IN THEIR tiny, pungent hell beneath the sea, two men shared a single bottle of water. For days which they had no way of counting, they took deep, shaking breaths of the chemical-laden air that filled the hold of the MV Pascal.
Somewhere in the Mediterranean, they succumbed and the hold became their coffin, to be opened by the vessel's Russian crew as it docked in Ayr.
The authorities that swarmed the MV Pascal in the wake of the discovery concluded that the unident
ified men might have boarded when the vessel stopped in Tunisia, en route from Italy, in the belief that they would be able to disembark in Spain.
But the MV Pascal only stopped briefly to refuel in Spain and the hold was not opened before sailing for another ten days to Scotland.
It is not known what horrors the two men must have endured, or expectations they must have had, to force them into that airtight prison. But they are not alone: the European Councils for Refugees and Exiles estimates that 3,000 to 25,000 people died trying to cross the Mediterranean from Africa between January and July 2006.
Abdo Yahya Abdullah, a Darfuri now seeking asylum in Gloucester, is one of those who survived. His own subsea hell – a dark hold stacked with bottles and boxes where he cowered for many days – is imprinted on his consciousness and his dreams.
The man who had brought him aboard – from a speedboat that left Port Sudan, Darfur, in the middle of the night – would deliver food and water and allow Abdullah to follow him silently along corridors to a toilet, then back to the hold.
"I was in the ship for 16 or 17 days, I don't know exactly," said Abdullah. "I didn't know where I was going. I was afraid, but I didn't know what to do. I had just had enough. I chose it as better than to die. I thought I could go for a bit and then maybe come back."
War had been gradually devouring his homeland for about seven years when it arrived in August 2003 to feast on the village, Jeemy, where he lived with his wife and young son. The trio hid terrified as their grass- fashioned home, along with the rest of the village and many of its inhabitants, burned under Janjaweed militia flames.
They emerged into the smoke-filled evening to bury their dead and then fled to Abdullah's father's village, Terbiba.
For six months they survived, until early one morning in January 2004 Abdullah and a cousin left to collect firewood, only to turn and see helicopters criss-crossing the skyline.
"I tried to get back to the village and then I saw there was no way because they were burning anyone. They were killing everyone," Abdullah said. "My family was in the village. I hid outside. When I came back, there was nobody – no houses, nobody."
Destitute again, he walked to a cousin's home in a nearby village and stayed for a month. When the government came to make arrests he fled back to the village where he was born, where a settlement of survivors had been fashioned from tents. Among them he found his son, mother and youngest brother – but no other family members. His pregnant wife had been killed.
It was not long before the settlement came under attack. "Everybody was shouting and running for their lives," Abdullah said. "You don't know who to protect or what to do. Everyone was running and shouting and screaming. I was running too.
"I don't know if the rest of my family chased me or I chased them. Even my son.
"My mum put my son on her back and she ran and my little brother ran, but after five miles I lost them."
Alone with only the money he had dug up from its hiding place on his farm, he was put in touch with two men who promised to find him "a safe place".
On the third night he stayed with them, he and four others were taken on an eight-hour drive to Port Sudan and passed to another contact. He stayed with him for five nights until he was taken to the quay.
"I didn't know where he was taking me," he said. "He said only to give him money. We waited until night-time and a small boat came and he said jump in. Two people were in the boat and he left. They drove me for two hours in the night.
"We arrived at a big ship in the port and there was some rope, like leather, in the boat. Someone climbed in front of me and said follow me. We got inside the boat. He said don't make any noise and put me in the hold."
After more than a fortnight in the small storage area, he was transferred to another boat and put inside a lorry with some food and a bottle to use as a toilet, and told to stay until it stopped.
"Someone came and opened the covers of the lorry and when he saw me, he started shouting," Abdullah said. "I couldn't understand the language. I walked out. It was very early in the morning, it was dark. I was walking about for about five hours. I didn't know which country I was in.
"When the sun came out, I could see people. I tried to talk to them, but I didn't understand what they were saying. Frantically, I started running after black people, I thought I could find someone who could speak my language."
Eventually, at a bus station, he found an Arabic speaker, who told him he was in Birmingham, England, and gave him £5 and directions to a police station. It was September 2004 – about a month since his journey had begun.
