Tears of the Desert

by Halima Bashir

  Yet I was to be sent back to Sudan?

  I wondered what that spiky-haired man had written about me on the day that I arrived in London. What could he possibly have said that might warrant such a decision? Upon arrival at my lawyer’s office my refusal letter was read to me. As far as I could understand the main argument seemed to be that it was safe to return me to Khartoum. There was no fighting in Khartoum, so why would I be in any danger there? How could they say such things? Had they even read my file? This was madness—blind, stupid lunacy.

  I was allocated a new lawyer who dealt specifically with asylum appeals. He was a kindly young Englishman called Albert Harwood, and we met in a cramped office that was piled high with files. We had to prepare a whole new witness statement for my appeal. I had to repeat my story, only this time adding in the new developments: finding my husband, my pregnancy, talking to the Aegis Trust people. Albert wrote down everything, and my trust grew in him as we worked. He really seemed to care.

  He told me not to worry. Once the appeal was lodged I would be safe—it would then be illegal to deport me to Sudan. After I was done with Albert I went to see my GP. He examined me, and told me that I was going back into the hospital right away. I was so weak that he doubted if I would be allowed out again before the birth. There was certainly no way that I could return to Southampton. And he was going to try to get me housed as an emergency case, in London.

  Sure enough I was told that I would have to stay in the hospital. I was around thirty-seven weeks by now, and soon I could be induced. I spent a few days there, bored and fed up and alone. I wanted to give birth in Southampton, so that Sharif and my friends could be there. I told my consultant that I wanted to go home. She begged me to stay. One more week of eating well and building up my strength and then she would induce me, she promised. I agreed to stay.

  On the day of the inducement Sharif traveled up to London. But the birth was difficult from the very start. I started bleeding heavily, and my Australian midwife pressed the emergency button. A team of doctors came running. They used ultrasound to check, but it seemed that the placenta was stuck to the baby. I would have to give birth by caesarean. Sharif donned a medical gown so he could be with me in the operating room. But all of a sudden the baby just started to come, and the room went into total panic.

  My baby was born naturally, but by that time I knew nothing of it. I came to sometime later in a dark and shadowy place. I was surrounded by lights that beeped and flashed with every beat of my heart. I was cold, so cold. I felt as if I might be dead. I saw a white face appear above me, floating among a sea of muted lights. It was one of the nurses.

  I was in the Intensive Care Unit, she explained. My body was bound in bandages, and I had drips going into either arm.

  “How are you feeling?” she asked.

  I tried to smile. “I’m okay . . . Where is my baby?”

  The nurse gestured with her eyes to my bedside. I glanced across. Next to me was a see-through plastic cart, and inside it was a little bundled heap of life. I saw tiny hands and feet poking out of the bundle. A fuzz of jet black curls. Eyes closed tight. My baby.

  “Can I hold her?” I asked.

  The nurse shook her head. “You’re too weak. Maybe tomorrow. Anyway, it’s not a ‘her.’ It’s a ‘him.’ You have a lovely baby boy.”

  She pushed the incubator closer. I gazed in rapture at his tiny, scrunched-up face. His eyes opened just a fraction, as he blinked in the dim light. For just a moment his gaze met mine and I swear that he smiled. My little baby boy had smiled at me.

  “Is he safe?” I whispered. “They’re not going to steal him? I can’t watch over him and protect him . . .”

  The nurse smiled. “Don’t worry. Look, I’ll put a little alarm on him so that if anyone picks him up you’ll know, okay?”

  The nurse reached into the incubator and fastened something around his tiny ankle. I guessed he was safe enough now. I started to sing to him—gently, quietly, a lullaby whispered under my breath, a song that my father and mother had sung to me when I was just a child . . .

  It was many days before my baby and I were allowed to go home. Sharif and his friends collected us and drove us back to Southampton. It was high time that we held the naming ceremony. Of course, as he was our firstborn son he had to be called “Mohammed.” I had no boy’s clothes for him, so that first day Sharif and I dressed him up like a baby girl.

