On Karim’s fourth attempt to cross the Channel, there were 70 people crammed into a smugglers’ boat.
“After a few hours,” he says, “the dinghy is going down. Everyone is screaming….The people sitting at the edge – they don’t have anything to hold onto now the dinghy is deflating. With my own eyes, I see three young guys my age fall from the boat and drown.”
This year is already the deadliest for people crossing the English Channel in small boats. At least 60 are confirmed to have died this year according to United Nations figures.
This week also marks the third anniversary of the deadliest ever small boats’ disaster, when 27 people died. But these figures may be a terrible underestimate according to Karim, now 22, who never found the deaths of the three young men he saw drowning recorded anywhere.
“I looked at the news reports. I asked if any dead bodies had come in. No-one counted how many people were on the boat. We didn’t know each other’s names.” As migration once again dominates the headlines following a special Downing Street press conference, this is the story of one 19-year-old’s journey from a war-torn country to a small city in the Midlands.
Karim was forced to flee from Afghanistan in 2021 when the Taliban began hunting down academics like his parents. Terrified for their son’s life, his family paid traffickers to smuggle him to Europe. He is unable to swim. Yet, when he was 20, he made five attempts to cross the English Channel in a flimsy dinghy. Now, he lives in a hostel, with the ghosts of his journey – the skeletons of trafficked people in the mountains of Iran.
The family he has never seen again. The three drowned boys. If I had my life before in Afghanistan, even for £1million I wouldn’t take that boat,” he says now. “You have to be without a future.”
So later that day when the smugglers messaged him, his clothes still soaked from his rescue in the freezing sea, Karim tried again. “It was the first time we had a family with us,” he says. “A little girl and a baby. In the middle of the sea, a baby screaming.” After several hours, the boat’s engine stopped, stranding its passengers among container ships.
Karim, who speaks English, rang the UK Border Force. “I put the phone next to the screaming baby. I said, ‘listen’.” A Border Force boat took the terrified passengers to Dover.
“The first thing an English person said to me, was ‘shut the f– up’,” Karim says. “It was winter, we were completely wet, freezing. They didn’t give us a blanket or water. They took our lifejackets and said, ‘You people are stupid’.
“One of them stabbed the lifejacket with a knife and it was just foam inside. Not even a lifejacket. The traffickers – human life doesn’t matter to them at all.” When his friend Amir became sick in the Bulgarian forest, Karim says the traffickers refused to call a doctor. “They let him die,” he says. “It was the worst moment of my journey.” Yet when they had crossed into Bulgaria, he had felt hope. “I had read a lot about Europe from my parents’ bookshelves,” Karim says.
“But all the things I was told were lies. People say why don’t you get asylum in the first country you come to? I was arrested at the border and stripped naked. They called me ‘terrorist’ and ‘Taliban’.” After 30 days, he was released. “All I thought was, ‘I can’t go back, and I can’t stay here, so I have to go forward’.” That winter, he followed the migrant routes to Calais in the hope of reaching a family member in the UK.
He says the French police regularly took their tents, their clothes and stabbed holes in the boats. “The smuggler messages that the weather is nice,” he says. “Like blind people we follow. There is a boat and engine under the sand. They make us pump up the boat ourselves.”
After he finally reached Dover, Karim was taken to a migrant hotel in a poor suburb in the Midlands. It turned out not to be the England he had read about in classic literature. “When I went to the town centre there wasn’t one time I wasn’t called a name or shown a middle finger,” he says. “Abuse, racial slurs. Eggs thrown at you from cars. ‘Go back to your country’”.
Karim says he felt luckier than most because he spoke English and acted as a translator at the hotel and local GP surgery. But then he was selected by Suella Braverman’s Home Office to go to Rwanda. “Rwanda ended our hopes,” Karim says. “All the time I knew I just had to look forward. Now there was no ‘forward’. I should have died in my own country. I thought, it’s better to die than go to Rwanda. Why did I go through all this? I tried to take my own life.” Then the hotel was targeted by Far Right ‘migrant-hunters’.
“We were locked down for days,” Karim says. “Like being in prison. I looked at the protesters’ website – they said we were taking their tax money. But I didn’t want to stay in the hotel, I just wanted to work and pay tax. But I am not allowed to work or study.”
Then in July, a change of government ended the Rwanda Plan. Karim was dispersed to a hostel. Now, as refugees and campaigners call on Labour Home Secretary Yvette Cooper to build a new, humane immigration system, he is still awaiting the outcome of his asylum application – one of 133,409 people, according to Home Office figures released today.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “Our Border Force officers do an incredibly difficult and dangerous job every single day with huge courage, dedication and professionalism. We do not recognise at all the description of those officers made in this report, and they do not match what people can see with their own eyes at the Channel ports. Our reception processes are geared to the fact that many who have crossed the Channel are likely to be tired, cold, wet and possibly injured as a result of their crossing.
“Men, women and children alike in those groups receive all the care and support that would be expected in those circumstances, including the provision of fresh clothing. Under the leadership of our new Border Security Command, our priority remains to end dangerous small boat crossings, which threaten lives and undermine our border security, and we applaud the work that is being done every day towards that end by our operational staff, from the Border Force teams in the Channel to our National Crime Agency investigators overseas.”
Sabir Zazai, spokesperson for the Together With Refugees coalition and CEO of the Scottish Refugee Council, fled Afghanistan in 1999, arriving in the UK by lorry. He said: “I remember how frightened and isolated I felt when I first arrived in the UK nearly 30 years ago. My heart goes out to Karim and many others like him. It doesn’t have to be like this. We need a new plan for refugees that is fair, humane and well managed – a plan that ensures people fleeing war and persecution can claim asylum here and that they don’t have to wait for years for a decision.
“It needs to provide a proper approach to welcoming people, offering them a real chance to settle into communities and rebuild their lives. And the UK must build greater international cooperation, including establishing ways for people to get to safety without undertaking extremely dangerous journeys.”
Recalling his journey in such detail has taken a toll on Karim. “But,” he says, “I hope telling my story can help people understand why a person who only understands books and can’t swim, could find himself in the middle of the English Channel.”
