One of Many: the case of Marcel Malik

In the last week of October 1997, a young man from Moravia who had been brutally beaten sought asylum at Dover. He liked to read history, and believed that Britain was an anti-fascist country. So it came about that Marcel Malik was immediately sent to Rochester Prison.

In the first week of December, responding to a desperate call from the Refugee Legal Centre for sureties to stand bail for the 200 interned Romanies from the Czech and Slovak republics, I went to Gravesend Court. The way I met Marcel Malik was a taster of the arbitrary legal processes, fragmented lives and overworked incompetence which mark this "low dishonest decayed" episode in English history.

On a lucky whim of the adjudicator, all bail was waived that day and the prisoners were set free to be with their families. (Next week's adjudicator was to insist on bail of £7,000 for just one boy in identical circumstances; a week later , a adjudicator at Hatton Cross, refused all three sureties of up to £2,000 and sent six Slovak men back to prison for Christmas.)

But even on that fortunate day, Marcel Malik was almost sent back to Rochester because there was literally nowhere else for him to go. Eventually a room was found for him at the East Cliff Hotel, that crumbling and unheated pink edifice beside Dover Docks, presided over by an eccentric Hungarian landlady.

Standing at Gravesend station with a Scottish guest of the Hotel, I realised that even in Dover the asylum seekers had made some friends. He told me of Mr Hudy, sent all the way to Campsfield detention centre near Oxford when his wife was seven months pregnant; later I heard of Mr Balogh, who was victimised by prison guards in Rochester because he spoke honestly to the press about conditions inside. I shared the platform with another Balogh family, who just after Christmas become the first to be granted "leave to remain", instead of having their case dismissed as "manifestly unfounded"... but even then, the adjudicator made it clear that the Baloghs' leave to remain must come to an end after six months. Every other asylum seeker in the UK till now has had indefinite leave if it is granted at all, just as every other asylum seeker had three months to prepare their case. The majority of Roma face being processed in 'block lists' in February with as little as 15 minutes to be heard and as little as five days to be sent back.

In working with the Czech and Slovak refugees, you quickly enter a surreal world where no amount of facts appear to make any impression. Where the Home Secretary says that all the Romany asylum cases in Canada have already been found without merit - when in fact 23 out of the first 24 families to pass through Canadian courts have been granted asylum. Where the head of the whole UK Immigration Appellate cites his experience as a Surrey local councillor as his main qualification to assess whether hatred of Gypsies is justified. Where Czech authorities claim that the Roma refugees are returning "voluntarily", whenever a family can no longer stand having the man in prison. Where a senior reporter from the leading liberal newspaper comes to Dover and interviews asylum seekers, writes a full-length article and his editors refuse to publish it...

The day that I accompanied Jonathan Steele of The Guardian on his fact-finding mission was the most surreal of all. A blizzard and broken trains in London, then a round of visits to hotels where Romany families lived alongside heavily sedated English mental patients. Guided by the tireless Charles Bourner of Kent Refugee Link, we met a retired UK immigration officer who had lost his job for expelling too few asylum-seekers. We heard from a young Slovak how a so-called "psychiatric social worker" visited Rochester weekly to pressure the detainees to go home. On one occasion this man had told prisoners that their wives were being harassed by Albanian refugees ­ instead of moving the families to a safe hotel, the UK authorities put pressure on the husbands to "save" their families by returning. We also heard from a landlady what was happening to those returnees: grown men crying into the phone because every single thing they had ever owned was gone ­ no home, no car, no means of livelihood whatever.

When we interviewed Marcel Malik, he was somehow keeping his hopes of England high. He told us he was treating his imprisonment as a test, likewise his present Spartan existence (alone and living on tinned food in a small cold room). He was the only asylum seeker to dare to give his full name, and have his photograph taken. His responses, like his earlier statements to the immigration officer, showed an inquiring analytical mind.

Where others might write "Catholic" for religion, he put "None". He had gone through the regular education system, not the special schools to which up to 70% of Roma children are confined. During army service he had been bright enough to get promotion. But everywhere racism had followed him. When he called himself a Czech citizen, "white" Czechs had always jeered. In the army he had been made to clean toilets with a razor.

Somehow he had always adjusted, got on. Wanting to study history, he had instead gone to technical school. After experiencing abuse and worse from his workmates, he had chosen a solitary driving job. The crunch came this summer when he was with his Czech girlfriend in a cafe outside Brno. A crowd of young men first insulted her and then beat him so that he was hospitalised. All the time this was happening, other Czechs looked on. Not one came to the couple's aid. Marcel emigrated because he realised he had no chance of marrying. As he said through the interpreter: "Even if I married a white lady and our children had white skins, once people found out that their daddy was a Gypsy they would have to go through all the experiences which I have had, and can't bear to tell you about."