  All of our visitors exclaimed: “Oh, what a beautiful girl!”

  So I told them that “she” was called “Mohammed,” and that put them straight! After the naming Sharif and his friends vacated the flat, and went to stay with friends. I was left with a gaggle of Zaghawa women. They cooked for me and washed baby Mohammed and clothed him, while I rested and regained my strength. Every day Sharif would come to visit. This went on for the full forty days, by which time I was pretty much recovered.

  For a while Sharif, Mo, and I lived the life of a happy family. But at the same time we knew that there was a shadow hanging over us. During this time we were given a little flat to live in, in London. Our new home consisted of a tiny apartment in a Victorian house that had been divided into a dozen similarly sized flats. We had one room with a foldout bed, and a walk-in kitchen and shower off to one side. It was hopelessly cramped, yet it was our home.

  Finally my asylum appeal was heard, and I received a letter from the Home Office with the result. I couldn’t bear to open it myself, and so I took it to my lawyer. I would need him to read it in any case, because I couldn’t understand the complex legal jargon they used. I handed Albert the letter and he opened it, with a smile. He knew it was going to be good news. He started to read it out loud, but as he did so the smile froze on his lips.

  He couldn’t believe it. He was dumbfounded. My appeal had been turned down. In essence the letter stated that the Zaghawa were not affected by the war in Darfur. It was safe to return me to Khartoum. And while I had spoken out to the Aegis Trust, there was free speech in Sudan so that would not cause me any undue problems. The letter concluded by stating that both Sharif and I had been refused asylum in Great Britain. Once again, we were scheduled for immediate deportation to Sudan.

  By the time he had finished reading the letter Albert was stunned. He had a look of total disbelief on his face. As for me, I just felt drained. What was the point in continuing, I wondered? Why go on? It was Albert’s anger that galvanized me into action. We would appeal once more, he said. We would appeal to the highest court in the land. We would go to the House of Lords if necessary, but we were not going to give up.

  Albert went about preparing a second appeal, and baby Mo, Sharif, and I returned to our little London flat. I was miserable and downhearted. I was also scared. All I wanted was to stay here in peace and safety. I wanted my dignity back, and I wanted to contribute to this society. I was a trained medical doctor, and I knew this country needed doctors. But instead the Home Office forced us to live on handouts, while arguing that my story was a pack of lies.

  Each week I had to go to a Reporting Center to sign for the family, and to be fingerprinted. The Center was like a prison. There was a row of cells off to one side. It was here that asylum seekers were grabbed by the guards and thrown into the cells, from where they were taken to the airports and flown back to the countries from which they had fled. Being there was so dispiriting, and each time I was terrified that the same was going to happen to little Mo and me.

  I was approached by the Aegis Trust for a second time. My first testimony had been very powerful, they told me. Now they were organizing a Global Day for Darfur—a worldwide campaign of publicity. No one knew exactly how many had been killed in Darfur, but there were reports citing hundreds of thousands. It was a mind-numbing figure. Whenever I thought about it, I imagined the whole of my homeland bathed in blood, and burning in flames. Millions and millions had fled into refugee camps in Chad, but even these were places of dark suffering. God only knew where my family might be.

 
The Aegis people asked me if I was prepared to speak out publicly, to the media. I said that I would think about it. I was worried. I had spoken to the press once before, in Sudan, and look where that had got me. Might it get me into more trouble if I did so here in England? I met their press person, David Brown, in a café in London. He told me that the Global Day would focus on violence against women. That was why it was so crucial that I spoke out. The world had to know the truth. He had an interview lined up with the BBC.

  I thought about what he had said. I was angry myself now. I was angry that the nightmare in Darfur was ongoing, and I was angry with the British government. Three times they had refused to believe my story—once in person at the Home Office, and twice since then in writing. They were intent on sending me and little Mo back to Sudan, and they were doing so in cold, blind ignorance. David was right. The world did need to know.

