Mon, Aug 29, 2016 page7

• ‘What am I waiting for?’ Child refugees in Calais appeal to MPs

  • By Jessica Elgot / The Guardian
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  Omar, a 17-year-old Syrian, has UK Home Office approval to join his family in London, but is trapped in a refugee camp waiting for transfer

  Omar’s home for the past six months has been a makeshift wooden hut in the Calais “jungle” refugee camp, where the teenager sleeps alone under piles of donated blankets.

  However, unlike many of the thousands of refugees living in the tents and containers next to the bypass, the Syrian teenager has a home waiting for him in the UK.

  Omar has been approved by the British Home Office to cross to the UK, under the Dublin regulation, which would give the shy 17-year-old the right to join his uncle and cousin in northwest London. And yet he is still living in the makeshift refugee camp, with no way of knowing when he will be able to leave. He has been waiting for his transfer to the UK for about two months.

  Volunteers working in the camp say violence is increasing as its population increases with the good weather, meaning more people are attempting the journey. Omar (not his real name) said he does not tell his family in Syria about the dangers he faces each night.

  “I could not tell them, no. They would be too scared for me,” he said.

  For now, when the atmosphere in the camp turns tense, Omar said he stays shut in his cabin or heads for the main road to stand under the bridge on the outskirts of the camp, out of the melee.

  Omar is one of many refugee children in the camp caught up in bureaucratic delays. He applied in March and the office approved his “take charge request” in June. Every day he waits for the call telling him it is his day to be transferred to the UK.

  The office is under increasing pressure to speed up the process of bringing children who have the right to be in the UK across the Channel, with human rights groups claiming children are being left at risk of violence and exploitation in the camp.

  Labour’s former shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper last week wrote to British Home Secretary Amber Rudd and said the office was given details last month of 110 children and teenagers still in Calais who have Dublin rights to be reunited with their families in the UK.

  No action had yet been taken on their cases, Cooper said.

  At the current rate of progress it would take more than a year to reunite every child with their family.

  An additional 200 children in the camps in Calais are eligible for sanctuary in Britain under the Dubs amendment to bring child refugees to the UK, brought about by Labour peer Alf Dubs , formerly a child refugee himself. It commits the government to relocate lone child refugees in Europe “as soon as possible.” Although ministers promised about 3,000 would be brought to Britain, around a 10th of that number have arrived so far.

  Visiting the camp on Tuesday last week with Save the Children and two Conservative MPs, Heidi Allen and David Burrowes, Cooper said the delay in Omar’s case and others was hard to understand.

  All three said they would seek a meeting with Rudd to press for a Home Office official to be based in Calais, though one has now been seconded to the Dublin Unit at France’s interior ministry in Paris.

  For now, Omar is in limbo. All the paperwork is in order and yet he has been waiting for more than six weeks with no word of when he will finally cross safely to the UK. He has heard stories about Willesden, the suburb where he would eventually live.

  “They told me it’s so beautiful, you can’t imagine,” he said.

  Burrowes, MP for the neighboring Enfield Southgate, smiled, but agreed.

  “It is beautiful because of the freedom it brings, the safety,” he said. “It is beautiful in that sense. The opportunity it brings.”

  The camp is on edge when the MPs visit after a disturbing late night fight between two parts of the camp.

  Volunteers warn that many of the children at the youth center are in need of special care and attention after the violence.

  While Omar waits in the camp, each day brings a new risk. “Everything is bad here, there is a lot of violence,” he said. “There is no law in the jungle, and there are a lot of people looking just to take advantage of the situation.”

  Walking back to his cabin one evening, he came across a fight between Sudanese and Afghan refugees. “Really it was a big fight, 600 people, throwing rocks at each other.”

  One missile caught him in the eye and his face is still scarred.

  No ambulance would come to the camp, he said, so he had to walk to the underpass where he waited half an hour for medical help.

  Laura Griffiths, the senior field manager for Safe Passage, which is handling Omar’s case, said it was important to keep reminding authorities that the delays left children not just in limbo but at risk.

  “You’re sitting here in danger,” she said.

  Others waiting for their transfer include Ahmed, a 13-year-old with learning difficulties who has been given special dispensation to go to the UK along with his father, because of the demands of his disability.

  Few of Omar’s friends are left in the camp and he sleeps alone in the container, decorated with woolen rugs and posters with English language quotes.

  One says: “I love Syria, more than my life” and he said he was hopeful he would return there.

  For now, he is keen to ask the MPs what they can do to help.

  “I just have one question, what am I waiting for?” he asked.

  There is no answer, other than paperwork.

  The Syrian community has shrunk to about 50 of the 8,000 people living in the camp.

  Volunteers say though the system is slow, there are official routes in place to help Syrians claim asylum in France or help children reach families in the UK.

  About 30 Syrian boys have been reunited with their families in the UK, through the work of Safe Passage. However, for others, no such systems exist. Volunteers are particularly worried about unaccompanied young girls, mostly from Eritrea, whose numbers are growing, with up to 50 in the camp.

  Were they to decide to claim asylum in France and move to the official housing, only six beds for young women are on offer and volunteers say many young asylum seekers of either sex are regularly turned away, despite being actively encouraged to claim asylum in France.

  Johnny Willis, a volunteer coordinator with Help Refugees who runs the camp’s brightly painted youth center, said he had had 10 asylum seekers turned away by the authorities in one day.

  “Staying in France is the only safe thing we can really recommend. And they are wasting their youths here, this really talented bunch of kids, they have so much to offer and it is just painful to watch them here for months on end. But they say, ‘OK, we’ll stay in France,’ we make the phone call and get told there is no space.”
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