refuge

Lenin’s right. This is fantastic stuff:

The estate became home for hundreds of families escaping persecution and torture in places such as Iraq, Afghanistan, Algeria, Uganda and Congo. Most had their request for asylum in the UK turned down, and when the Home Office began coming to the estate at 5am to remove them, Donnachie and the rest of the residents looked on in horror. "It was like watching the Gestapo - men with armour, going in to flats with battering rams. I've never seen people living in fear like it," says Donnachie. "I saw a man jump from two storeys up when they came for him and his family. I stood there and I cried, and I said to myself, 'I am not going to stand by and watch this happen again.'"

She got together with her friend Noreen and organised the residents into daily dawn patrols, looking out for immigration vans. When the vans arrived, a phone system would swing in to action, warning asylum seekers to escape.

The whole estate pitched in, gathering in large crowds in the early-morning dark to jeer at immigration officials as they entered the tower blocks. On more than one occasion, the vans left the estate empty - the people they had come for had got out in time and were hidden by the crowd. The estate kept this up for two years until forced removals stopped.

And from up the road a few miles:

At the back of the Asda car park in Bury, Greater Manchester, is the Mosses community centre. Inside, along with the sewing group and the creche, Sue Arnall is working hard to protect the asylum-seeking families in the area. Born and bred in Bury and proud of it, the retired teacher was horrified to learn that children in her town were living in fear of being sent to countries some of them had never even visited. Like Donnachie, she felt compelled to act.

She and other women at the community centre mobilised local support, organising marches, getting local schools on board, barraging the local MP and helping asylum seekers with their legal cases. "Most of the children are safe now," she says, "but not all of them. And there are new ones arriving all the time who we need to fight for."

This, on the other hand…

The first Iraqi interpreters to be offered refuge in Britain are living in fear in squalid tower blocks in Glasgow, The Times has learnt.

They complained of living among drunks and drug addicts, being abused and spat at, and of feeling isolated and unable to work. One girl of 9 had had her hijab torn off by one of her new neighbours.

Abdul, 71, one of three Iraqis who risked their lives working for British troops in Basra and were resettled in April with 15 dependents, advised others in a similar position to stay in Iraq.

Maybe that was the idea.

Comments

[a very public sociologist]

When word reaches back home to Iraq about how interpreters are forced to live in Blighty, I suspect fewer will be willing to come forward.

Re: the first two stories, it's excellent. You won't get that reported on in The Sun and The Heil!

[Alex]

The description in your third link appears identical to all previous media reporting about the estate in the first.