Solace Surviving Exile and Persecution

Mbole Kapola (1968-2012)

2012-02-22T15:03:00.003Z

When Mbole came to the UK on 18 February 2000, he was hoping that the hell he had been through in the Congo was over and he could start a new life, free of worry and persecution. But it was not to be. When he died suddenly twelve years later on 10 February, 2012, he was still an asylum seeker waiting for his umpteenth appeal against deportation to the Congo, where all his Congolese friends and Mbole himself knew that he would not survive for long.

Most of the last two year’s of Mbole’s life were spent in detention centres, not because he had committed any crime, but because the Home Office were determined to deport him. Mbole and his friends and allies were equally determined to prevent that from happening because they all understood that being sent back to the Congo was to all intents and purposes an outsourced death sentence.

The Congolese authorities take a particularly dim view of Congolese nationals deported from the UK. Many of them are tracked as soon as they arrive at the airport and then picked up by the military and dumped in jails where they are tortured and killed. Mbole understood that this was the fate in store for him if he lost his right to remain in the UK.

Mbole escaped from the Congo in 2000 after his entire family, including his parents, wife and two children, were all killed because of his father’s political involvement with a Rwandan group. Mbole was kept alive so he could be incarcerated in jail and tortured to extract information from him.

Months of torture left their scars on Mbole, both physically and mentally. He suffered from chronic back pain and his leg never fully recovered after he was stabbed in jail. His body had all the signs of being tortured and his mind was clearly troubled by all of his experiences.

Like many victims of torture and persecution, Mbole suffered from memory loss which was both a blessing and a curse. When he first sought asylum in the UK, the Home Office did not believe his story of persecution and torture. Immigration judges took the view that he was not a ‘credible witness’. They dismissed a medical report by an expert, which added weight to his claims that he had been tortured.

I first met Mbole at Solace in 2008 after he had recently arrived in Leeds, having spent several months in prison in Scotland. He told me what had happened to him and why he needed Solace to help him. He showed me the holes in his body and arms.

In the three and a half years I knew Mbole, he was detained four times, for months at a time, while the Home Office tried and failed to deport him. On each occasion, his solicitor’s submitted a bail application on the basis that he had committed no crime and was unlikely to abscond. ‘Where would I run away to?’ he asked me, shrugging his shoulders.

Mbole was the only client at Solace who I went to court with and acted as a surety, not just once, but four times. On one occasion I was asked by the judge why I was prepared to risk £500 as a surety for Mbole. I told the judge that when I first met Mbole, I was taken aback by the horrors that he had lived through and that he was being punished for no reason.

Mbole was a kind, gentle man, who, when he had the opportunity, liked to go out of his way to help other people. He was a regular church goer with a strong faith, who also worked at Oxfam as a volunteer. Whenever anyone helped Mbole or showed him some kindness he always said ‘God Bless You’, which included a judge on one occasion who had just ordered his release from detention.

Mbole was easily recognisable around town and on the bus with his colourful hats and clothes. At one of his many court appearances I suggested to him that it might not be a good idea to wear the hat with the colourful flowers. How about the red flowery shirt with the brown leather tie? No, not really a good idea, Mbole.

Mbole was glad that 2011 was over and he looked forward to a fresh start in 2012. His immigration case was awaiting a decision in the High Court – the last chance saloon. We still don’t know whether he would have been successful or not, but at least in the last few weeks he was feeling hopeful.

The last third of Mbole’s life was one of relentless persecution, either by the Congolese authorities or the UK asylum system that never believed him. In the end, aged forty four, Mbole’s body was ground down by all the adversity he faced with the full power of the State lined up against him for years on end. But he did score one victory. They never succeeded in deporting him.

God bless you, Mbole, and may you now rest in peace.

By the Banks of River Asylum

2011-10-24T12:15:00.000+01:00

As I sat pensive by the banks of river asylum,
Tears flowed and blocked my sight,
I wallowed in the thoughts of yesterday,
A fraction of yesterday that was happy,
Happy yesterday decorated by sunshine,
Laughter oozed out like water from a broken cistern,
I blossomed in that career like a flower in spring,
Endless voices of children a huge part of that yesterday.

As I tarried by the banks of river asylum,
The garment of beautiful yesterday fully changed into
A flowing gown of depression and psychosis,
In my mind’s eye is a distorted lens,
Life seemed worthless and meaningless,
END IT, the only song I hear,
Medication and therapies my daily bread,
In this limbo, a ray of light appears
… three years leave to remain,
With an irreparable mark for life.

