By Abdul Ghelleh

I arrived in London on a drab rainy Friday afternoon in the spring of 1985. Margaret Thatcher was in her second term as prime minister and Samantha Fox was Britain’s favorite page three girl for The Sun. Michael Jackson had won seven Grammy awards the previous year including one for Thriller which was released in late 1982, and the song was still one of the top ten singles for club dance in Britain. Negotiations over Hong Kong sovereignty handover to the Chinese were continuing. And back in Africa, Desmond Tutu was elected the Archbishop of Johannesburg, and the following year, he would famously say: “On my part, I think the West can go to hell!” in response to Ronald Reagan’s refusal to impose sanctions on the white minority regime in South Africa. Both Britain and the world I left behind seemed to be fine, for now.

I have experienced few racism incidents in England since the mid-eighties but I hardly noticed the threat of terrorism and how that would affect me personally prior to September 11, 2001. Although I read about terrorism in paperbacks including one written about Carlos the Jackal and watched acts of terrorism – mainly from the IRA – on television, these events were actually far removed from my immediate surroundings.

After brief assignment at Slough Borough Council, I started working for Peterborough City Council, Cambridgeshire on September 10, 2001. On my second day at work, I heard shouting coming from the next door office. While walking towards the office, I took a mobile phone call from a contact, a real estate agent whom I was about to meet  that afternoon to negotiate about accommodation arrangements for clients. I can’t recall his name, but this particular estate agent was near hysterical.  “Abdul, look at what Yasser Arafat is doing,” he said, clearly making up his mind about the unfolding event. It was obvious to me that he was watching television in his office, and at that moment, as he’d later confirmed, the first plane hit the North Tower of the World Trade Centre in New York. I went into the office and I watched the events that would change the world forever with the rest of my team.

My role involved close collaborations with Cambridgeshire Constabulary as Peterborough participated in the Home Office’s Asylum Dispersal Scheme, a programme designed to ease the burden from the South East of England. Peterborough is one of the oldest cities in England but it has very little shops and a small city centre. It’d seem to someone who lived in London for a long time as a large rural England parish village. At that time, Peterborough residents had no recent past experience of large scale new immigrants so hostilities towards asylum seekers were identified as highly likely.

Over the next couple of years, Britain – and, indeed the whole world — would change dramatically as a result of the terrorist atrocities in Washington and New York. When Tony Blair rushed changes in legislations through parliament, reckless directives – indirectly affecting our service provisions – were issued by the Home Office, to the entire asylum scheme participating local authorities from Peterborough to Glasgow. A few months after a bad decision called “Hard Case” was made by Beverley Hughes, the then Home Office minister, and the city council declined to heed my advice, a police officer was fatally stabbed in Manchester by a former North African asylum seeker who was released by our team. Hard Case: an asylum application is refused, subsistence cancelled, accommodation terminated and no record of the individual retained, either by the local council or by the other relevant authorities. At that point, I lost what little interest I had in working for PCC, a city which, at the time, had hundred per cent elected Conservative council members.

As the attacks on the US poisoned the atmosphere on both sides of the Atlantic, I flew to Toronto, Canada in November 2001. A Northwest Airlines ticket which I bought via the internet and in which I had not checked properly whether it was a direct flight or not, landed me in trouble. Little over seven hours after the flight landed, I found myself in Cleveland, Ohio with the wrong name! I was interrogated and searched from tip to toe, and I was asked intrusive and aggressive irrelevant questions. But I fully cooperated as I could sense the paranoia throughout the arrival hall and later at the departure lounge where I was led to board on my onward flight to Ontario.

When I left Peterborough in late 2004, I wanted to live somewhere near the M25 (a highway that circles the British capital), basically to be closer to London, so I chose Luton. I did not know anyone in town and there was no particular reason for my move to Luton, but whenever I drove through the M1, I wondered what this little town has to offer given its close proximity to London. The weather was pleasant in late June 2005 when I took up residence at Milton Road, Furley Hill. And on July 7, a few days after I moved to Luton, I left the M25 to join the southbound carriageway of the M40. The sky was clear and the weather was warm in that late morning, and I was heading to Acton Town, West London. About a mile after I joined the M40, I noticed that all the overhead Motorway signs were flushing.  They read: ‘CENTRAL LONDON CLOSED’. No other details were displayed, but I felt that something serious had just happened.

