Congratulations to Ugandan lesbian Prossy Kakooza who has won her asylum case after 15 months. According to the report, the judge was influenced by the medical evidence and the expert’s report which highlighted the extreme difficulties of being LGBTI in Uganda.

The judge was heavily influenced by three factors: the Country Expert Report, the medical evidence, and Prossy’s campaign. The Country Expert Report highlighted the terrible plight that lesbian and gay people endure in Uganda, as well as the “extra-judicial” activities of the police.

Her asylum also shows us that campaigns can be successful even when there seems to be an endless trail of obstacles to surmount.

* 5200 people from countries, and church congregations, from all over the world who have signed her petition to the Home Office.
* The 100s of people who have written or emailed the Immigration Minister.
* The 80 members and friends of MCC Manchester who have supported her.
* The 19 friends who went to court with her and helped her collect signatures on her petition at Pride festivals all over the country.
* The 10 friends who gave evidence in court on her behalf.
* The 3 lawyers who drafted and prepared her cases (Ruth Heatley from the Immigration Aid Unit and barristers Mark Schwenk & Mel Plimmer).

So please keep sending those emails, making phone calls, publicising campaigns, holding vigils and demos because it all helps and can influence the outcomes.

In another asylum case, Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre staff have been caught “stealing” a Guide on detainees rights. The Black Women’s Rape Action [BWRAP] project issued the following press statement following reports by one of the women they are working with in Yarls Wood…..

On 15 October, Ms Mercy Wanjiku[1], a rape survivor from Kenya, called from Yarl’s Wood IRC to report that Legal Action for Women’s Self-Help Guide against detention and deportation, which she had received by post had been confiscated by Yarl’s Wood staff. The Guide contains essential information that Ms Wanjiku needed for a legal hearing three days later. It took an official complaint, intervention by Black Women’s Rape Action Project (BWRAP), letters to her MP and a theft report lodged with the police to force Yarl’s Wood authorities for the Guide to be returned.

Background

On 8 October, and despite her protests that it was an infringement of her right to privacy, Ms Wanjiku was forced to open her mail in front of Yarl’s Wood staff. The Self-Help Guide was confiscated even though Ms Wanjiku informed officers that she urgently needed access to information in the Guide as she had an appeal hearing for her asylum claim in three days and she had no lawyer (see notes below). She was told by a male member of staff that it was “illegal to have the book in here” and that he was following orders!

In the absence of sufficient lawyers due to cuts in legal aid provision, many women rely on the Self-help guide to provide them with the necessary information to process their cases. This is yet another in many illegal and inhumane acts committed by Yarls Wood including the recent damming report by UK Children’s Commissioner, Sir Aynsley-Green.

BWRAP is “one of the few groups providing information and support services run by and for African, African Caribbean and other women of colour surviving rape, domestic violence, racist assault, other torture and persecution”.

Tags:
Prossy Kakooza
Uganda
Asylum UK
Black Women’s Rape Action Project
LGBTI
Yarls Wood

A couple of years ago - maybe a year I cant remember - I read a blog post by Keguro on things he thought of / wanted to blog about but didn’t. Thinking about blogging on something and not doing it is a sure sign of blogger paralysis / disinterest / being blogged out or on the verge of a blogging breakdown. I’m not sure which one applies but I suspect it is all three. So here are some of the things I thought of blogging about but never quite moved from thought to opening up my wordpress “write new post”!

Reflections on Nigeria - actually I was a bit economical with the truth here as I did start writing down stuff but it was all so negative and depressing I thought I cant possibly post this. On Tuesday I was down in Canterbury at the Anglican Church Synod gathering where I spoke with a Nigerian gay man who is seeking asylum here in the UK. I felt even more miserable as he recounted his life in Lagos and Nigeria generally. Shaking with anger and bitterness on surviving there and being in the closet and surviving here, being out but still living on the periphery, being ripped off by his landlord the awful waiting to see if you will be given asylum or deported. In Lagos I met a lesbian who was deported a year ago after spending a year in Yarlswood. According to Harriet Harman it is safe for lesbians to be returned to their home countries such as Nigeria because all they need to do is be “discreet” and hide themsleves. Totally ignoring the reality as in the case of this woman whose family and friends found out about her sexuality, disowned her and left her to fend for herself on the streets. Fortunately one friend took her in for a while until she had to move to another city and try to manage her life somehow. Harman also ignores the fact that no one should have to deny themselves and go through the pain of living a lie? On the other hand when the government sees an opportunity to front their illusion of humanitarianism - then LGBTI persons, rape and torture survivors, political dissidents from across the globe - get handed asylum on a plate in 2/3weeks.