  I understood the power of the BBC. I knew its reach. I remembered my father tuning his little radio into the BBC World Service. I didn’t even need to ask myself what he would have wanted me to do in the circumstances. It was obvious. I told David that I would speak to the BBC. In fact, I would speak to any press and any media that would hear me. I didn’t give a damn what anyone thought and I didn’t give a damn about the shame.

  But there was one thing that I wanted to be reassured of. “If I speak to the press can I be punished? Can they hurt me? Is it safe? I have little Mo to think of . . .”

  David smiled. “This isn’t Sudan. . . . There’s a free press here. No one can do anything to you. You’re free to say whatever you want.”

  The BBC went ahead and filmed an interview with me for Newsnight, their flagship news program. At around the same time I spoke to a journalist from The Sunday Telegraph and The Independent newspapers. The Sunday Telegraph ran a story with this headline: “Tony Blair admits Darfur is a tragedy. So why is he sending this gang-rape victim back to her attackers?”

  Following publication and broadcast of those first stories a tidal wave of publicity just seemed to engulf me. Channel 4 News carried a long report on the abuse of women as a weapon of war. Al Arabia TV ran a feature on my story, which broadcast across the Arab world. American TV stations picked up on it, and soon there was a steady stream of journalists and camera crews shuttling in and out of our tiny little flat.

  This is what I told the media was happening in Darfur:

  Innocent people are dying. There are people with nothing to eat and drink. People living with no homes, on the streets, in the bush. They are lost in the desert, dying of hunger and thirst, dying from war. Why? What have they done? Nothing. People should think about our common humanity. If the same happened to you, would you accept it? If this happened to your family, would you accept it?

  Where is the Muslim world? Where is the Arab world? Where are the people of the whole world? How can Muslims kill other Muslims for no reason? This is something that God forbade. God said, “Do not take a life without justification and right.” But this is happening with no right, no justification, people killing innocents for no reason.

  Darfur is not separate from the world; Sudan is not isolated from the world; but people are standing and watching this happen, those who have it in their power to stop such things. People shouldn’t look at this in a political way, because the victims are innocent people. They are dying through no fault of their own. What did they do? They did nothing to deserve this.

  I feel like I am one of the survivors, one of those who escaped, and possibly God chose me to send out a message to the rest of the world, to alert the entire world that there are innocent people dying, so that the world might protect them and extend assistance to them.

  My face became the face of suffering in Darfur, as newspapers across the world carried full-page advertisements decrying the rape of women in my homeland. It reached the stage where I didn’t know anymore who or where each journalist was coming from. Eventually, I could take no more. I told David I would have to call a halt. I was exhausted. And we needed some private space in which to be a family once more. David told me that he understood. In any case, I had done more than enough. I had truly broken the silence.

  But there was one last thing David urged me to consider doing—as much for myself as for the cause. James Smith, his boss at the Holocaust Center, which is home to the Aegis Trust, is himself a fellow medical doctor. He had suggested that I might visit and speak to an audience of doctors and other health professionals about my experiences in Darfur.

  I had never spoken publicly before, so I was nervous to do so now—especially if it would mean talking about the dark horrors that had engulfed me. But I was curious to learn more about the Center, and the murder of so many innocent millions during World War II.

  The Nottingham-based Holocaust Center is Britain’s first Holocaust memorial and education center. I was encouraged by the fact that survivors from the Bosnian and Rwandan genocides had spoken there before me. And because it was fellow doctors that I would be talking to, I felt that they would really identify with my suffering.

  One June morning I traveled up there by train. The Holocaust Center is set on two acres of lovely gardens. After the beauty and tranquility of those gardens, I was shocked to see the images of the Holocaust that line the walls of the center’s exhibition rooms.

