On 8 January Ugandan asylum seeker Zahra Byansi and her two sons, aged 5 and 12, were detained at Brand Street Immigration Centre in Glasgow and subsequently transported to Yarls Wood Detention Centre in England. The family had been detained and threatened with deportation in March 2006, but freed after a successful campaign in Glasgow.
Zahra Byansi is one of Glasgow’s leading asylum seeker activists, consistently involved in demonstrations, protests and marches for the last 15 months. She was a prominent speaker at many demonstrations held by UNITY and spoke last year at FRFI protests in the city centre. She has been a leading member of the Kingsway Asylum Group and was involved in the early morning vigils against dawn raids that prevented immigration officials entering the Kingsway estate (see FRFI 194). Her kidnapping is a conscious attempt by the Home Office to hunt down activists and intimidate Glasgow asylum seekers.
Scottish Nationalist Party MSP Sandra White publicly stated that Zahra had been ‘targeted’ because of her high profile campaigning for other asylum seekers and that: ‘The arrest of this innocent woman and her children is a criminal act by the Home Secretary.’
No to dawn raids!
The Christmas period had seen no let-up in dawn raids, with up to a dozen families brutally snatched from their homes in Glasgow. The holiday period is an opportune time for the immigration services to conduct these raids, as lawyers and MPs are impossible to contact.
The snatching of asylum seekers continues to draw criticism from all sections of Scottish society. Glasgow Archbishop Mario Conti said dawn raids should be stopped ‘once and for all’ and called for a reprieve over Christmas. ‘It is heartbreaking to see families, who have integrated admirably and made a significant contribution to schools, parishes and communities, being roused from their beds and dragged away by police and immigration officials.’ (Sunday Herald, 24 December 2006)
On 3 January, Scotland’s largest teaching union, the Educational Institute of Scotland called for an end to dawn raids and the closure of Dungavel Detention Centre. It said that raids were ‘harrowing’ for families and left children depressed when fellow pupils disappeared. Scotland’s Children’s Commissioner Kathleen Marshall has accused the state of ‘terrorising’ children.
Working class solidarity grows
At the end of November, a Scottish woman from the working class estate of Knightswood was charged with obstructing the course of justice for harbouring an asylum seeker and her three-year-old twins in her flat. The family sought shelter after immigration officials battered down their door in a dawn raid. When the woman refused to let the immigration officials into her house, she was charged with obstructing the course of justice and is awaiting a summons from the procurator fiscal. The Glasgow woman said: ‘I do not regret it. They could have been black or white or asylum seekers or anybody, but what I heard that morning was frightening – never mind how terrified the children were.’ (The Scotsman, 26 December 2006)
This is a further warning by the Home Office that it will not tolerate resistance and is willing to criminalise not only those asylum seekers who fight back, but also all those who assist them in their struggle. The solidarity movement in Glasgow has continued to gain strength, with protests of 60-70 people at Brand Street throughout December, and active working class support for asylum seekers is growing. In communities where asylum seekers have now been resident for several years it is assuming creative and militant new forms.
The Boxing Day edition of The Scotsman sympathetically detailed the story of Noreen Real and Jean Donnachie, who spent Christmas Day leading a patrol on the poverty stricken Kingsway estate to watch out for immigration removal vans. The article reported how the two women established Kingsway Against Removals and Deportation, and how every day between 15 and 30 people patrol the estate to make sure immigration officials cannot seize families. Mrs Donnachie said: ‘We are both mothers and grandmothers; that is why we do it. Asylum seekers have made our community a better place. There are no problems among asylum seekers here or fighting with the neighbours…They are ripping the heart out of the community by removing asylum seekers.’
Joseph Eskovitchl
FRFI 195 February / March 2007