"I went to the police station and stood in a queue," he said. "The people kept moving and I moved with them. They had someone who spoke Arabic. I claimed asylum that day."
Fewer than 25,000 people seek asylum each year, of whom between a third and a half will be allowed to remain. In the first quarter of this year, Afghan nationals accounted for the highest number of applications.
Abdullah stayed in hotels then houses across England, ending up in Gloucester, until he secured an interview at the Home Office. However, he said, the interpreter was Arabic, while his first language is Masalit.
He was sent back to Gloucester, with the promise that he could return when an appropriate interpreter was found.
His next contact was a letter, which told him only that his application had been rejected. His benefits were withdrawn and for nine months he slept in shop doorways. Eventually, he got in touch with charity the Aegis Trust, which helped him get a lawyer and begin the appeal against the Home Office decision, which reinstated his benefits. Abdullah said: "I don't know what's happening – maybe they will deport me."
Last year, the Border and Immigration Agency removed 63,140 people from the UK – one every eight minutes.
Dr James Smith, the chief executive of the Aegis Trust, said: "Returning asylum-seekers to genocidal regimes such as Sudan sends those governments a message that we trust them with their victims.
"Instead of the short-sighted, often callous, policies of the Home Office to keep Britain's doors shut to foreigners the government should place greater emphasis on tackling the root causes of why people flee and apply serious pressure for change in such countries."
Two years after reaching England, Abdullah met a man from home. He learned that his younger brother had been shot and his mother was mentally ill and unable to care for his son, who had been adopted.
Unable to work or sleep, he takes a sleeping tablet every day and is haunted by dreams – some of a lost but happy life with his family, others of being shot or tortured. Yet although now trapped in a different hell to the one escaped he, at least, is not one of the forgotten who did not make it.
Tourist visa is route for many into UKTHE story of the men whose bodies were discovered in a ship's hold in Ayr highlights the sheer desperation felt by millions of people in the Third World to get in to a country like the UK.
We have all read the tragic "people trafficking" stories of poor migrants suffocating in a container lorry, drowning in a makeshift raft off Africa and even meeting their death in the luggage hold of a plane.
But I believe a far more common approach to enter the UK is to obtain a simple tourist or visit visa, which entitles a person to "legally" enter the UK for up to six months.
Every day I receive dozens of e-mails from people in Africa, Asia and the Indian subcontinent that simply say: "Get me visa." Many will pay any amount of money and even sell themselves to an "agent" or "fixer" to get them into Britain.
I have met clients who have paid as much as £5,000 to a visa agent in countries such as India or the Philippines, where the salary for a nurse or teacher is less than £100 a month.
Having borrowed thousands of pounds or sold all they have to get here, illegal immigrants have to earn money to survive and repay their debts, so the reality is they are not going anywhere.
They seem to have an uncanny knack of tapping into a criminal network providing fake documentation such as passports, visa stamps and national insurance numbers.
Charles Kelly Immigration adviser and director of Bison UKWe should be hanging our heads in shameTHE tragedy of two dead men on the cargo ship in Ayr harbour is unusual in Scotland but sadly commonplace in the seas of the Mediterranean and off the Canaries, where so many fleeing from persecution and deprivation perish.
The irony is that, as western governments have effectively sealed their borders, so asylum seekers have to rely on smugglers who charge money to evade border controls but with no guarantee of the safety of those whom they transport – a more lucrative trade than trafficking drugs.
Under the terms of the Refugee Convention, the UK is obliged to examine every claim for sanctuary and to treat asylum seekers with humanity, yet, with other western governments, the barriers have been built equally against genuine refugees as well as economic migrants. Only now is the incompetence with which asylum applications have been processed in the past being remedied. True, there is the problem of removing those who fail to establish a legal right to remain, either because they have no documents, their alleged countries of origin will not accept them or the situation is too dangerous for them to go back immediately. But that is no reason to visit further indignity on them by refusing to allow them to provide for their families here.
A measure of the civilisation of any country is the way in which it treats the most vulnerable. We should hang our heads in shame and cry out, "not in our name".
Keith Best, Chief executive, Immigration Advisory ServiceThe full article contains 1895 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