Family Reunification - Nathalie's Story

2011-10-04T18:12:00.002+01:00

Like many asylum seekers and refugees, Nathalie fled her country in a hurry, having not seen her husband and young children for months. She had no idea where they were or whether they were still alive, but she worried about them for hours every day, especially her baby who was only a few months old when Nathalie was taken away to a prison and tortured and raped.

Months after she had escaped to the UK, and uncertain of her own future, Nathalie still had no idea what had happened to her family, but she gave us the name of a priest she had worked with in the Congo who we looked up on the Internet where we found an email address.

In early 2010, we were desperate to find someone who could confirm Nathalie’s story of what had happened to her in the Congo to help her claim for asylum. Our first contact with the priest was an email which arrived just in time to persuade an immigration judge that Nathalie’s case had credibility. Without the email form the priest in the Congo, Nathalie’s chances of staying in the UK looked very slim. The email arrived while she was in the immigration court to decide her future.

While Nathalie’s claim for asylum in the UK was not resolved for another few months, we had also asked the priest if he knew the whereabouts of Nathalie’s family. For weeks we heard nothing and then in July 2010, the priest sent an email saying that he had found the family living on the border with Angola, in the south of the Congo, along with many other displaced Congolese refugees.

It was many more weeks before the priest managed to arrange a time when Nathalie’s husband and children could come to his house at a time when Nathalie could contact them by telephone. Electricity cuts and problems with the Internet in the Congo didn’t help matters.

The priest asked us to call his house at 3.30pm, Congolese time. It was now months after we first established contact with the priest and Nathalie now had leave to remain in the UK.

Nathalie hadn’t slept for days because of the anxiety stirred up by talking to her family again. She came to Solace where I called the priest. She wanted me to speak to him first. She was feeling so anxious that she was shaking in the chair next to me.

Nathalie had worried that her children wouldn’t know who she was. By the time she spoke to the elder of the two, who was still only 5-years old, she was kneeling on the ground in front of me with her head in my lap.

Nathalie asked him: ‘Did you miss me?’ ‘Do you know who I am?’ her son asks her if she is big or small – whether she is an adult or a child, in other words. He then asks her if she is going to bring him some black pudding that evening.

Black pudding touched a nerve with Nathalie because she used to bring her eldest boy black pudding, which he loved. Nathalie repeated the words ‘black pudding’ several times while sobbing in my lap.

Half an hour later the call ended with Nathalie’s head still in my lap, sobbing. She then drank four litres of water and sat down, exhausted, staring into space.

In September 2011, the family were reunited and living in bed and breakfast accommodation.

You can read Nathalie's back story in our latest Annual Review which you can download at www.solace-uk.org.uk

The Lives of Asylum Seekers

2009-04-29T15:53:00.005+01:00

Solace was set up to provide counselling and advocacy to asylum seekers and refugees. A growing body of evidence revealed that their mental health needs were not being met by mainstream services, partly because of language barriers, but also because many health professionals felt ill-equipped to deal with the multiple traumas that many asylum seekers and refugees were suffering from. These findings were supported by research commissioned by Solace.

One of the traumas facing asylum seekers that is rarely recognised is the way they are treated in Britain, not only by the media and by many of the people who live around them, but above all, by officialdom, as a result of government policies.

A standard letter from the Borders and Immigration Agency (a Home Office agency) to an asylum seeker begins with the greeting ‘You are liable to be detained’, a threat that is carried out even when no crime has been committed. Like dangerous criminals, however, asylum seekers, including women with young children, are all too often raided in the middle of the night by the Police and sent to a detention centre without warning. Several of our female clients have experienced this treatment in the past year.

The failed asylum seeker’s ‘crime’ is that the authorities do not believe them when they say they have been persecuted, or, to use the jargon of the courts, their ‘evidence is not credible’. For many asylum seekers, it is very hard or impossible to prove that they have been persecuted, especially when, as one client told us, he had to leave his country in a hurry, after government soldiers had tried to kill him.

Our experience of working with asylum seekers at Solace is that the inhospitable treatment they frequently receive here in Britain often exacerbates any mental health problems that they may already have. The vast majority of our clients have felt or continue to feel suicidal. Whilst many of them have benefited enormously from the service we offer, which makes their lives a little more tolerable, progress is all too often reversed by the heavy hand of officialdom as a result of punitive government policies.