Few months earlier, I returned from Nairobi where I observed from the sidelines one of the numerous Somali reconciliation conferences. In fact, during my stay in Kenya, I made the decision that my skills and experience would be put to better use if I lived in Africa and tried to help Somalia get back on its feet. But things were not as straight forward as I thought. When the new Somali MPs and the government ministers started bickering and throwing chairs at each other in the first temporary parliamentary sessions in Nairobi, I thought that they were hopeless and I returned to Britain.

A couple of unsuccessful moves to emigrate from the UK followed in 2009 and 2010. Recession was at its height in the UK and you could feel the tension in the town. Luton was hardly out of the headlines since 9/11 and it got worse after the London Underground bombers took that deadly trip from Luton Town Station. The English Defence League (EDL), a far right organisation of mainly poor whites, was also founded in that town. Luton’s mainly Pakistani ethnic minority residents and the angry white youths seemed to be a destructive cocktail and a ticking time bomb. The town’s residents were further polarised, clearly for everybody to see.

On a Wednesday in early 2010, the Daily Mail had run a story about former criminals who couldn’t be deported from the country for legal reasons. The headline read: “200 Somali criminals we can’t kick out.” I was assaulted the following day at the White House pub by four white males who were wearing boxer shorts, simply for looking like a Somali. When my black friends confronted the men outside the pub while I was still trying to report the incident to the landlord, a full scale fight had already broken out. With blood dripping from their faces, Brian and Early were escorted to the waiting ambulances. Two ambulances and four police units showed up for the incident, lighting up the area as they flushed their blue neon lights in front of the pub.

Is this the peaceful Britain I lived through most of the past three decades? It was time to relocate again. I was in the tiny red sea country of Djibouti in February 2012 when Britain hosted an international Conference on Somalia. After the conference indeed, an encouraging communiqué was released demanding that the troubled country be put back together. However, I knew that Somalia needs more than press conferences as the Shabaab continued to commit atrocities. I decided to give the benefit of the doubt, and after a brief visit to London and Luton, I flew back to Africa, this time to Nairobi, Kenya, on October 6, 2012. Friends back in the UK cautioned and advised against a trip to Mogadishu as I made preparations to enter Mogadishu for the first time since 1984. At the same time, they continued to telephone, email and tweet me with bad news after bad news about the state of race relations and the recession back in the UK. It has been thirty years since I had been back to Somalia, so I stayed put in Nairobi until further improvements were made regarding the situation in Somalia.

Last week, and nearly seven months after arriving in Kenya, I heard the worst possible news from Britain: a young unarmed soldier who was walking in a street in South East London was brutally murdered by two terrorists who claimed to be defending Muslim people. In that same week, fighter jets were scrambled to escort a Pakistan commercial Airliner over Britain’s skies towards Stansted airport. Following immediately the killing of the soldier, EDL members attacked mosques and removed headscarves publicly from Muslim women in the streets. In Britain, intolerance has been taken to a new level. I am numb. My two countries are both in crisis: one is a failed state which has become almost permanently a terrorist-invested country; and the other is a recession hit nation with increasingly fragmenting society.

As I sift through the news reports this week, things aren’t looking that good for both Britain and Somalia. The internationally supported Somali government in Mogadishu is not up to the job as the inexperienced president picked a fight with the Kenya army this week over the formation of a regional administration in Kismayo, the southern port city. Back in Britain, attacks on Muslims and other ethnic minorities increased in the country to record levels. This weekend, EDL plans to stage what they call “silent marches” in 30 cities and towns across England, including Luton, which inevitably will involve some sort of disturbances. In the social media, angry far-right tweets such as, “f**k PC,”  “f**k human rights,” and “f**k peace,” are just adding fuel to the already volatile environment. I feel sad for not being able to continue my original trip to Mogadishu. But, I am also equally disturbed to hear the news about the ugly events back in the UK.

Now that the future ever looks gloomy for many, including myself, I am off to Kenya next week to ask the immigration there for a further three months’ extension on my visa, the fourth such request since October last year, just to hang around while the dust settles down.

Abdul Ghelleh
Nairobi, Kenya
Email:abdulghelleh@gmail.com

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