  As I gazed at the photos of unspeakable horror and mass murder from the time of the World War II, I found myself back in the hell that is Darfur. The darkness from which I had fled engulfed me again. I was back inside the suffering of my own people, and my own personal tragedy. I felt the tears start to flow, and I could not stop them.

  Yet at the same time I felt a strange kind of contentment and happiness. Yes, I told myself, here at last was a group of people who were investigating and challenging genocide, so that nobody could ever forget the dying of the innocents in my homeland, in Darfur.

  The lecture room was quiet, the audience bathed in darkness. As I stood up to talk to them, I was horribly nervous and I feared that the words would fail to come. But an instant later my voice started speaking, and I began telling the story of my happy childhood growing up in Darfur.

  I wanted to convey the ordinariness of it all, the sense in which my own childhood was perhaps so similar to those in the audience. I wanted to communicate the love and laughter of my close-knit family and village and tribe, so as to better demonstrate what had been crushed and desecrated when the nightmare descended in Darfur.

  I spoke quietly, and with growing confidence, as the words started to flow. But once I began to relate the horrors that I had witnessed, and those that had befallen me personally, I felt my voice tremble, as if it were going to break. But I strove to hold back the flood of emotion that was threatening to overwhelm me, so that I could go on.

  When I finished speaking, silence filled the lecture chamber. And then my fellow doctors rose to their feet and applauded me. I knew from the questions that followed that I had touched them deeply. That such things could happen to a fellow doctor—and simply as a result of trying to help the sick and injured in my home country—shocked them to their core.

  I returned to my little London flat to discover that there were problems with the neighbors over all the journalists who had been dropping by. There were two Iraqi sisters at the top of the communal stairway. They had been accosting journalists and complaining that they had only one room for the two of them to live in.

  “Look! Look! Come! Come!” they would scream. “Mr. BBC, look what your British government gives us—what place is this to live? It is hell! Not even fit for dogs . . .”

  “You have a room,” I’d tell them, once the journalists had gone. “It is somewhere to live. Have some respect. Stop complaining.”

  But those Iraqi women never did cease their complaining. They complained to anyone who would listen. Eventually, they were moved to better accommodations. That was how the system seemed to work. If you complained and worked the system, it responded. If you were quiet and respectful,
as we were, it was a dead end.

  There was a shocking example of this in our building. Across the way from us was a pretty blond Albanian lady called Zamirah. She had a little baby girl, and she and I used to take Mo and her daughter to a local playgroup. The teachers and the mothers were all very good to us, and it was a lovely place. There were different races and religions at the playgroup, and we all got along just fine. I really loved it there, and so did Mo.

  Zamirah was quiet and decent and she never complained about anything. And in contrast to the Iraqi sisters, she never once tried to belittle us because we were black Africans. The sisters were forever trying to do so. But one day Zamirah came back from the Reporting Center looking as white as a sheet. A car pulled up outside, and she began rushing in and out of the flat bundling all her worldly possessions into it. I met her at the ent trance, and suddenly she was stuffing her daughter’s toys into my arms. She looked absolutely finished, and I could see a dark panic in her normally sunny eyes.

  “For Mo!” she told me, breathlessly. “Take them!”

  “But what . . . ?”

  Before I could ask her any more she jumped into the car and was gone, her little girl strapped in behind her. That was the last I ever saw of them. It was from another of our neighbors, a British woman called Frances, that I heard what had happened. The people at the Reporting Center had seized Zamirah, so they could deport her. But she had been released so she could fetch her little girl, whom she’d left in the care of a friend.

  The next time I went to the playgroup the mothers asked after Zamirah and her daughter. I didn’t know what to say. We were the only asylum seekers there, and what was I to tell them? That their government had tried to send Zamirah back to the country from which she had fled; that she was terrified; that she had gone into hiding instead? So I just told them that I didn’t know what had happened to my friend and her little girl.