Audio: ‘The human being was not made to be imprisoned, never’
Audio from 127bis 15/12/2017
Translation:
Currently I am in the 127bis closed centre.
Before that I was living in Verviers. I lived there for four years.
Firstly I would like to say that we, the foreigners as they call us, we do not come here to be a burden for others, for the Europeans. We come here to participate to the life of the community. Most of the people who come here do so because they flee problems in their country: problems of security, of war, of family; hence they are both economic and social problems.
We come here because we can see the media all the time, thanks to the internet, we have access to everything. All the people who are living in Africa, in Asia, in the poor and third-world countries, we can see that life is better in Europe and that’s the reason why we come and seek refuge here.
When we come here to search for freedom and peace and we find ourselves in a closed centre, many thoughts cross our minds. Of course, even the word closed centre annoys me a bit, it is like if we called it closed centre to reassure the people who are outside, to reassure society. In my opinion, they say closed centre to say that they are not like prisons and that people are well treated. In my opinion, here it is worse than in prison because when you are in prison you know for how long you are staying there whereas here we do not even know for how long we are going to stay, it all depends on the good will of the Foreigners Office. Therefore, we can stay 2 months, or 4 months, or even 8 months and live without knowing when we are going to leave, just that is unbearable. So many thoughts cross our minds…
When you find yourself retained, hope becomes despair, reality becomes a nightmare. I always thought that the human being was not created to be imprisoned. The fact of being imprisoned can transform the person. I have always been caring and kind to others; the others are myself, I’ve always been like that.
Just wondering: is it Belgian society that imprisons me, or just one part of it, or just Belgian politicans? All these thoughts cross our minds. It is a bit difficult, honestly, there is a risk that the persons retained here lose their values of humanity. The risk is that love transforms itself into hatred.
When we see demonstrators who sometimes come here, then we understand, but when we don’t see them, we believe that all the society agrees with that.
When we see demonstrators who sometimes come here to shout for our freedom, to support us, it makes us so much good, it brings us back together and we start to think that it is not the whole society that agrees with us being imprisoned, hence there is always something positive, when we see demonstrators we think that luckily enough everything is not bad. Fortunately, even if they are not a lot, there are voices that arise to oppose to this inhumane policy and to support us.
I would like to add many other things but my heart is very heavy. I just want to say Long live Freedom, the innocent human being was not created to be imprisoned.
I say it here and I’ll continue saying it when I leave the centre, I’ll continue to fight for it to remain the truth for ever and ever, long live the human being, long live human values.
Demo 127 bis 01/10/2017
http://www.gettingthevoiceout.org/solidarityaction-to-the-127bis-closed-centre-in-steenokkerzeel-and-call/
