NINE DAYS AGO Amin Buratee and his housemates rose at 5am to pray; it was Ramadan. So he was awake when, half an hour later, what is known as The Knock came. The house was surrounded by seven police officers and immigration officials. Amin was not surprised, though the police were because the young man they had come to arrest was polite and offered no resistance. All the same they locked him in the cage at the back of the police van, although on the journey to the detention centre they changed their minds, apologised and allowed him to sit in a seat behind them.
Ever since Amin’s second appeal to stay in the UK to complete his education was refused earlier this year he had been expecting, and dreading, the arrival of a letter telling him that he was to be deported to Afghanistan where he grew up. The letter never arrived; the police did instead. His flight to Kabul leaves on Saturday.
Perhaps you think that his story is one of an asylum seeker who flees a blighted country, leeches off the British benefit system, engages in crime and deserves to be thrown out. Amin’s story is much simpler than this. And what is remarkable is that over the past nine days almost everyone who has got to know him in Kent has rallied to campaign for him to be allowed to stay in Britain.
At Canterbury High School teachers and pupils are rooting for him. The teachers, who without exception regard him as an exemplary pupil, continue to advise and care for him, urging him to eat at the Dover Immigration Removal Centre where he is being held, and trying to establish whether any support can be found for him in Kabul where he now knows no one. His family are believed to be dead. On Sunday, 200 people held a candlelit vigil for him outside the centre; another is planned for the Buttermarket in Canterbury today , which the headmaster has permitted students to attend. Even the dean of the Cathedral has agreed to meet students to discuss the matter.
“He really wanted education and used every advantage given to him,” says Pauline Marks, the school’s sixth-form manager. “He’s a quiet lad but he threw himself into everything. He is in Britain legitimately and he wanted to learn so that eventually he could give something back to Kabul.”
No, Amin’s story does not concern an abusive young man. Rather it is one that shows that if you are gentle and earnest, dignified and trusting — and you then come up against an inflexible system, in this case the immigration policy — you may be treated inhumanely. Amin, who is 18, has done nothing wrong, he has not broken any rules, he is not a criminal.
I meet him at the Removal Centre, a grim collection of barbed-wire-clad buildings in Dover. You pass through a gatehouse, then two more locked gates and finally into the visiting room where the detainees wear orange tabards and where visitors are asked to tell staff if they think anyone is likely to be suicidal or to self-harm. Amin is neither; he is more inclined to smile, because that is is habit, though he looks down a lot and when asked how he feels he is not forthcoming. I suggest instead that he talks about his upbringing and hear a story which, in spite of the understated way in which he tells it, explains why he has been so appreciative of the kindness and support he has found in Britain.
He grew up in Kabul with his parents, brothers and sister. His father, a communist, worked at the airport. “When I was 13 or 14 it became dangerous for everyone who was a communist,” he says. “When my father finished work he used to leave his uniform at the airport and change into traditional clothes before he came home. My parents didn’t tell me much but the Taleban was in power so as Shiites it was difficult for us.”
By the time Amin was 16 his family had become a target and his brother and uncle had been killed. “I was 16 when my father decided to pay an agent to get me out of Kabul,” he says. “We went first to Pakistan. We were always hidden in lorries, vans, taxis, sometimes for 20 hours without water or food. I was frightened.”
In April 2002 Amin arrived at Folkestone, where he sought asylum. He spent three months in a hotel in Dover where he was given English classes. Then he was given leave to remain and housed in Whitstable with three other young refugees; in effect they became his new family, though they were also supported by key workers and the school.
“It was difficult because I couldn’t speak much English but for lots of reasons I was happy,” he says. “I was safe, I was alive, I had more freedom than in Afghanistan. School was fantastic, everyone was kind and friendly. I was there like a British citizen, not a foreigner. In Kabul if we didn’t do our homework the teachers beat us. We didn’t have sports or science. Here you can do everything.” It is this ability to dwell on positives rather than the many losses of his life that has astonished his teachers and mentors.
While he has been in Kent he has received a letter from the Home Office telling him that his father has died, but he does not mention this to me; he prefers to talk about the hours he spends in the Removal Centre’s library improving his English. At school he often asked for extra homework on top of the five or six hours he did each night, and his long-term plan was that he should be allowed to study computer science at a UK university, so that when he returned to Kabul he would have qualifications. But to return now? “I don’t know what will happen. I don’t know what Afghanistan is like. I have no one there,” he says. Outside the removal centre I meet another Afghan refugee whose circumstances are similar to Amin’s but who has been granted leave to remain while he completes a university course.
Amin does have a relative of his father’s in the Netherlands and it is likely that new evidence will confirm that Amin will face difficulty and possibly persecution should he return to Kabul. A Home Office spokeswoman is unmoved. “If someone has had their final appeal we expect them to leave the country,” she says. “All applications are assessed by skilled case workers. He has reached the end of the application process.”
Adam Weston, a volunteer mentor with the Kent Refugee Action Network (Kran), explains that Amin — the first of 30 detainees in the area to be refused leave to remain — is being deported on a point of law. “The law has decided that his case has no merit,” Weston says. “Amin needs evidence that it’s unsafe for him to return, and it’s hard to find the proof when your legal help is limited.”
As Amin’s mentor at school, Gilly Wadmore, puts it, here is a well-motivated young man who wants to work, who has valid reasons for being in the UK, and who is being treated as undesirable. “He wanted to go back to Afghanistan to contribute something. At the moment he hasn’t finished his studies and he hasn’t got the skills he might have. His return will benefit nobody,” she says.
Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights states that “Everyone has the right to respect for his private and family life.” Amin has no family and in the past two and a half years he has come to rely on friendships and networks that have supported him in Kent. His private life is now in the UK, not in Kabul. This will be just one of many fears that fill his mind as he arrives in Kabul on Saturday and heads, alone and with nothing to his name, into a city where he knows no one.