To English eyes, Marcel himself does not look black. More and more of the asylum seekers come from that layer of Czech and Slovak Roma who have been successful, assimilated. It is the fact that these "uppity" Roma are now being targeted which makes one most fear a genocidal situation in the making. My Jewish ancestors in Hungary came from just such a background and it did not save their lives in 1944. If one believes the activist Lubomir Zubak, we might be "in 1937" now... with a persecuted population running everywhere they can, searching for refuge in an indifferent world.

In Dover, Marcel's guitar was even damaged by a Slovak Rom who wanted him to play Gypsy music instead of his favourite Bluegrass. All this has created in him a wish to revalue his Gypsy culture as well as learning about the history of others.

But if we didn't put up a fight Marcel was going to be sent back to Moravia on the day before Christmas. Sadly, the Guardian interview with Marcel which we had hoped might appear the day before his hearing, never appeared at all. Apparently in journalistic circles the Gypsies are "no longer news".

His caseworker gave us no hope, making no secret of her opinion that his claim was weak. (Had she had time to listen to it properly?) When I came offering to speak as an expert witness, and with written testimony on Malik's behalf from Karel Holomek, Paul Polansky and Vaclav Trojan (leading supporters of Romany Rights), she seemed very surprised. Nonetheless, on 23rd December she carried out effective delaying tactics and the hearing (scheduled for perhaps an hour) was granted a whole day for evidence could be presented. The adjudicator Mr Smith, generous over bail, had the reputation of a hard man in granting asylum.

I cited some horrific Czech opinion polls, and an article from a conservative, therefore "objective" source (The Spectator magazine) on Britain's inability to believe Czech racism. I quoted Karel Holomek on the "outstandingly intolerant" nature of Czech society as a whole, and the inadequacies of the British asylum law to cope with the Roma persecution. I told of my own experiences when trying to dine or enter cafes with Roma friends.

Mr Smith appeared to listen courteously to my testimony, but only came alive when I read the account of a Lety survivor collected by Paul Polansky: it transpired that as a young soldier Smith had helped to liberate the concentration camps. Yet he seemed strangely unable to make connections with the situation of the Roma. All that he did appear to accept was that "the appellant" had impressed myself and several others with his self-respecting character.

We went away to collect more expert evidence for the 23rd January, when Mr Smith would deliver his Determination. Suddenly, a week before the court date, I heard that the Determination had already been written. In desperation I wrote to the court indicating the new information available.

When the hearing resumed Mr Smith had turned down the appeal and had not altered his original Determination to accommodate the new evidence. The determination shows how little the adjudicator listened to anything that was said; how little he read the expert evidence (and indeed complained that there was too much of it - a bare dozen pages). Certain stubborn assumptions of the British mind are very evident in Mr Smith's writing: that skinheads are a nasty but powerless youth subculture, "young thugs" who need to be kept in order by the police (rather than the sons and relatives of policemen themselves, with backing from a sizeable ultra-right parliamentary party); that the Czech authorities must essentially be acting as the constitution says they should (it is unlikely that he applied this reasoning to the former Communist constitution of Czechoslovakia); that sources like the European Roma Rights Centre must be "partisan".

Through all this anxious time Marcel could count on the brilliant solidarity of Kent Refugee Link, a network of dissidents who came together in 1995 when the first Slovaks fled to Dover. Charles Bourner, who started learning Slovak when the refugees arrived in his mother's guest house, endlessly drove Marcel to court, to solicitors, to business advisors. It seems that Malik's last chance might be through the EU agreement for self-employed businesses.

A sad future for an aspiring historian, to survive as a window cleaner. But already the leaflets are going out for 'MMM Windowgleam' (standing for Marcel Malik Moravia). Better life as an unskilled manual worker in uncomfortable accommodation in a less than welcoming Britain, than the lynching and degradation facing a Romany in the Czech Republic.

There's one last problem. Taking the case to Judicial Review, can be very expensive and can therefore only be made with legal aid to pay the fees.. but if Marcel, is self-supporting, he will no longer qualify for legal aid to prove the justice of his asylum case. Catch 22 was clearly invented by the British .

PS Since then Marcel has been threatened with removal twice - the Home Office claiming that those on temporary admission cannot set up businesses. He has been to the high court to join several such cases before the European Court of Human Rights. Below is the speech Marcel, gave at the founding conference of the Roma Refugee Organisation on 1st August at Hamilton House (NUT HQ) in London.:

Amanda Sebestyen

The above article was written for the Helsinki Citizens Assembly, Roma Section.