Grandparents for Asylum demonstrating in Denmark: Photo by Amila Jašarević.

Amila Jašarević reports on children in Danish asylum centres.

Sixteen years ago, at the age of twelve, I came to Denmark as a refugee from Bosnia-Herzegovina. For two and a half years, I lived in an asylum centre while war and genocide raged on in my country and politicians in Denmark fought over whether we should have the right to apply for asylum or not.

The time I spent inside the asylum system did put a lot of strain on me as a child. For example, I still remember how much I hated interpreting for adults in my asylum centre since it put me in horrible situations, like in the hospital with people screaming in pain. On the brighter side, I remember the Danish children who came to play with us just after a few days of our arrival. They taught us our first words of their funny language. A year and a half later, they became our classmates when we were allowed to attend regular school, with our asylum status yet unresolved. It was a good thing that our asylum centre was in the middle of a small town and we came in contact with the locals straight away.

A lot has changed since then. The government, to begin with. One of the politicians who were against our right to apply for asylum back in the 1990s, Birthe Rønn Hornbech, is the current refugee and integration minister.

Compared with our situation as refugees, life for an asylum seeker in Denmark is much harsher now. Most of the asylum centres have been closed leaving only eight of them in odd locations such as the one in the middle of the woods (Centre Avnstrup); next to an airport (Centre Kongelunden); or in a military exercise area (Centre Sandholm). Families have spent years in those facilities, caught in a limbo with no end in sight. While they are not officially recognised as refugees by the Danish authorities, they refuse to go back to the wars they fled from and understandably so. Who would want to take their children back to Iraq at this time? Despite all the misery, life as a rejected asylum seeker in Denmark is still much better than the life in a war zone.

Today, the geographical placement of the centres leads to social isolation. Asylum seekers have very little, if any, contact with the Danes. They are not allowed to work and can not even afford bus tickets to the nearest towns. Politicians exploit this isolation for manipulating public opinion through the media, with some even comparing asylum centres to summer camps.

For children, this isolation is particularly devastating, as they grow up with no sense of normalcy. There is even a special word for them: asylbørn. Asylum children, not simply children like all others. The asylum centres ensure a roof over their head and food in their stomach, but these are not actually designed to be family homes. Without contact with Danish children who live in normal homes with their normal families, asylum children grow up surrounded by traumatised, dysfunctional adults.

Many of them are not allowed to attend regular schools. Instead, they are confined to provisional schools at the centres that offer a poor level of education. In one instance, when a mother complained about the poor quality of the centre school, a teacher retorted: “They don’t need to learn anything because you never know whether they will be here tomorrow or not.”

Then, about every six months, asylum children are moved from one centre to another. This means they make friends and lose them again and again because of the the moving, up to a point where many even give up making new friends.

An anthropological study by Signe Smith Nielsen of University of Copenhagen, in 2006, established that for children who spend more than one year in asylum centres the risk of developing psychological illness is thirty times higher than the children in other sections of the society. In 2007, a psychiatric report on the mental health of six asylum children found serious psychiatric disorders in all of them with a wide spectre of emotional and behavioural problems. These are among a series of studies that have documented the psychological problems endured by asylum children because of their living conditions.

In their desperate search for normalcy and stability, these children often take refuge in the virtual world of social networking websites like Facebook or Myspace. There, they create an alternate reality where they are normal children with normal interests and hobbies. For them, this becomes a sanctuary where they do not have to worry about when they are going to be deported.

The fear of deportation is omnipresent in their lives. Deportation usually takes place at night or very early in the morning, possibly to avoid any witness or media attention. It is very common for children to lose friends, never to hear from them again, because they were taken away at night. As a result, some children insist on sleeping in the same bed with their parents because they are afraid to wake up and find that the parents are gone too, taken away at night.

In the Danish asylum system, children are not represented since they are merely regarded as their parents’ luggage. In Canada, for example, refugee children have their own lawyers and separate asylum cases. However, in Denmark, whatever is decided for the parents applies to the children as well.

The Danish government is often criticised by human rights organisations for routinely breeching the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, ratified by Denmark in 1991, when dealing with refugee children.

For example, this June, five Danish human rights organisations – Amnesty International Denmark, Danish UN Association, Rehabilitation and Research Centre for Torture Victims, Save the Children Denmark and Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Network – asked the government not to forcibly deport rejected Iraqi asylum seekers in Denmark to Iraq. In a joint statement, the organisations noted: “The children of the asylum seekers, who have grown up in Denmark, constitute a particularly vulnerable group in need of help. They have grown up in Denmark, speak Danish and consider themselves part of the Danish society. They have no ties to Iraq. Studies have shown that it is harmful for children to live in asylum centres for long periods of time. The examples are plenty that the parents’ ability to fill the parental role and take care of their children is demolished during their prolonged stay in uncertainty and that the children suffer from this lack of attention. To forcibly return families with children after several years of residence in Denmark to uncertain conditions, risk of violence and without support and network will be against the spirit of the United Nations children convention.”

Like all other criticism of the Danish asylum policy, the appeal fell on deaf ears. The politicians seem immune to criticism even in cases where families have been torn apart because the father and the children got asylum while the mother was rejected.

Two years ago, a new movement – Grandparents for Asylum – emerged in Denmark, to campaign on behalf of the asylum children. It all started with a group of seniors who gathered in front of Centre Sandholm every Sunday. The group soon multiplied and spread to Centre Kongelunden and Centre Avnstrup. Grandparents for Asylum have been very active in organising rallies and marches against the current asylum policy, while still gathering in front of the centres every Sunday. They have visibly made the politicians nervous since the idea of grandparents as activists speaks to the entire population and automatically draws attention to the ill-treatment of the grandchildren. A population that knows the asylum seekers, is a population that is unlikely to accept their confinement to asylum centres for years or their forced deportation at night.

Maybe, that is why I and the others from my asylum centre ended up getting asylum. We had become somebody’s classmate, somebody’s friend, somebody’s girlfriend or boyfriend. We were not just numbers in the press. That is why the fight that is going on right now is a fight to put human faces before numbers and statistics.♦

Amila Jašarević is a human rights activist based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her weblog is available at: http://amilabosnae.wordpress.com