft and breakage. There is an air of poverty and abandonment. To open his community center, with the help of local flinders, Gaby took over three derelict shops and knocked them into a single cheerful room, in which each day he listens to the ills and
worries of the Congolese, Zimbabweans, Angolans, and Rwandans who come to consult him. Gaby barely knew Dialo, he said to me, while behind us, on a vast television donated by a local well-wisher, a portly and energetic gospel preacher in pinstripe suit and waistcoat exhorted his studio congregation to heed God. Gaby greeted Dialo when he saw him, but as a fellow African, not a friend. It was only after his death that Gaby was asked, as a leader of Newcastle’s African community, to say something to journalists; his words were toned down by a local refugee officer, anxious that his valediction should not sound too accusatory. Dialo died, said Gaby, because of despair; it was threat of deportation that pushed him, literally, from the bridge. These were not words that people want to hear.

Dialo didn’t have many close friends, since he couldn’t talk to them as he wished to. Photographs show a thin, wiry, good-looking young man, with dreadlocks and a quizzical smile; in one, he is leaning against a door, his elbow outstretched, one foot, wearing a fashionable sneaker, crossed rather jauntily over the other, his head dipped to one side, the dreadlocks falling along his cheek, a half smile on his face. Monica Bishop, the goodhearted and motherly woman at the Newcastle refugee service, told me that hugging clients was not something that she normally ever did, but that with Dialo, she had broken her own rules. “He used to come into the office frequently, and we had no time to look after him. He didn’t say very much. He just sat and smiled. And I would say: ‘Suleiman, you’ll be all right. You really will be all right.’ And then I would give him a cuddle.” He was, Monica repeated several times, a greatly liked young man, a “lovely lad.”

When Dialo ceased to be all right no one really knows. He reached Britain in July 2000, at twenty-seven somewhat older than many of the other African asylum seekers, from a small Guinean village far from the capital. He told Bertrand, whom he met that November at Gateshead College where he had gone to study English, that he had been forced to flee because his parents and brothers and sisters had been murdered. He said that he had left behind him a shop and a good life as a trader. Monica told me that Dialo had scars
all over his back, from being beaten by the people who killed his parents. I asked Bertrand if he knew whether Dialo had been tortured. He looked puzzled: “Of course.” I had made the same mistake before: forgetting that torture is now endemic across many parts of Africa, and how many asylum seekers come to Britain bearing scars from cigarettes, bayonets, rifle butts, boiling water, or whips. “There was also something wrong with his feet, because when I started a football team for Africans, he would come but only watch.” Falaka, the beating on the soles of the feet practiced by torturers all over the modern world, can leave injuries that are slow to heal.

Bertrand and Dialo met only in the evenings, because Bertrand was a regular business student at Newcastle University, with a French passport to ensure him smooth passage in and out of England, while Dialo was an uncertain asylum seeker, who seemed to find learning to speak English extremely difficult. But in the evenings, when the Africans met and played music and talked, Dialo would sit and listen. Bertrand didn’t ask him questions about his past. In any case, in those days, Bertrand wasn’t much concerned with refugee matters. It wasn’t until Dialo’s death that he really began to wonder about the fairness of it all. All he thought about before that was how hard it must be for Dialo, with no friend who spoke Eula, and no more than perhaps a dozen people in the whole area who could understand some of his broken West African French, with its words of dialect and distinctive intonation, difficult to unravel even for those who speak French well. He worried when Dialo told hirn that his first legal representative in London had insisted on interviewing him only with a French and not a Fula interpreter, and that Dialo knew that he had not been able to get across either to him or to the Home Office the many terrible things that had befallen him at home.

All through the summer and autumn of 2001, in her office in the middle of Newcastle, not far from the statue of the eighteenth-century Whig reformer Earl Grey, under which the refugees of Newcastle like to meet, Monica Bishop worried about Dialo. She repeatedly wrote to the Home Office, in order to have his hearing
adjourned while she desperately combed the northeast not just for a decent solicitor to take his case but for a Fula interpreter who could understand and translate what he had to say. Even now, she cannot bear to consign his file to the archives, but keeps it buried in a drawer of her desk. She found it and gave it to me to read. “He is extremely distressed,” says one of her letters to a reputable firm of solicitors, written in May, “and I hope that you will be able to represent him.” This particular firm was unable to, already having more cases on their books than they could deal with. Other solicitors declined as well. I went through the file. There were other letters: to sort out problems over accommodation, to ask for travel warrants to attend hearings, to request further postponements. There is a brief note describing the fact that Dialo had been imprisoned several times in Guinea, where some of his teeth had been extracted as part of torture, and that his feet were damaged. By the time Dialo was accepted by Katherine Henderson, who has specialized as a solicitor in asylum cases for several years now, his appeal had just been turned down.

The last time Bertrand saw Dialo alive was at the beginning of December, not long after he had received a letter from the Home Office telling him that they did not consider him a “Convention refugee,” a person recognized under the 1951 Convention as having a justified fear of returning to his own country. He seemed confused, and he complained that he couldn’t understand how it was that some of the asylum seekers he had met had made up stories, fabricated events and dates and even torture, and yet been granted asylum, while he had told everyone the truth and been turned down. It was at this last meeting that he told Bertrand that he would never go back to Guinea. It had taken too much to get to Britain, too much emotion and courage and too much money, and he had nothing and no one to go back to. He felt, he said, like an
écbec
, a failure. He had left Guinea in order to save his own life: why go back now to die? And it had all become too difficult: the language, the fact that he was not allowed to work, the way he couldn’t understand anything. He wanted a private life of his own, not to be treated like a
child, and he could no longer bear to depend on others for everything. And he was afraid; inside himself, he was afraid about what he would find waiting for him.

Bertrand was shocked by Dialo’s death; he had not anticipated it. But when it happened, it made sense to him. Dialo was not enjoying life. He wasn’t the kind of person who would ever have been able to slip into Britain’s underground economy and live along the margins, and he had nowhere else to go. He was, as Bertrand sees it, a strong individual, with a strong instinct for survival, or he would never have managed to overcome the torture, his parents’ murders, and his own escape to Europe. But his strength had all been used up in the waiting, the uncertainty, the humiliations, and the sense of rejection. What haunts Bertrand now is that he did not see all this sooner.