"Not that seat. It's the red one. I have to sit in that. " Jamil explains to me.I shift around to the grey chair. We have been in this room a few seconds and I notice the cctv video cameras. Detainees must sit in the red chairs and their visitors in the grey ones. This makes the observation easier for those watching us - on the screens in a room that we cannot see. They watch us. We do not see them.
It is a very large room but the windows are opaque. The chairs are organised around tables and we are in the corner near a table with toys for children. We have been assigned a specific table. This also makes it easier to observe us. It is all very informal on the surface. A clever piece of architectural and spatial psychology that allows you to relax. But the truth is that that camera is pointing your way, and someone is behind it, watching.
As we stood in the glass box with the security doors, that leads into, and out of, this room, it was the children we saw first. Faces that we knew. You could see they were excited that we had come. Then Sara, their mother, and Jamil, their father. Familiar faces.
Sara was in tears. We - that is Kath, Frances, Huda and myself, hug her and the children and embrace Jamil. Sara weaps out how awful it is here as we hug her.
"Why are they doing this to us?" She asks this over and again. "We have committed no crime."
It is true. They have committed no crime. Except perhaps that a relative of Jamil was said to have been critical of the regime of Saddam Hussein and so they had to flee. But it is claimed that they are in breach of the Dublin Convention - so the immigration service says. Powerful white men in suits met in comfortable surroundings and decided that refugees must claim asylum in the first safe country they land in. The Dublin Convention is not advertised in Iraq. You don't go to an advice centre about fleeing for your life. Jamil fled first and then Sara later. They ended up in different countries - in Germany and Spain and then did as best they could in the confusion to get together again, by managing to meet up in Britain together. The family were reunited and sent to Nottingham.
I have brought photographs of happier times with them and I have been allowed to bring them through the security arrangements. There isn't a lot allowed through the security arrangements - there are signs up in the visitors reception about the immigration act. Pictures show the objects that will not be allowed in. Of course weapons are not allowed in... fancy that... and neither are video, or other kinds of cameras.
When it comes to videos and cameras the Detention Centre has the monopoly. There's one facing you, virtually, as you come through the door, into the visitors reception. As you hand in your ID, which can be a passport or a driving licence, you stand in front of the camera for an instant digital mug shot, that goes with an electronic record of your fingerprints. There's that mug shot and finger prints following you through all of the stages of getting into the visitor's room. No doubt the people watching in that back room, behind that video camera, have your picture there to call up, so they know instantly who you are.
Funny when I came in. I was asked about the pictures that I had , "They're not dirty photos are they?", as if you would bring porno pictures to a family group. But the people who are doing the furtive watching, the people raping other people's right to privacy, are the staff - following the security regulations, of course. Regulations made by comfortable white men in suits, meeting in a boardroom no doubt - the same boardroom that hears about the profit trends from this privatised enterprise. Regulations implemented mostly by black people, as Jamil and Sara have noticed. Virtually none of the staff are of English origin.
They check up on Sara every night. Call it a detention centre if you like. In reality it's a very modern prison. Many of the staff are from the prison service. You don't have to be there long, as a visitor, to realise that there are some people working there who still have human feelings and some sense of decency, people who don't like what they are doing - who you can tell are going to be getting out fairly soon - while there are other staff who have been institutionalised by the prison, don't care, or perhaps even enjoy the power that the regulations give them. These are the one's who shrug and say "I'm just doing my job." They are the ones the stories are about, when the detainees are able to talk to each other- who get very heavy as you are dragged away to the airport in handcuffs.
You don't feel safe in a place like this if you are a detainee. Every few minutes outside you can see the planes taking off from Heathrow airport. The entrance to the terminals is just a few yards down the road. We have come in the visitors entrance, through a normal size door. The detainees don't come in and out like that. Like institutions of this type everywhere in the world, they come in through a very big door, that slides open for vehicles to pass through. And so here, if you are a detainess like Jamil and Sara, you fear that one day they will come for you, handcuff you in front of your weeping children, drag you into that vehicle, driving though that giant sliding door, to the airport, getting rough if you don't co-operate.
Actually, the photos I have brought are of a day a few months before. It all seems such a long time ago. It was to have been a summer barbecue, jointly organised by the Refugee Forum, my own project Ecoworks, the Stonebridge City Farm and the Food Initiatives Group. But it was pouring with rain. The barbecue was to have been in a clearing in Bestwood Country Park, but as we all got there, alternative arrangements were needed. Ecoworks has a catering trailer and we drew it up near the classroom that is used by the Park Rangers to teach children and young people about the natural history of the woods. We piled in there and all joined together, preparing the food and eating together. There is the picture of Jamil, cutting up onions, of Sara and Majid, standing by the catering trailer under a brolly, of the people huddled against the wet. The memories come back. I ask Hoda if she remembers and she reminds me how she was the star with the hoola hoop, that none of us adults could manage.
I have brought other photos too, of the wild flower meadow, planted by Jamil, at the Ecoworks community garden, of my colleague Adrian's children, in the catering trailer. There is Daja, for example, who stayed at the Daoud's House at Abbotsford Drive, playmate to Hoda.
