By Isabel Turnbull

Anti-deportation campaigners in Nottingham are trying to stop the deportation of Amdani Juma, a Burundian refugee and worker at the Nottingham Refugee Forum.
The case is set to be looked at again towards the end of summer. Campaigners hope that the Home Office will allow him discretionary leave to remain. The omens do not look good. The Home Office and the minister, Liam Byrne have been taking an increasingly hard-line approach. Byrne is particularly keen not to set a precedent where asylum seekers from Burundi are concerned or to suggest that the peace accord in Burundi is ineffective and that it is unsafe for asylum seekers to return to that country, despite the evidence.
Amnesty International in their recent communication of 16 May stated that “scores of civilians suspected of supporting an armed opposition group have been arrested by police since the start of April, and are at grave risk of torture. Seventeen detainees are being held in a cell measuring two metres square in a cachot in Ngozi”.
According to local human rights monitors, they are being denied family visits and going hungry. There is no toilet in the cells. Human rights organizations and Friends of Burundi (a community organisation set up by Burundi people to support their community in the UK) have consistently identified the country as a place where the situation has not improved and where there are numerous cases of executions, torture and beatings of civilians and detainees. The Foreign Office has recommended that no British national travel to Burundi as it is “unsafe”.
An estimated 300,000 people were killed in the armed conflict in Burundi that began in 1993.
Amdani came to the UK in 2003 and was granted humanitarian protection and has recently applied for indefinite leave to remain. The threat to deport him was made even though he was tortured in Burundi for being a pro-democracy activist and narrowly escaped death because of ethnic conflict. Many of his family and friends have faced torture or have been murdered. Amdani has no friends or networks in the areas of Burundi, yet the Home Office wishes to return him. He suffers from the additional problem that he is originally not from Burundi but from Rwanda, is half Huto and half Tutsi and would be accepted by neither community in Rwanda, making his position very insecure.
Amdani’s record since coming to the UK has been exemplary. No-one can say that his stay in the UK has not benefited the community. He has been involved in national organisations to do with HIV awareness and refugee rights as well as being actively involved in community organizations in Nottingham, advising Nottingham Social Services and other East Midland bodies on asylum issues. Amdani has worked with the Terrence Higgins Trust in Nottingham and they have stated that his work within the African communities on HIV/AIDS is crucial and pivotal to their organization.
His experience of detention is a familiar story to those involved with asylum cases. Amdani was moved four times over a period of a few weeks and finally ended up at Campsville Detention Centre outside Oxford. He was given no notice of the numerous changes made to his location making it difficult for contact to be maintained with him. The sophisticated levels of security and the fact that even visitors and friends of Amdani were fingerprinted and photographed when visiting reflects the way that the Home Office seeks to criminalise those people whose only crime is to have been persecuted in their own countries. The detention centre at Heathrow – the last port of call before asylum seekers are forced out on flights is run by a private company who are paid commission for those people that are ‘persuaded’ to return.
Many people are bewildered by the UK’s attempts to expel Amdani – a decision that only makes sense if viewed in the context of a government that is keen to adopt a right wing agenda over asylum and immigration.
You can access additional information about Amdani online:
• On the Facebook group ‘Keep Amdani Juma in Nottingham’.
• On the blog Friends of Amdani: a campaign group about Amdani’s case, at www.friendsofamdani.wordpress.com
• Watch the film on YouTube.
• There are now 4,000 plus articles on the web including sites in California and Kenya that refer to his case.