The Mirror’s Ros Wynne Jones shares a heartbreaking story of a refugee friend who fled near-certain death and his parents being burned to death. He would have been deported under Nigel Farage’s plans
My friend Abdul Musa Adam was seven when he set off from his home in war-torn Darfur on the journey that would bring him to Britain. He didn’t choose to leave. His village was set alight by Janjaweed militias.
His parents burned to death in the fire, along with almost every inhabitant of the village. He and his little brother Yusuf were two of four survivors. The other two adult survivors put the boys on their backs and walked with them for six days across one of the world’s most inhospitable deserts.
This is how millions of refugee journeys start. Abdul loved his home, his parents, the animals he tended under African skies. But he was born into a war – and time and time again he had to move.
The little group reached Chad, a country with its own armed marauders, unrelenting heat, and scarcity of food and shelter. They moved to Libya and found themselves in a civil war. After losing the adults in the group, and his little brother, Abdul wandered the globe with very little understanding of where he was, just moving each time away from death, exploitation and danger.
He eventually, aged 13, reached the UK wedged under the wheel arch of a smuggler’s lorry. “I just held on,” Abdul told me. “I knew if I fell asleep, I would die.”
Under Nigel Farage’s new plans, instead of being assigned to a loving foster family, this traumatised teenager would have been part of Reform UK’s “mass deportations”. Addressing his latest inflammatory news conference in an aircraft hangar in Oxford with a blaze of extremist rhetoric, the Reform leader confirmed women and children would be detained and deported under their “radical” reforms.
But in Abdul’s case – deported to where? To his flattened village? His starving country in which civil war still rages and which was recently named as one of the most dangerous nations in the world? A country he left when he was seven and has no longer any connection to?
Sadist showman Farage doesn’t care. He was flanked by two large “departure” boards showing destinations including Afghanistan, Iran – and Abdul’s home country, Sudan. I wrote a book with Abdul called The Journey about the years he spent seeking safety. Having ridden since before he could walk, for a while, he was a promising young jockey. In 2015, he won a coveted Daily Mirror Pride of Sport Award. But his mental health meant Abdul ended up leaving horseracing.
He will never stop reliving the time he found his parents’ burned bodies, or being tortured in a migrants’ prison in Libya, or living inside a bin in France. Abdul is the sweetest, kindest person you could possibly imagine, who only deserves our love and help. Yet in recent months he has been terrified by public anger towards people like him.
Last summer, as Britain rioted, he got a job with a horse charity but didn’t take it as he was too frightened of the journey to work because of rioters and protesters. Instead, now aged 27, he works in an asylum hotel trying to help people whose desperation he understands.
So today, when I listen to Farage’s talk of mass deportations, and when I watch the far-right protesters in Epping and Liverpool and elsewhere masquerading as crusaders for women’s rights, and I speak to friends who work in refugee charities who are having to take safety precautions, I think of Abdul, and the effect on his worsening mental health. And I think of the hundreds of refugees and asylum seekers I have interviewed in the past two decades all over the globe.
The most common story people tell is summed up by Afghan Karim, 19, who came to the UK by small boat with a screaming baby who will never leave his dreams. When I asked what made a boy who couldn’t swim climb into a dinghy, Karim said: “All I thought was, ‘I can’t go back, and I can’t stay here, so I have to go forward’.”
When Karim reached the UK, he was shocked to find his hotel surrounded by angry protesters. A scholar back in Kabul – whose parents had been hunted down by the Taliban for the crime of being academics – he told me he googled what the protesters were angry about to try to understand their point of view. As he was one of the only English speakers, he went out on behalf of the hotel residents to try to resolve things.
Karim had eggs thrown at him. Under Farage’s plans, a Reform government would do a deal with the Taliban to send people like him home to certain death. Our People Move project tells the story of over 100 people who came to the UK seeking sanctuary.
The inspirational Sabir Zazai who came here inside a suffocating lorry and now runs the Scottish Refugee Council. “Mama” Agnes Tanoh, a 70-year-old who escaped jail in Ivory Coast for being on the “wrong side” of a coup – to spend months in a UK detention centre. Many came by irregular routes. So many of them have already contributed so much to the UK, while other simply need our help.
As the political parties try to outdo themselves over who would be toughest on migrants – a politics that risks giving permission to those whipping up hatred and hysteria – our country stands at a crossroads. Those screaming on social media and surrounding asylum hotels are loudest but it’s time for the rest of us, the real “silent majority” to speak up.