“Hello, I wanted to explain the things we go through here in this centre. The majority of the people who are here we all came, we fled either… there are people who fled death, people who fled abuse. Everybody has reasons to leave their native country. We came to Belgium, we asked for asylum, we asked for protection, we asked for everything here and it’s always the same……..”
Transcription of audio
Hello, I wanted to explain the things we go through here in this centre. The majority of the people who are here we all came, we fled either… there are people who fled death, people who fled abuse. Everybody has reasons to leave their native country. We came to Belgium, we asked for asylum, we asked for protection, we asked for everything here and it’s always the same. Our lawyers, they impose pro deo lawyers on us, they give us lawyers that we can’t communicate with. They don’t prepare us, they don’t come to see us, nothing at all. We’re locked up in this centre because we just want to live normally, like everyone else, what we couldn’t live at home there. There are homosexuals, in their native country, it is forbidden, it is killed, it is punished. Punishment is serious in their country. They have spent all the money they had, they don’t even have any money. They flee their country, they come here to take shelter from the danger that is there in their native country. I, for example, fled death, I brought back a medical report, I brought back photos, everything, solid proof. Many people here have solid proof. They come, they tell us: “Yes, wait, we’ll give you a lawyer”. The lawyer is never reachable. The situation we’re in psychologically is… It’s really bad. We’re so bad that people here are talking about committing suicide. We didn’t know that it was going to be like this, otherwise we wouldn’t have run away to come to Belgium. We were going to flee to another country in the European Union. There are lots of people, they arrived in Spain, in France, they stay 2-3 days. Here there are people who have been here for 8 months, 7 months. Here there is a guy who is afraid to tell his real age, he is a minor. Everyone, every person in this centre has a reason to leave, you can’t leave your home to come here just for the fun of it. No, each one of them has fled either death or… Most of them have fled death or torture. The help we get is being locked up in a centre
, we are woken up at 8am to have breakfast. If you’re not there in 15 minutes breakfast is over for you. At 11am you go to have lunch. If you’re not there from 11 to 11:30 or from 11:30 to noon, that’s it, you’re not going to have lunch. People go on hunger strikes, they don’t care about them. “Go ahead and die if you want”. We’re running away from slavery, we come here, it’s modern slavery, it’s modern slavery that we have here in the centres. The social workers who are here don’t help us. In any case, we spoke to the director and she told us: “These are not social workers who work for you, these are repatriation agents. There were Congolese people here, fifty Congolese or I don’t know how many, they put them on a military plane to return them to the Congo. Like sheep they were taken in the evening without telling them anything, without warning them. They put them in “cachots”, in isolation cells. The next day they were put on buses and taken to the airport. Hop! on the plane. Hop! Go home. Although they have done 16 years, some of them have done 16, 17 years in Belgium. They don’t know the Congo, they came here very young. They take our phones, because they can’t leave us our phones, if they leave us our phones with the cameras everyone will know what’s happening here. But they don’t leave us our phones and they don’t leave us anything. It’s to lock us up and deprive us of our laws and our rights. And they give us lawyers who are not there for us, they are for them.
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