4.
CASE STUDIES, ARTWORK & POEMS
Case study 1: Shokat’s Story
Written by Shokat’s visitor
Shirley Williams is on the case and is trying to get hold of the Liam Byrne to stop Shokat’s
removal.’ These were Nic Eadie’s words over the phone as I rang our office one Friday in
December 2007. I was impressed, realising that GDWG could call on the support of our Patron
in such a hands-on way. I was also anxious. Our visitors’ training warns us against getting too
caught up in the fate of those we visit and after 18 months visiting Tinsley House I thought I’d
attained a workable balance. But Shokat got through my defences. I remember that weekend as
a time of anxious waiting and dashed hope.
Shokat was a young Afghan detainee whose case was relatively simple: categorised as ‘third
country’ by the Immigration Office, it was a matter of time before he was to be returned to
Greece where a lorry had dropped him in the spring of 2007 after an arduous journey from
Afghanistan.
He had fled after the presumed death of his father and brothers at the hands of the Taliban.
Shokat belonged to a one of Afghanistan’s minor Muslim communities who had fought the
Taliban longest, suffered the most during their rule and had much to fear from their return to
power. His mother and younger sisters had fled from their home near Ghazni and Shokat had
no knowledge of their whereabouts, still less of their fate. Fearing for his own life, he used the
little money he had to pay an agent for a passage out of the country.
Arrested in the streets by the Greek Police, Shokat was detained for three days, beaten in
custody, fingerprinted and returned to the streets with the admonition to ‘get out of this country’.
He found a place on a lorry heading out of Greece. Eventually, in August 2007, Shokat found
himself transported in yet another lorry to the Folkstone area where he requested asylum. He
had a birth certificate showing he was under 18 and was given the status of a ‘minor with
disputed age’ and provided for in Ashford, Kent. The Home Office insisted on a bone-age test
and concluded that Shokat was over 18 and was immediately transferred to Tinsley House
while awaiting removal to Greece.
This is when I met Shokat, a pale, traumatised young man, who couldn’t sleep because his
mind filled at night with images of his mother and family. Likewise, the dreaded prospect of a
return to Greece haunted him. Despite appeals and endless letters the Home Office was set
upon its determination.
Then something unexpected happened. A few days before Shokat’s removal date our office
heard of a court judgement advising against the return of ‘third country’ detainees to Greece.
Time was short but our office staff went straight into action with the most admirable efficiency to
stop Shokat’s removal. This is how Shirley Williams became involved. When we realised on the
following Monday that, despite all our efforts, Shokat had been removed we were collectively
devastated. It was even worse a couple of days later when the office staff found a forlorn,
overnight message from Shokat on the phone with a contact number, which failed to connect.
It was difficult to shake off the memory of Shokat. I felt a need to know what was happening to
him in a way that I never have with any other detainee. As time passed it became a dull sensing
that some day, somehow I would hear again from him. I just carried on lighting a weekly candle
for him in my church. And then one morning, a year or so later, Nic Eadie received an email
from an unknown German lady called Ruth. She had found Shokat ‘looking very sad, ill and full
of fear’ in a refugee camp in northern Germany and had rescued him, eventually adopting him.
Did we have someone called Mr. Jim in our organisation? she was asking in her message.
Amazingly, Shokat had felt all this time the same need to get back in touch despite having very
little recollection of where he had been detained in the UK. Ruth’s determination and the web
did the rest.
Immediately, I sent off an email to Ruth. The first line of her reply was, ‘Oh my God! I cannot tell
you how happy I am about your mail’. When Shokat came home from school that same day he
and I were in immediate email contact; he still called me Mr. Jim but we were like two kids who’d
found each other.
GDWG visitors will be familiar with lots of aspects of this account, and many will have their own
tales to tell. I have written it because I was lucky enough to find out ‘what happened after’. Many
of us are left wondering, knowing that we are unlikely to find out. I think there is much to
encourage us in ‘Shokat’s Story’. I am still in touch with him and his family. This is what Ruth
wrote recently: ‘It is great that you do this work in Gatwick - Shokat told me a lot of times how
much your visits helped him not to abandon hope’.
Shokat on his 18th birthday
with his mother, Ruth, and
his brother, Jona.
Germany September 2010.