LAYLA Ibrahim was born in hellish circumstances. She came into the world on the open deck of a small, ramshackle fishing boat packed with migrants and taking in water.
There was no doctor for her mother, Avin, who was barely out of her teens and suffered terrible pain. Worse was the dread that Layla had been born only to face a watery grave. "We saw death before our eyes," her mother recalled yesterday with a shudd
er.
The Ibrahims, from Iraqi Kurdistan, paid people-smugglers the equivalent of £5,300 to ferry them from Lebanon to Italy in October 1998. Deliverance for the 75 boat people, mainly Syrian Kurds, came unexpectedly at the hands of the British military after the Lebanese crew dumped them on a rocky shore at the bottom of a 100ft cliff.
Instead of being taken to Italy, they had been abandoned on the shore of one of Britain's two sovereign military bases in Cyprus. Some scrambled to safety, the rest were rescued by an RAF Wessex helicopter.
Nearly ten years later, the British military in Cyprus is still playing reluctant but sympathetic host to 28 of the boat people, plus 21 of their children born on the island and ten other family members who have since joined them.
Layla, now a healthy and happy looking girl with striking blue eyes, has a younger sister and two brothers. For them, the British military base at Dhekelia in eastern Cyprus is home: they have known no other place. They speak Kurdish and have a good smattering of English. Some of the children in Richmond village, the area of Dhekelia where the boat people are housed, are avid cricket players.
The boat people have involved Britain in one of its most bizarre and protracted refugee dramas. Most demanded the right to go to Britain, arguing they had arrived on UK sovereign territory. Some were later given refugee status but not allowed to enter Britain. Officials feared setting a precedent that would encourage other would-be migrants to regard Britain's two bases on the island as a fast ticket to the UK – they are little more than 100 miles from countries such as Syria, Lebanon and Turkey.
When the boat people first arrived, British officials tried to pass them on to the island's authorities but were bluntly told they were the UK's responsibility.
The bases in Cyprus, retained when the island won independence in 1960, give the impression of striving to be a corner of a foreign field that is forever England. A Union flag flutters outside the police station in Dhekelia and the streets have names such as Knightsbridge Road and Clarendon Avenue.
The migrants are deluded if they believe Richmond village is as British as, say, Trafalgar Square, UK officials argue, adding that the sovereign base areas (SBAs) are overseas British territory but not part of Britain.
Nor were the two bases, which cover 98sq miles, ever meant to accommodate migrants. "We accept that the Richmond families are our responsibility as they arrived directly into the SBA," says Captain Nick Ulvert, a spokesman for the British military. "That said, the SBAs exist for military purposes only and we do not and should not have the infrastructure to support asylum seekers. However, we are going beyond our duty to help them here."
Most of the boat people say if they cannot be given new lives in Britain, they want to stay in Richmond village. "I'd like to stay here, but in a bigger house," Avin Ibrahim says. "It's a good life for my children here. It's home. My children were born here and I learned to speak English here."
British officials are concerned that the migrants, after living in limbo for years, appear determined to put down roots in a place that can never be home. The boat people are provided with spartan but adequate housing in former married quarters for British service families that were due to be demolished.
The head of each family is given 70 (£55) a week for living expenses from the SBA budget, as well as 30 for each member of the household. The migrants are provided with free water, medical care and electricity: the Ibrahim house has air-conditioning, a luxury enjoyed by few British squaddies in Cyprus.
Some of the boat people with refugee status now live and work outside the UK bases and they pay their own way. But British officials say 13 adults and 16 children with recognised refugee status who could live in Cyprus have chosen to remain at Dhekelia, still hoping they will eventually get to Britain.
'We can't have stateless people here. It's a military base'BRITISH military officials say that in 2002 the UK Immigration and Naturalisation Department made a recommendation, supported by the UN's Refugee Agency, to deport the boat people who were not granted refugee status – among them the Ibrahims – to their point of departure. That was Lebanon, which refused to take them.
A year later, following the "liberation" of Iraq, the British military offered cash incentives to repatriate the Iraqis among the boat people, an offer none took up, although some Lebanese, Syrians and Egyptians among their number have since returned home. One Palestinian made it to Britain in 2002, apparently as a stowaway on a ship from Cyprus.
The boat people are an exceptional case that will not be repeated. When Cyprus joined the European Union in May 2004 it signed a memorandum of understanding with the British military authorities to take responsibility for any migrants arriving on the sovereign bases. The boat people preceded that agreement.
The Cypriot authorities were ready to make an exception but one senior official told The Scotsman that the boat people did not want to be dealt with by them. "They wanted to go to Britain," he said.
Yet as the tenth anniversary of the migrants' arrival approaches, the British military authorities are confident of reaching an agreement with the Cypriot authorities that will solve the problem in a "legal and righteous" manner. Captain Nick Ulvert, a military spokesman, said: "We can't have stateless people here. It's a military base."
The full article contains 1035 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
