14/11/2017 It is a prison here, Madam.
Before the great manifestation for regularisation of all on November 12 2017 some detained persons had volunteered to participate through telephone. Sadly, it was not possible because of technical difficulties.
Here are their testimonies. Parole de détenus
“We are here in a closed centre, they retain us: two months, we sign, two months again, we sign. They deprive us of our liberty and they tell us “you are not in prison”. But we are in prison! We are imprisoned, we have the right to one hour courtyard in the morning, one hour in the afternoon. If one of us does a small thing, we get disciplinary reports. It is prison, it is all the same!
We have families outside. Personally, I have two kids and a wife who are waiting for me. What I don’t understand is that the Belgian government want to take me away from my children. They want me to go back to my country, and my children are anyway legally registered here, so is my wife. They gave me inadmissibility for 10 years, which means that I’ll alsmot be 58 years old when I can come back, in ten years.
It is not logical, it is not normal, is it Madam?
And the stories are many. One week ago they brought a young Syrian boy, who is 14, a small young boy. We had to talk to the social assistant, we talked to everybody here so that they would intervene. He spent two nights here. Do you find it logical that they bring a minor in a closed centre, with majors, because they had doubts on his age? When you see his face, it is obvious that he is only 14, there is absolutey no doubt about that! When they have doubts, usuaylly they have, they place him with other minors, in a centre for minors, and then they make a test such as the one they were going to do to prove he was minor. But when we put a little bit of pressure on them, we spoke to the boss here, to the social assistant, we rang the organisations, and it worked, two days after.
We are here, retained, deprived of our liberty. There is nothing better than freedom, Madam. But we suffer, I swear, we do suffer a lot. It is already difficult to be separated from your children. We suffer from everything, Madam, everything. Luckily we have faith, because if we didn’t, we would commit suicide. The problem is that we fear the dark world because we ignore what there is after. And we have faith, hence we do not do that, we can not do that. We have people behind us, we have family waiting for us, children, wives.
What they do to us is really serious. And the politics, it is ture… with the politicians, we can not get nowhere. They have the power!