Germain Naruhana's Story

2009-04-29T15:04:00.008+01:00

I came to Britain in 2005 after escaping from prison where I had been sent with my sister for being involved in a demonstration against the Congolese government, which I helped to organise. My father had been beheaded by government officials for organising the demonstration and I went into hiding with my family, where we feared for our lives. We did not even attend our father’s funeral. A month later, my sister and I were captured by government troops and sent to a dark, stench-ridden dungeon. Every day I was in there, I was beaten with sticks, punched or kicked.

My sister was regularly raped and on one occasion, when she was being raped in front of me, I tried to intervene, but I was beaten unconscious by the guards who hit me on my back with their rifle butts.

I came to Britain in 2005 after escaping from prison where I had been sent with my sister for being involved in a demonstration against the Congolese government, which I helped to organise. My father had been beheaded by government officials for organising the demonstration and I went into hiding with my family, where we feared for our lives. We did not even attend our father’s funeral. A month later, my sister and I were captured by government troops and sent to a dark, stench-ridden dungeon. Every day I was in there, I was beaten with sticks, punched or kicked.

My sister was regularly raped and on one occasion, when she was being raped in front of me, I tried to intervene, but I was beaten unconscious by the guards who hit me on my back with their rifle butts.

An Italian priest helped to release us from prison and he managed to get my sister and me on a plane to England. I still don’t know how he got us out of there.

When we arrived in England, I was in bad shape physically after my experience in captivity. My case for asylum was rejected because the authorities didn’t believe my story. Despite not being able to speak English at the time, I made an appeal against the decision, but on the day of the court hearing I was in hospital, vomiting blood, and suffering from internal bleeding as a result of the torture I had suffered in captivity.

The Judge insisted I went to court, but seeing that I was the worse for wear, he sent me back to hospital. But the Judge also said that if I was going to be in hospital for a lengthy period, the appeal hearing would go ahead without me.

When I was eventually called back to court to make my appeal several weeks later, I was still feeling unwell and I had no legal representation. I asked the Judge for more time to recover but he refused my request. With no knowledge of the English legal system and a poor grasp of English, my appeal was rejected.

The High Court rejected a further appeal by me and I then became a failed asylum seeker with a high risk of being detained or, worse, deported, which would mean almost certain death for me.

My life went from bad to worse. My sister, who as a minor, I had been legally responsible for, ran away. The consequences for me of her running away were dire. As a failed asylum seeker, no longer with any dependants, I was made homeless and penniless. I slept on friends’ floors; hid for four nights in St. George’s Crypt with an Iraqi asylum seeker, without anyone knowing I was there. The alternative was to sleep on the streets.

Eventually, I was provided with a room in a house with other asylum seekers, but I was, and still am, a failed asylum seeker who could be detained or deported at any time. I still do not know where my sister is.

Two years ago, when I was using the Internet in a library in Leeds, I discovered that some soldiers had been to my Mother’s house and had interrogated her and two of my aunts about my whereabouts, but they did not know where I was.

My mother and her two sisters were then raped and brutally murdered. Then the soldiers took my wife and three children away to force me to come out of hiding.

For the last two years, despite extensive enquiries, I have had no news of my wife and three children and I fear the worst.

I was feeling completely depressed and suffering from anxiety. I felt life was not worth living. I desperately needed some help.

Solace really helped me get back on my feet. The therapy helped me be strong again. It was not just the therapist who helped me but all the people working at Solace who gave me a lot of support and very helpful advice. I felt really welcome at Solace by everyone, so much so that I have recommended that friends of mine in the same situation as me come to Solace for help.

I have made a real effort to integrate in Britain. I have learnt to speak English and passed all my English exams; I am actively involved in my local church and involved in many voluntary activities; I am studying an MA in Activism and Social Change at Leeds University. I am not allowed to enrol on the course officially because I am an asylum seeker, but I am happy that I am allowed to be a guest student. I would not be doing any of these things without the help I received from Solace. I cannot underestimate how much Solace has helped me.

I’m still a failed asylum seeker and life is a struggle, sometimes a real struggle. I pray that I will be allowed to stay here, but whatever happens to me, I will always carry the burden of what happened to me and my family in the Congo.

The Story of M

2008-11-18T14:38:00.002Z

I originally come from Gulu in the northern part of Uganda, which for the past twenty years has been subjected to violent armed struggle between the government of Uganda and the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), a militia group opposed to the government. The LRA has terrorised large parts of the country, particularly the north where I come from.

