UK deports hunger striking asylum seeker to Malawi

ONE of the five Zimbabwean women who went on hunger strike at Britain’s Yarls Wood Immigration Removal Centre since Monday has been deported to Malawi.

Rose Phekani, who arrived in the UK in 2004 but only claimed asylum last month, was handcuffed and bundled onto a Kenyan Airways plane on Wednesday night by five guards, friends said.

Maud Kadangu Lennard, another detainee at the Bedford facility who has been told she will be deported on September 19, said Friday: “She called us from Kenya where the plane had a stop-over.

"She said she stood no chance against five guards assigned to her. They handcuffed her when she tried to resist, and two guards took her all the way to Malawi.”

The remaining hunger strikers are Lennard, Faina Manuel Pondesi, Zandile Sibanda and Pauline Chitekeshe.

Britain has refused the women’s plea for asylum, insisting that the women travelled on “genuine” Malawian passports and are therefore Malawian and not Zimbabwean as they claim.

The UK government is currently not deporting failed asylum seekers to Zimbabwe, awaiting the outcome of a country guidance case known as HS (Zimbabwe) which is currently before the Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT).

Rights groups say the UK government is showing breathtaking insensitivity to the asylum seekers’ plight.

Malawi Watch executive director Billy Banda said while the UK government had a right to protect its interests by sending the Zimbabweans to Malawi, most of the deportees ended up destitute.

He said: “It is wrong for the UK government to displace these Zimbabweans who escaped a repressive regime by obtaining a Malawian passport to seek protection in UK. What the UK is doing is not deportation but displacement. How can they deport someone to a country that one has no roots?”

Lennard said the four remaining hunger strikers, who are in a group of seven Zimbabweans, were determined to continue their action.

She said: “We are all very weak. I personally don’t have strength to walk around and I have a headache. But we are determined. I am not going to Zimbabwe, they would have to kill me first.”

Meanwhile, Malawi has warned that the deportees face up to three years in jail.

Malawian authorities also revealed there was little or no engagement at all between the UK Home Office and its embassy in London to verify the identities of asylum seekers travelling on Malawian passports.

The deportees are prosecuted for “false declaration of a Malawi passport form C/S 327 and uttering a false statement of citizenship C/S 33(1)” under the Citizens Act, reported the Nyasa Times newspaper on Friday.

If convicted, the Zimbabweans face up to three years imprisonment with hard labour “with an option of fast tracked deportation to the Zimbabwe/Mozambique boarder at Nyamapanda”, the paper added.