Sri Lankan migrants awaiting their asylum application have been meeting at the local Ansamb Oi, in Saint-Denis.
For the past year, the department has been dealing with illegal immigration from Sri Lankans seeking asylum. The population is divided on their welcome.
Close game, concentrated faces and knowing smiles, four men are playing carrom. Between two scooter rides, teenagers in turn place pawns on the wooden board. This table game, very popular in Sri Lanka, brings together migrants hosted at the premises of the Ansamb Oi association in Saint-Denis for a few hours.
“They meet here, give each other news,” explains Fabrice Sindraye, from Reunion Island and initiator of this collective of solidarity. Others collect clothes and shoes because they arrived with nothing, barefoot. “
Every day, bags filled with food, toys, pants and dresses are brought by residents who are sensitive to the cause of asylum seekers. Faizan, 22, pushes the door to find out what she can bring: “How to remain insensitive? With the terrorist attack which affected Catholics in Sri Lanka a few days ago, we can only understand the urgency of helping them. “
Flee from interfaith persecution
The drama has undoubtedly had a lot of influence in this citizen mobilization. “Even if we are there for those who have landed on the island since December, comments Fabrice Sindraye , the sensitivity has been stronger since the attacks. “
And the greater acceptance of the reasons which motivate aspirants to exile? Because, on the spot, the subject divides the population. Many do not understand that the French state accepts on its territory, already marked by endemic unemployment and precariousness, asylum seekers.
Since March 2018, the department has indeed experienced an unprecedented arrival of migrants on its coasts, 273 in total, including 120 who arrived on April 13. Men, women and children ready to embark on 4000 km aboard fishing boats to flee interreligious persecutions in their predominantly Buddhist country. “Catholics are tortured, killed, some raped, but also Hindus and Muslims. This is not a figment of the imagination! “.
For a long time, the channels of illegal immigration organized the departure to Australia or New Zealand but the two countries have recently tightened their reception conditions. Hence a new destination proposed by smugglers who pocketed between € 2,000 and € 5,000 per migrant crossing.
60 deported to Sri Lanka
Even if all the accounts have not convinced the courts, 130 migrants are waiting for their case to be studied by the French Office for the Protection of Refugees and Stateless Persons (Ofpra). The others were taken back to Sri Lanka, 60 of them by a flight last Monday.
“Some think they are saying anything to be welcomed in France. But those who are persecuted want only one thing: to work and not to be assisted. They will not steal anything from Reunion Islanders, but want to be useful. “ As Jayajotheeswary, professor in Sri Lanka arrived with her four children when her husband was kidnapped by the Sinhalese army: ” we were in danger, I had no choice. We hope to find peace, to integrate and to be of service. “
“They don’t want alms”
This desire not to live at the counters in the host country is also what the migrants’ lawyers defend. Nacima Djafour, of the Saint-Denis bar, regrets that this suspicion of lies “exists throughout the proceedings, both in court and at the level of the authorities and certain Reunionese. For the majority of migrants, this is not economic immigration but a desire to flee violence and permanent persecution. Moreover, many say it, they do not want alms, any form of allowance is quickly seen as a shame. “
Likewise, some migrants, initially exiled in Indonesia, already have refugee status issued by the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR). Which should assert “the veracity of their persecutions.”
On the other swelling controversy, namely that migrants would arrive in too good shape after crossing from one continent to another and therefore necessarily at the heart of a sector that could make them transit through the neighboring island of Mauritius , Nacima Djafour refutes the argument: “The Mauritian authorities would know, right? And then, here, in a department where you cannot do without a car for the slightest trip, it is perhaps difficult to think that men and women are ready to do anything to live in peace, even to risk their lives aboard a makeshift boat, without comfort. Most have gone through the worst of it, so they are able to withstand a lot of suffering as well. “
At the association’s premises, Jayajotheeswary’s daughter, far from the ordeal of her crossing, smiles while watching a Sri Lankan rosewater series. “For three days, on the boat, we had almost nothing to eat and drink, ” she explains in English. But we held on, thinking that the future would anyway be less harsh than our past there … “
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