Hansard

Presiding Officer, thank you for your indulgence in letting me leave the chamber after I have made my speech.

“On the morning of October 3,”—

2013—

“a fishing boat leaves Tripoli. It is a small wooden boat, like a child’s drawing, with a high wheelhouse. It is old, worn out, no one can remember its name. Fish are scarce, and its owner would have been happy to get rid of it for a handful of sticky notes. On board are 520 passengers; they pack every inch of the hold, a biblical human fish, and they stand crammed on deck. Each has paid about $1,600 for the one-way trip. It is a calm, warm day, the tideless Mediterranean is blue, the rickety engine warbles and chokes, slowly pushing north. Its destination is Lampedusa.

This is the last journey, whatever the outcome. The boat is a disposable bark with a disposable cargo: Eritreans, mostly, some Somalis and Syrians, with a couple of Tunisians, men and women and children. There are 41 unaccompanied minors—the youngest is 11. They look back at their last view of Africa. The distinction between an economic migrant and a refugee is simple: are you running from or to? All these souls are escaping.

... on the night of October 3 that ... old fishing boat, with its exhausted passengers, ran out of steam and fuel.

They wouldn’t normally have expected to get this far: as a practised rule, the Italian coastguard tracks and picks up the trafficking boats at sea and transfers the refugees to the small port in the town. These arks usually call ahead on satellite phones or short-wave radios. It is an organised and familiar run, except not this time. There was no call and somehow no one noticed the blip of 500 Africans on the radar. The boat began to drift towards the cliff. Someone set fire to a blanket to attract help. They could see the lights on the shore. The passengers were tired and frightened and so close to the promised land they panic and move to one side of the ship, which swayed, yawed, lost its slippery balance and capsized: 368 Africans drown.

... When the refugees are brought ashore they’re given a medical check and their names are taken, then they’re bused to a camp on the outskirts of town that’s been pushed into a thin, dead-end valley: two-storey blocks of dormitories and an administration building, surrounded by a chain-link fence ... The dormitories are packed, there is barely enough room to walk between the beds, the walls are covered in hopeful, religious graffiti and names, the place smells of sewage and sweat. There are no dining facilities; refugees squat in the open or eat on the beds. There is a small area set aside for nursing mothers, otherwise there is only one lavatory for 100 women.

A Syrian complains that she hasn’t been able to go to the loo for days because the door doesn’t have a lock and there are always men there.”

That is the reality of the people who are trying hard to come to this country for a decent life. They are not coming here as economic migrants who are trying to steal our jobs and they are not coming here to take away our public services. They are coming here because life in their own country has become completely and utterly unbearable.

Remember young Alan Kurdi—when the photos of that poor boy hit the media, the world responded with a collective gasp. People could see that real children who had once had lives, feelings and a family were being washed up on the shore as if they were part of a shipwreck. As we look forward to the UN’s international migrants day next week, I am proud to be part of a Government, a Parliament and a country that has sought ways to save refugees and that has responded to the crisis with compassion and welcoming arms.

When the First Minister committed to taking more than 1,200 refugees as a starting point, it became apparent that local authorities would be tasked with rehoming and integrating those new members of Scottish society. The most recent figures to be released show that 29 out of 32 local authorities had taken in a proportion of refugees and it is to their credit that that work was done quickly and that timely adjustments were made in response to the urgency of the appeal. We must congratulate the many third sector and religious organisations that have helped those refugees to adapt to life in a strange country.

Education has a role to play in the adjustment to the lives of those vulnerable children who have arrived on our shores. Teachers have the challenging task of being a constant in the lives of the children—sometimes the only constant—while aiding them as they grasp the English language and the Scottish customs that can be so unfamiliar to them.

Kids can and do adapt well. Recently, staff in my office had the joy of meeting a young man—Hassan Ibrahim—whose family had fled from war-torn Iraq. He had learned English from watching box sets of “Friends” and he went on to obtain outstanding grades at high school. However, he was faced with a challenge when it came to university funding. For young asylum seekers, funding can be a sticking point, but—to the great credit of the University of Strathclyde’s student support and wellbeing team, along with back-up from the university’s institute of pharmacy and biomedical sciences—Hassan now has a place to study chemistry. When he is qualified, there is no telling what skills he could bring to the way in which we shape our nation. That is another great news story of how migrants and refugees enrich the fabric of our society.

Migrants bring so many gifts and Scotland is a tapestry of colourful cultures as a result of years of migration from all over the world. We cannot speak of how wonderful it is to welcome refugees and migrants into our society without again touching on some of the brutal stories that those people experienced before they fled. Atrocities on an unimaginable scale were committed to some of those people and will leave them damaged and traumatised for the rest of their lives.

A young woman who came to Scotland with two young girls was shown her new living arrangements. She was led to a balcony and she made the comment that it was bigger than where she had lived before. Staff thought that she meant the whole house, but she was referring to the balcony alone, as she had been surviving with her two girls in a chicken coop. It is unimaginable to think of that woman living in that way while bombs fell around her beautiful daughters.

The quotation that I started with came from an article by A A Gill, who passed away just last week, unfortunately. In that article, he also said:

“Most of the Eritrean men I spoke to have been imprisoned in Libya or held hostage in the Sahara, all beaten, all tortured. They knew others who had died of thirst, of beatings, of starvation, the girls who’d been raped, whole families abandoned in the desert, disappeared under the sand. They tell the stories with a matter-of-fact fatalism. ‘Please,’ says Natneal, ‘tell the world about our people in Libya. They are dying in prison.’”