Inderjeed Singh: Lost In Kabul

[killah]

Inderjeed Singh: lost in Kabul

Caroline Moorehead

22 - 7 - 2003

The epic journey of a Sikh man from the Afghan city of Jalalabad to London’s Southall district ended with his deportation to Kabul by the British authorities. If this policy of forced return of Afghans becomes standard practice, what will happen to the legions of the lost in Iran and Pakistan?

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Inderjeed Singh Kaboor is a Sikh from Jalalabad, a city in Afghanistan that lies between Kabul and the border with Pakistan. In December 2001, he fled to the United Kingdom in search of asylum. In June 2003, I met him back in Afghanistan, where he was camping in the dormitory of a Sikh gurdwara (temple) in Kabul, one of a planeload of deportees of rejected Afghan asylum-seekers arranged by Britain’s Home Office from Gatwick airport. He was despondent and confused.

Jalalabad is a large, busy city, little ruined by years of war. It has an old, well-established Sikh community. When the Communists were in charge, until 1992, Inderjeed Singh’s family thrived. They ran a textile business and lived together, parents and eight children, in a large house. But with the takeover of power by the mujahideen, life grew tougher; there were constant demands for bribes. And when the Taliban came in 1996, the Sikhs found themselves hedged in with restrictions, constantly harassed in the streets and soon virtual prisoners in their own homes.

“Soon after the arrival of the Taliban my father and other Sikh elders were taken prisoner and had to pay to be released”, Inderjeed Singh explains. “Then one day I was taken prisoner too and kept in a small narrow room with my eyes blindfolded. I was released after my father paid a ransom, but the Taliban beat me and broke my nose and my hand”.

A life in limbo

In the months that followed, the family shared the fate of many of Afghanistan’s persecuted people: they cowered at home, the men seldom daring to attend the gurdwara, the women too frightened to be seen in the streets. Early in 2000, Inderjeed Singh’s father decided that life was too dangerous for his older children, and arranged with an agent to send Inderjeed’s older brother abroad. He paid the trafficker $10,000, money saved from the textile business over the years. When this son reached Britain, and found asylum, he sent his next three children, all girls, to join him.

“Life was getting harder and more dangerous for us all the time”, says Inderjeed Singh. ”We were not allowed to worship and now not even the men left the house. I had trouble with a Muslim family, whose daughter had become a friend of mine. The father insisted that I marry her and that I convert to Islam. When I refused, he said that he would have me killed.” A further $10,000 was found, and Inderjeed Singh was put into the hands of traffickers.

His journey to Britain, where he hoped to join his brother and sisters in the London district of Southall, took three and a half months. It started on the back of a lorry to Peshawar, from where Inderjeed was smuggled across the border under some bales of cloth. There he spent many weeks in hiding alongside other would-be emigrants in a house he was forbidden to leave.

After this came a series of journeys, by lorry, once by car, once by plane. Inderjeed Singh says that he was not told where he was, nor informed of the stages of his journey - for his own, and the traffickers’, safety. In between he spent days and nights in safe houses, alone or with others. He was given food and water, but little else.

“Finally we reached some kind of dock. It was mid-December. I was hidden at the very back of a lorry transporting fridges and freezers to the UK. I could feel the lorry being loaded onto a boat. It was totally dark. I could hear voices but I couldn’t see anything. At last I was told to get out. The agent who had brought me took me to London on a train, and then left me, telling me to find a policeman and ask for his help. A policeman directed me to a Sikh temple and they helped me to contact a solicitor and the Home Office and ask for asylum.”

What Inderjeed Singh did not know when he arrived in the UK, was that in his absence the Taliban had fallen, and a new transitional government was in place in Afghanistan. The persecution of the Sikhs and other ethnic and religious groups was officially over. To be Afghan had ceased to be a passport to a new refugee life in the west.