My husband was an army commander for the Uganda People’s Defence Force, which was set up by the government to defeat the LRA. My husband was involved in covert missions against the LRA and because the rebels never gave up without a fight, many of them were killed in the skirmishes. Often the LRA would retaliate by killing innocent civilians, including my parents who they killed in 1999.

One day in October 2002, one month after my husband had returned from a particularly gruesome encounter with the LRA, we were woken up in the middle of the night to the sound of gunfire and shouting. The next thing we knew, our front door was being kicked down by what sounded like a large group of angry men. My husband rushed out of bed with a pistol he had kept in a drawer by the bed. He confronted the group of men and as they hurled abuse at him I rushed into the room next door where my children were screaming.

I was terrified. I pulled my children close to me and we crept into a wardrobe, cowering with fear. I heard a number of shots in quick succession and could hear the men screaming abuse and insults at our whole family and my husband in particular. I then heard loud thuds and thought they must have overpowered my husband and were beating him up.

The mood in the room next door then changed and I heard someone ask ‘where is the woman?’. They soon found us and pulled us out of the wardrobe. They pulled me away from the children and hurled me on to the floor where they proceeded to rape me one after another. I do not know how many raped me, but I do remember my children sobbing behind their bed.

Suddenly, all the men in the room panicked and ran out of the room - some of them treading on me in their rush to get out. I could smell smoke and knew our house was on fire. I cried to my children who were so petrified they could not move from behind the bed. I somehow gathered enough strength to drag them out of the collapsing building.

I later learnt that my husband had been shot in the head and that his body had been badly mutilated by multiple beatings from rifle butts. I also learnt that the attack was retaliation for the successful mission led by my husband the month before.

With the help of my husband’s best friend, I went into hiding with my two daughters in another part of Uganda. They kept asking for their father, but they were too young to understand what had happened. I was hoping that we would be left in peace, but it was a forlorn hope. Less than three months after my husband had been killed and I was raped, I returned to our new home one day after coming back from church and found our flat had been ransacked and all our belongings were strewn all over the place, including smashed crockery outside the flat. A badly shaken neighbour with a bruised face warned me that the LRA were looking for me and they had attacked him instead, hoping to get information out of him about our whereabouts.

Leaving your country for an unknown destination is traumatic. I did not know I was coming to Britain. It could have been anywhere as long as it was safe for me and my children. But as an asylum seeker in Britain, I soon discovered that it was far from being a warm and welcoming place and I was presented with more traumas.

No one seemed to understand the traumas I had faced and I was refused asylum in the UK. The threat of being sent back to Uganda made me suffer from terrible anxiety and my physical health deteriorated. While I was trying to recover from all my traumas, my house in Leeds was raided in the middle of the night by immigration officials in April 2005 and I was sent to Yarlswood Detention Centre for a month. It was a traumatic experience and reminded me of the time when our house was raided by the LRA rebels 18 months before.

After I was released from Yarlswood, I was referred to Solace for counselling. I was struggling to cope with life when I met Anne, my therapist, at Solace. I had lost hope and life no longer had any meaning for me. Since going to Solace, my state of mind started to improve. The counselling really helped me. But then, in April 2007, I was raided at dawn for a second time and sent back to Yarlswood for four months with my children. Like the first time I was detained, I had committed no crime. It was a real setback for me and once again I lost all hope and was petrified of being deported.

Throughout my time in the detention centre, Solace worked with my solicitor to get me out. Anne came to visit me and offer me support. I applied for bail as that was the only way they would release me. Anne provided surety for me, which I really appreciated as there was no one else to help me.

Solace has always been there for me, especially in the dark times. All the staff are welcoming, friendly and understanding and for me it is like a second home.

At the beginning of 2008, while I was still being subjected to stringent bail conditions, I received a letter from the Home Office saying that I had been granted refugee status, which is a huge relief for me. It came completely out of the blue. Hopefully, my nightmare is over, but I am still going to Solace to try and heal my wounds.

Telephone interpreting with our advocacy worker

2008-11-12T15:43:00.004Z

Telephone interpreting at work from Voltaire on Vimeo

Asylum Seekers and the Law

2008-06-24T11:23:00.001+01:00

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Asylum Seekers and Racism

2008-06-24T10:53:00.001+01:00

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