The other day I decided to indulge myself my watching a blockbuster movie. I thought it sad and disturbing that I felt watching a “Hollywood” movie was an indulgence. Will self-flagellation be the final step on the road to the denial of pleasure in my life? Anyway I followed the hype and went to see “The Dark Knight” with Batman looking and sounding a bit like Darth Vadar. The film plays with the theme of good and evil which is presented in both simple comic book terms and also much more subtly as “evil” surfaces in unexpected places including Batman himself. The late Heath Ledger is superb in his performance as the demonic wild hilariously funny Joker and master of chaos. At one point he dresses up as a nurse, flicking his hair and licking his lips whilst blowing up a hospital and jumping on himself as the last detonator goes off. Afterwards I felt the director, Christopher Nolan, was playing with my mind with this scene of “comic terrorism” - should I be laughing? Well yes because the world of Gotham like the real world - is full of liars, corrupt police and government hypocrites (Batman included).

The only real person is the Joker - “I am what you see” he wears the mask but it is the other characters who are “masked”. Still it was a relief to see that humanity redeems itself and fails him (the Joker) dismally. Race comes briefly into play when it is the huge Black prisoner who stands up to pick up a detonator set by Joker as a trick for the two groups to blow each other up. A bit obvious that the stereotype Black murderer (bad citizen) was not actually going to do anything and rather it was the white middle class male (good citizen) that nearly blows the “other” to smithereens.

Joker plays everyone, from criminals to the police to Batman who, apart from looking and sounding like Darth Vadar was clinical with no depth to his character. His transformation from good to a man with evil tendencies was hardly recognisable but for a few prompts from the narrative. Rachel was a mediocre femme fatal and it was hard to feel any sympathy for her or her lover who “turned” from the all American white boy hero into a “two-faced” cold hearted rather boring revengeful killer. But they all seemed so peripheral to the Joker whose lines often held the kind of home truths some of us would rather not hear. My favorite was his reference to it’s ok to kill hundreds and thousands but everyone freaks out when one person like the mayor is under threat “cause it’s not part of the plan”! The Joker doesn’t “plan” he just lives and there is something inviting about not planning and not being part of the plan.

Tags:
Nigeria
LGBTI
The Dark Knight

Excitement gripped me when I was able to go back across the border to visit my family in Zimbabwe. Pleased as I was, I tried to ignore all the media reports on the country’s disregard of acceptable and proper treatment of human beings. Before going home, I braced myself for whatever the hell was to befall me! Imagine going back home to unpredictable situations, disastrous conditions, or even impending death - and when home is Zimbabwe this is no exaggeration. If you have been in South Africa you are immediately suspected of being MDC. Anyway, going home was the only way to please my mum!

From Johannesburg I boarded a bus directly to Harare, Zimbabwe. I paid 300 Rands for the trip and took at least seven hours to reach the Beitbridge Border Post. The border was highly-congested, with border officials dragging their feet at main checkpoints. My stay there was four hours. Later, the bus had to leave for Harare at around 5 o’clock in the morning. The bus took eight hours to reach Harare.

My arrival in the capital city was met by a great shock. There was no transport to ferry me to my small city of birth, Marondera. Familiar to my country’s economic woes, I immediately settled on the fuel disaster as the explanation. However, I waited by Fourth Street, just behind Roadport for any transport, and immediately arrived a smoking, dusty, ready-for-scrap Mazda T3500 lorry, and not wanting to miss it, I jostled alongside other stranded commuters onto its back. Along the way the driver demanded Z$500 million, as transport fares. He said this was to enable him to buy fuel.

As we drove past Ruwa, a small town just outside Harare, the black-marketeers of fuel waved down the driver. It was a clear signal that only Zimbabwe could run dry, but never the black-marketeers. Immediately, the driver parked by the roadside, but was told to restart and get fuelled in a small patch of thick bush, obviously to be hidden away from the raging battalion of the army or police. He complied. I tried to get as close to the black-marketeer as I could to grasp details of his conversation with the driver, but had to gather the two were arguing over the exact price of the ‘precious liquid’. It seemed the young man was attempting to refuel the lorry before settling on the actual price.

When I arrived in the newly-crowned city of Marondera[formerly a town, and recently given a city status], I just slept overnight, eager to catch the morning bus to my mother’s plot, that she was allocated by the ruling Zanu-PF party. The house in Marondera belongs to my grandfather, my mother’s stepfather. Currently, the four-bedroomed tiny property is home to my mother’s sister, together with her three children. Her first-born is a boy, who has two younger sisters as well. The next morning I took a lift to the Baker Plots that were grabbed from a Mr. Baker, a white farmer. Mr. Baker is one of the 4 000 white farmers whose farms were forcibly grabbed by the ruling government in 1997, under the influence of the late and former Zimbabwe National Liberation War Veterans’ Association leader, Chenjerai Hunzvi.

I paid Z$200 million from Marondera to Baker’s. Initially, the driver of the small, out-of-date obsolete Datsun Pulsar had asked for Z$300 million, arguing that the exchange rate of the ZimDollar Versus the South African Rand was unpredictable, thus the need to cater for the unexpected devaluation of the dollar. True to his utterances, and as I had to experience for myself during my short stay in Zimbabwe, the Z$ keeps falling on an hourly basis. To stay on the safe side, one has to keep a close and tight guard on the ‘now indispensable’ Tito Mboweni product.
[Read more…]

In an outrageous statement against LGBTs and asylum seekers, UK’s Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith claims gay and lesbian asylum seekers can be deported to Iran (and other countries such as Nigeria, Uganda and Cameroon) safely as long as they are “discreet”.

