From Lier ventemottak on the 3rd Anniversary of Detention* PDF Print E-mail
Letter from Inhabitant of Lier ventemottak, 16 March 2009

I am afraid I have a fear unknown to you outside and which hopefully will remain unknown to you. The fear lives within my stomach, my head, my feet and my hands. My hands tremble and are wet and cold like my grandmother’s hands when she died.

 

The fear never leaves me, not even in my sleep. I can share it with no one and I can tell it to no one, because the men with whom I share my room speak a language I don’t understand. We live like animals without dignity and respect. We fight in the TV room and in our rooms. The room smells like shoes and garbage. There is strange religious noise when someone is praying. Some of us intentionally sing funny songs in the room just to make others emotional and angry. I think everyone of us assumes the other has it better.

We observe one another with suspicion. When deportation police comes into the room to deport your room mate, there is always guilt and blame. The dawn of the day looks wild and ugly, because every night you are suspicious about the police, coming the next morning to deport you. On two occasions, I left the room early in the morning and slept outside in the cold snow for fear of police. I froze badly that morning and up to now my health is not good, but I am afraid to see the doctor who always gives pain killers when you are sick.

The deportation police speak with rage and emotion when they come to deport a room mate. It is heartbreaking and scary. They enter the room and shout, ”I am here to take you back to your country, whether you like it or not. Pack up your belongings and they should not exceed 10 kg. The rest will remain here and your colleagues will use them”. My room mate speaks French, and the policeman spoke to him in English and there was a misunderstanding. I remained silent, and my heart began to beat faster as if it was happening to me. Fear invaded my entire body, and urine came out of me without my notice. The body was in shock and the mind could not think. After the deportation police had taken my room mate, I began to recover from my fear, but the entire world view was fake. I did not believe people who has signed the Geneva Convention to protect refugees, were secretly breaching it.

I was expecting hospitality from these people and this country, but they are very hostile, like rhinos in my country, especially in Trandum. Most of my friends who came back from Trandum detention camp, said, ”I did not know that in this country there is a place like that. It is like hell. People shout or scream and I don’t know what is going on, on the other side of the room”. Everybody who lives there is gripped with fear, a fear they have never experienced in their lifetime. You see new faces everyday in Trandum. When someone is taken to Trandum, even at night, the news will explode and spread in the entire Lier camp in minutes. This is exactly how we live in ventemottak for the last 3 years now. And we don’t know how long we are going to live in such conditions.

As we mark the third anniversary of this camp in this month, March 2009, I still hope that the judges of this country would believe me and the authorities would listen to me. I hope that someone on the other side of the island would turn and say to the authorities, ”give freedom and hope to these people”. The longing for freedom has disappeared, and the fear of the policemen and security people in my country is fresh in my mind as I wait for my deportation.

Inhabitant of Lier ventemottak, anonymous



* "Detention" is not a legally precise term, but there is no precise term for the kind of deprivation of liberty Lier ventemottak offers - a de facto confinement where you are free to come and go, but have nowhere to go and no way of going there, and usually have not had so for a very long time. (Editor's remarks.)