How long ago was this? It was only a few weeks. Yet the Daoud family have been in the detention centre three weeks now, and Jamil says that it feels like a year. None of them have anything to do. In an institution like this you notice each minute passing. What is there to do? Why, they can watch the television. There is one Arabic language channel of NBC. There is a library, if you want to go through the humiliating procedures to get to it, for a short time, to read the couple of Arabic books to be found there.
In every day life, in a prison or a psychiatric ward, at least you have occupation, you have work, things to occupy yourself with. But here you are in what they intend as a secure departure lounge, to that flight that they are going to make you go on. Like a departure lounge you can spend your money on the crisps, the biscuits, the chocolate bars, the Pepsi, the machine made tea or coffee, in the vending machines, but they'll not let you do virtually anything else. The institution makes the tea and coffee for you, at the time the regulations say. You don't have a kettle in your room. You don't get a razor to shave without going through the procedures. You don't cook your own food. To get to wash your clothes you ask permission and go through more security procedures.
After the physical torture of Saddam's regime Jamil is tortured again by Her Britannic Majesty's Government, this time psychologically. His wife and family too. Being alive means being active. Here you are allowed to breath, watch TV and spend a tiny allowance - everything else you ask permission for - or take what is given to you at the time, and in the manner, that the regulations specify. You get the worst of British society in microcosm, just before the government decides to chuck you out.
It's your fault, you mismanaged it, when you ran for your life. You should have known about the Dublin Convention and planned things better.
Yet this is an extraordinarily active and creative family. In less than a year the children have not only learned English they have been streaking ahead at school, are liked by the other children and doing very well indeed. Majid would be starting secondary school and asks if he well be punished for failing to turn up. Hoda has written in English to her teachers and other children. One of their mother Sara's greatest joys is to cook. She has cooked for all of us at the community feasts we have had. She has rights to be considered an excellent judge of the detention centres diet and it isn't a complementary judgement. In institutions it is often the meal that is the highpoint, the only thing to look forward to, as the minutes tick by, because there is nothing else happening. Here, even that pleasure is denied.
When we talk about the food she would like to cook, in celebration, if they get bail and win their case, her face is full of excitement. I tell her about the vegetarian restaurant across the road from the Refugee Forum offices. The restaurant is keen to work with the Forum, and they will cook Iraqi vegetarian food if they are shown how. Down that road there are Thai restaurants, Italian restaurants, Indian restaurants, Chinese restaurants, Turkish restaurants, so why not a restaurant for Middle Eastern food, at least now and then, or on special occasions? Showing them how to cook that's no problem, says Sara, she is excited by what she will cook on that day, the day of their release that we are all hoping for.
Jamil too. His face lights up too as he talks about his allotment. You can see he is only partly here, in this detention centre as he speaks. His mind is on his plot where he has cleaned the soil carefully, of any kind of weeds, and worked day after day until ten at night. He draws a plan on a piece of paper borrowed from the children's play table and describes to me where he has grown the 4 types of beans, the tomatoes, the onions, the lettuce. There's a tree in this corner, he explains, and it puts a part of the allotment under shade. He wants the allotment on the other side, which is vacant. He wonders what has happened about that. Tony Hallam, the allotments officer comes up to the allotments regularly, and he had planned to see him about that. On the day he was to see him, however, he hadn't turned up.
Jamil describes how he studied agriculture in Iraq. He describes his hatchery, where he incubated chicken eggs. I ask what he did with the chicks that hatched. That wasn't an issue, he said. Diet was a problem, everyone needed protein and everyone wanted to buy chickens to get eggs for their families.
Here he can do nothing, but wait and worry. On the Mission Statement at the entrance they have said that the role of the institution is to provide secure accommodation in a humane fashion. And to be sure there are no torture implements to be seen here. But what is happening to people here is institutionally cruel and damaging. It is bound to be. You take active, creative people and you put them in a sterile regulated box, watch their every move, give them a poor diet, and set them up to worry about their future. You separate them from friends and supporters by 200 miles. You say that you want their future to be in another country, whose language they do not know, where they know no one, and from whence they may be deported back to the country from which they fled, perhaps to their deaths. Fear, uncertainty, powerlessness and sensory/activity deprivation - it's a good recipe for giving people breakdowns.
You could hardly design a system better to batter people's emotional and psychological health, to magnify rather than healing, the psychological trauma that comes from having to run for your lives. You give them a card with their face on it, taken by a digital camera, with a number on it and the words "Detainee" in red. You treat people like numbers - get rid of 2 adults and 4 children and you are that much closer to meeting your target of expelling 30,000 to please the readers of the Daily Mail. And, of course, if they appear to be suffering, lying on their beds for hours crying, you give them tranquillisers. What else?
You can call this a humane environment in your mission statement on the wall. It won't make it so in reality. There is supposed to be law against this sort of thing. It's called the Human Rights Act. It is supposed to be against the law to administer cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment in 'Great' Britain. Jamil and Sara know about this law and at the moment they are not convinced about it. You can't blame them for that. I'm not convinced yet either.
It is time to leave this room. The children are afraid, says Sara, that if we go for our meal now, when we come back, you will be gone. But Frances tells them that we must leave and the children are right. Outside the entrance she breaks down and weeps. We all want to cry.
Brian Davey
September 2002
© BRIAN DAVEY