Published in Hewler Globe

Tuesday December 20 2005

Two Kurdish teenagers talk to the Hawler Globe about their escape from Syria and their struggle to secure asylum in the UK

Only three years ago, 17-year-old Kurdish refugee Eva Sulaiman couldn’t speak a word of English nor had she ever had any kind of formal education. Today she’s finishing business school and hoping to train as a solicitor.

Eva is a Syrian Kurd, and one of the tens of thousands of people seeking asylum in Britain last year.

She arrived in the country in November 2002 with her mother, Amina Ibrahim, two sisters and baby nephew, and has since frequently found herself in the media spotlight as she and her family have vehemently fought deportation and endeavoured to secure a new life away from Syria.

One of her sisters, Nasrin, has since been granted full asylum, and lives with her husband in Birmingham, whilst Eva and her younger sister Lorin, live with their mother and subsist on a Discretionary Leave to Remain, which will expire in April 2007.

Many Kurds flee their homes Syria each year, claiming political persecution, and believing their lives to be in danger. A great deal of these go the UK, whose asylum laws currently allow for an annual 6,000 people to take refuge within its borders.

This figure includes those who have been granted asylum, and those who are allowed to stay on a temporary basis, whose cases are open to review.

In making the initial arrangements to visit the family at their home in Southsea in Portsmouth, I was surprised to find myself negotiating on the phone with a young girl midway through her GCSEs, who was impressively apt at handling press enquiries.

Lorin and Eva have taken control of the family’s campaign against deportation back to Syria, in the absence of their father, who has been imprisoned for 12 years now, and in the light of their mother’s physical and mental ill-health.

The girls talk openly and comprehensively about their experiences, undaunted. Their determination is hard to fathom: just recently, they were the subject of a national television documentary for the British Channel 4 called “Don’t Kick us Out”.

Eva puts on a recording of the hour-long programme to show me, and I am struck by the ease with which the sisters appear before the cameras, which appear to have followed them everywhere for a period of several weeks.

The Sulaimans are originally from Derek in the predominantly Kurdish northeast of Syria. “We are maktoumeen,” Lorin told me. “It means that we are unregistered. We have no real rights in Syria; no passports, no IDs.”

There are approximately 75,000 maktoumeen currently living in Syria, ‘invisible’ people with literally no status, for whom schooling, working, travelling, and even marriage is made near-impossible by the beaurocratic red tape that discriminates against this segment of the country’s Kurdish population.

The origins of the maktoumeen date back to a census taken in 1962, that stripped 120,000 Kurds in Syria of their citizenship, on the supposed grounds that they were not born on national soil. Status could only be regained if the persons or families in question could prove that they had lived there since before 1945, a loophole that bore no fruit for the majority of those left stateless.

The highest estimate of the number of denationalised Kurds in Syria today is thought to be around 300,000, though many of these have a slightly improved status, having been issued with identity cards, which nonetheless state that they are not actually Syrian nationals, and so are unable to travel. These people are referred to as ajanib, meaning ‘foreigners’. But maktoumeen do not even enjoy the privilege of an identity card, and are truly unaccounted for.

Lorin and Eva’s father, Mohammed, was arrested and imprisoned in 1963 when the girls were four and five, respectively. They have not seen or heard from him since.

“He was active with Yekiti, and was arrested for putting up posters,” Lorin tells me. The Yekiti Party is a Syrian political movement campaigning for the rights of Kurds in the country, and has seen many of its members detained and imprisoned. “No one told us what had happened,” Lorin continues, “we knew because one of our father’s friends who had been with him managed to get away, and came home to tell us that he had been arrested.”

According to Lorin, after her father’s departure, her mother, Amina Ibrahim, who had seven children, made the decision to continue his work, and herself ended up in jail for five years, where she claims she was also tortured.

It was shortly after her release and the arrest of her older son, Mosoud, that she made the decision to flee the country, taking three of her daughters, one son and her grandson with her.

“We had to sell everything to be able to leave the country,” Lorin says. “We were smuggled out into Turkey by a man who pretended we were his family.”

Such bids for escape are extremely dangerous and incredibly costly, with refugee smugglers charging between US$3,000 and $12,000 for their services.

Lorin recounts how the family stayed in Istanbul for a while, and from there were helped by an agent who put the women on a truck out of the country, while her brother stayed behind. Somewhere in Europe, the family had to change to another lorry that was bound for Britain. The driver of the vehicle had no idea that they were inside.

Eight days later, the family found themselves “somewhere” in England.

Eva remembers their first hours on British soil: “We had no idea where we were. We just knew we had arrived. We had been told to go straight to the nearest police station, and so that’s what we did. We spoke no English, and the first thing we tried to get was milk for my sister’s baby.”

The family immediately declared themselves asylum seekers and were transported to a shelter in Wolverhampton, then later to Birmingham, until they were finally settled in Portsmouth.

In Britain, only 3% of asylum applications are immediately granted in full, and the Sulaimans soon found themselves among the rejected majority, eligible for deportation. Last October, their worst fears materialised: their house was subject to a police raid.

“They burst into my room in the middle of the night, while I was sleeping,” says Eva. “We were told we had to leave immediately.”

The girls and their mother were taken to a detention centre, where they were kept for eleven days. All three of them went on hunger strike, refusing to eat. Their incarceration caused a stir in the local community: friends from Lorin’s school immediately organised a petition with 2,000 signatures, and a protest, while the family’s legal advisors worked around the clock to prevent the three of them being taken back to Syria.

A sharp decline in Amina’s health which resulted in her collapse hours before the family was due to leave Britain, delayed their departure, and eventually paved the way for an appeal to the Home Office on the decision to refuse their first application.

I ask Eva if she has any idea what might have happened to them, had they been forced to go home. She shakes her head, “That wouldn’t have happened,” she says. “I would have slit my wrists first.”

Her experience with the authorities in Britain around the time of their attempted deportation has soured Eva’s attitude towards her current country of residence. She speaks of eventually leaving Britain, after qualifying as a solicitor: “I don’t want to stay after what they did to us,” she says, “I’ll go anywhere I can, even China.”

Watching Eva’s interview on the television, I see her boldly repeat her claim in front of the camera: “In England they treat dogs better than asylum seekers,” she maintains.

Britain is, however, the largest European recipient of asylum seekers, after France, although recent changes in immigration policy have seen the yearly quota for accepting refugees fall quite dramatically. These figures are in line with a reduction in the number of applications.

In 2004, of approximately 34,000 principle applicants, 6,000 were granted some form of temporary or permanent stay, compared with the 84,000 applications only two years previous, of which 31,000 were given permission to stay.

Eva Sulaiman was disappointed by their rejection, but was somewhat heartened by the fact that the family do not have to go back to Syria for at least another two years.

I ask her if she misses Syria. “I miss Kurdistan, not the Syrian part,” she says, drawing a distinction between her home and the rest of the country. “I miss everything; our neighbours, our house.” But Eva is not optimistic that the situation in Syria will ever improve, nor that they will ever secure rights and citizenship.

Syria’s Minister of Information made a pledge last summer that the government would consider granting citizenship to 120,000 Kurds in the country. The statement was met with scepticism, which has increased as time goes on and there is still no discernable sign of change.