In a letter to a Liberal Democrat peer, seen by The Independent, Ms Smith said there was no “real risk” of gay men and lesbians being discovered by the Iranian authorities or “adverse action” being taken against those who were “discreet” about their behaviour.

in her letter to Lord Roberts of Llandudno, Ms Smith rejected a call for an immediate halt to the deportation of gay and lesbian asylum seekers. “We recognise that the conditions for gay and lesbian people in Iran – and many other countries – are such that some individuals are able to demonstrate a need for international protection,” she wrote. “We do not, however, accept that we should make the presumption that each and every asylum-seeker who presents themselves as being of a particular nationality or sexuality, regardless of their particular circumstances, should automatically be … allowed to remain in the UK.

The idea that you will be safe from being executed if you pretend to be straight is inhumane and makes a mockery of a country claiming to defend human rights. The last “throwaway” sentence is an insult to asylum seekers and panders to the erroneous belief that there are hundreds of thousands of applicants every year with the government operating on the presumption that by far the majority are criminals. (23,610 in 2006) The reality is the numbers of people seeking asylum are small and they are not criminals. The statement is consistent with the governments attitude towards asylum seekers of disbelief and blaming the victim: - not believing claims; believing claims based on rape but saying unless they claimant can prove that the rape was part of a campaign of persecution against women then it is not valid; blaming the claimant for making a stand (for example in the case of a Zimbabwean, blaming him for protesting against Mugabe)

Links:
Trouble Sleeping [Film]
The Hell of Being an Asylum Seeker

Tags:
Asylum Seekers
Immigration + Britain

The sms’s came fast and furious. As furious as the fiery images we were subjected to by our television and our daily newspapers. The front pages are a festival of beastly pictures of the victims of the negrophobic bloodletting which has gripped South Africa in the past weeks. I dreaded opening a newspaper for days - afraid of being confronted by yet another grisly product of the negrophobic xenophobic violence, which by the end of week three had claimed the lives of about one hundred people and displaced about 100 000, according to some estimates. The mind spins out of the axis of the normal.

As the Alexander Township burnt, I was reading text messages from my cappuccino-loving Tito Mboweni-fearing middle class friends. The messages were generally along these lines; “I’m so embarrassed to be South African right now”, or more engaging: “I’m so tired of feeling angry about this and not being able to do something about it…” . Email lists held similar messages of shame; at least Winnie Madikizela-Mandela went to Alexander and told the terrified victims cramped at the police station; “We are sorry, please forgive us. South Africans are not like this”, before hopping back into her nice car and driving back to her life. Desmond Tutu, our beloved archbishop of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) followed with another “sorry, we are not like that”. The leader of the narrow Zulu nationalist movement, Dr Gatsha Buthelezi, went to the police station as well and cried for the cameras, at the same time as his followers from the hostel he had just addressed continued their war cry that they would kill all the “foreigners”, Hambani! Of course our president in waiting, Mr Jacob Zuma, was also told by an angry crowd, “go back to Mozambique with your Mozambiquens”. Apparently his favourite solo “Mshini wam” is sung by the marauding gangs as they go about their murderous deeds. The killings, burning and looting continued. Something has definitely broken, the despised are telling their leaders in their faces that they must all go to hell.

A former fiery revolutionary, now a sadistic tax collector friend, phoned one night, also indignant, saying “we need to do something”. He decried the barbarism of the Alexander attackers. The next days, an sms announced the clarion call; “fight xenophobia! Donate food, clothes and money if possible”. I thought about a nice warm latte as an incentive for risking ones life and limb in the fight against Xenophobia via ones cheque book. Donating your last summer wardrobe is a great revolutionary act, these days. The limited imagination of my fellow cappuccino sipping buddies defies logic. But it’s the hypocrisy I find even more interesting. We are not like them!

I must state that one of my friends has been working non stop even on weekends to try do something to ease the hardships of the refugees now cramped in police stations and other camps. Yes, everyone who has been displaced by the violence is now a refugee according to our media. If you ask any black African who has been trying to get refugee status in South Africa you will soon realise that you have a better chance of success at being a midwife to a lioness than being declared a refugee in this land of Mandela. I ask my exhausted friend, but why don’t you cook a big meal once in a while and send it down to our permanent refugee camps? She burst out laughing. Truth is the many squatter camps which host millions of South Africans are nothing but permanent refugee camps. The multitudes that are trapped in these squatter camps are the excluded of our democracy. Their lives are punctuated by violence 24/7. The multiple violence of hunger, denigration, hopelessness and perpetual terror of what the state is going to do next, what dust bowl would follow are everyday accompaniments. The poetry of the Abahlali baseMjondolo tells the story of legalised state sponsored violence against the squatters better. Their story is indeed the story of the millions of other squatters.
[Read more…]