Having traced his brother and moved to live with him in Southall, Inderjeed Singh soon heard that his request for asylum had been turned down, on the grounds that he no longer need fear persecution at home, and that his difficulties with his Muslim neighbour were not valid reasons to win him refugee status.

Through his solicitor, he appealed. This, too, was turned down. One day, when he went to sign in as he had been instructed, he was taken into custody and told that he would be deported. “I spent one night in detention in Gatwick. My brother brought me a suitcase with some clothes. Next day I was put onto a plane, with about forty-five other deportees and two immigration officers. No one struggled, but several of them were crying.”

As soon as the plane landed in Kabul, Inderjeed Singh used the little money he had with him to make his way home to Jalalabad. There he found the family home deserted. His parents and younger brothers and sisters had vanished. He has no idea where they are, and no one was able to help him find them.

He returned to Kabul and found help from the Sikh gurdwara to the south of the city, where he has joined others who are penniless and who have taken refuge in its precinct. None are deportees, but they lost their shops and homes under the Taliban, and their families are exiles over the border. In the gurdwara, rules are strict: in exchange for a bed in a dormitory, and food (with no animal products) the men accept that they will not play cards or watch television. Inderjeed Singh’s days are spent trying to find work and wondering what to do next and how to find his family. He longs for Britain and Southall, where he found the life congenial and where he hoped to get an education.

The dangers of deportation

Whatever the merits of Inderjeed Singh’s case, his claims for asylum are slender, among those of the many whose fears of persecution are very real and who have been severely tortured at the hands of the governments they have fled.

In choosing their first plane loads of deportees back to Afghanistan, the Home Office was intent on selecting only young single men from the Kabul area, which it declares to be relatively tranquil and under the protection of peacekeeping forces.

The new British policy also emphasises President Hamid Karzai’s appeals for the return of the many refugees from former Taliban persecution, and to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees’ (UNHCR) current programme of assisted returns.

Some two million people have indeed heeded Karzai, and their own longings for home, and returned to Afghanistan since the Taliban were overthrown. This is a considerably higher number than UNHCR expected, and certainly far more than the country is able to absorb.

All is not so simple, however. There is a chronic shortage of houses, jobs, schools, medical facilities and even food, and returnees have come home to find their property occupied by others and their lands rendered unusable by unexploded mines. For some years now, UNHCR has been walking a delicate line over the matter of assisted returns and deportations with Afghanistan’s neighbours, Iran and Pakistan, who absorbed the vast majority of refugees over the last troubled twenty-three years of civil conflict.

These two countries, while willing to help over small transport and resettlement grants, have held firm officially to their rule that return must be voluntary, and UNHCR protection officers and staff have fought hard to keep any forced deportations under control. Yet Iran, in particular, has deported thousands of young men back over the border, at times of perceived high unemployment or unrest. In 2002 alone, Iran deported 33,000 Afghans.

Despite these involuntary relocations, several million Afghans still remain in exile. They are scattered between the west, the United States and the Gulf states, but the vast majority remain stranded in Pakistan and Iran. As a result of bilateral agreements signed with both countries, UNHCR hopes to keep deportees as low as possible, at least for the next year or so, while Afghanistan struggles to rebuild itself and its economy. The position is very delicate.

Amnesty International and other human rights organisations have protested strongly about the forced returns, pointing out that there is no monitoring of those who go back, and that insecurity in the country is growing, not diminishing. Moreover, according to UNHCR in Kabul, some of the young men on the plane from Britain came not from the ‘safe’ Kabul region, but far to the north, where they could not return; and others were found not to be Afghans at all but Pakistanis.

This is where the story of Inderjeed Singh, a single leaf on the tree of Afghanistan’s tragedy, becomes so significant. A few plane loads of deportees from Britain will make no difference at all to the state of chronic poverty and overpopulation of Kabul. But their symbolic value is enormous. Once Britain and other European governments are seen to be deporting their unwanted Afghans, for reasons of domestic policy and popularity, what is to stop Iran and Pakistan from following suit? Then, truly, chaos will follow.