(C) OpenDemocracy This story was originally published by OpenDemocracy and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . He fled war in Sudan. Now the UK doesn’t believe he’s a kid [1] [] Date: 2024-01 It was around 8 o’clock on a January night when several men from the paramilitary Rapid Support Forces (RSF) barged into Fati’s* home in Darfur, Sudan. Machine guns in hand, they assaulted him, his uncle and older brother. The soldiers came with an ultimatum: join them to fight the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) or die. Fati’s family would choose neither. Within a matter of days, they gathered some clothes, food and water and fled by car. They were headed for Libya. The ride took two weeks. It would take several more weeks for Fati’s thin limbs and torso to recover from the kicks, but the scars inside his mouth remain. He tells openDemocracy he was 16 at the time. While he recovered, his uncle and brother worked odd jobs to pay a smuggler who would help Fati cross the Mediterranean from Tripoli to the Italian island of Lampedusa. From there, he would try to reach the UK where he would contact another uncle who had been living in Manchester for the past seven years. They could only afford for one of the three to make the journey. The elder men felt that if only one of them could reach safety and claim asylum, it should be Fati because he was the youngest and the most vulnerable. Help us uncover the truth about Covid-19 The Covid-19 public inquiry is a historic chance to find out what really happened. Make a donation “I was terrified,” he said, shoulders hunched over, while sitting on a weathered bench outside the hotel he has been assigned by the British government in a remote area of Liverpool, England. “Either you arrive alive or you die along the way. I was aware of this and was scared, but there was no other choice.” Fati does not know how much his uncle and brother paid the smuggler. Those concerns were for the adults to handle. He only remembers how the other 40 migrants placed him with the children in the middle of the inflatable dinghy to protect them during the rough sea crossing. He didn’t know how to swim. For two days, Fati held hands with the other children as violent waves crashed onto their dinghy. “When I saw the adults cry, I really thought I was going to die,” he said. After two days at sea, the Italian coastguard rescued the dinghy and took the migrants to Lampedusa. “It felt like I had died and come back to life,” he said. The Italian authorities took Fati’s fingerprints and, after 48 hours, transferred the migrants by boat to a refugee camp in Naples. Fati had no way of letting his family know he had made it safely to Italy. They could afford only one phone while they were in Libya, which they gave to Fati for his journey. This left his uncle and brother with no device on which to be reached. After ten days, he was allowed to leave the camp. He continued onwards by following other migrants en route to France. He travelled mainly by train until reaching Ventimiglia, a town located seven kilometres from the French border. For two days, he walked from Ventimiglia to Nice. Fati moved mainly at night and managed to dodge the strong French border patrols that repeatedly pushed migrants back to Italy. When in Nice, he took a train to Paris and then another to Calais, a port city in northern France through which thousands of migrants pass each year in their attempts to cross the English Channel. In Calais, he stayed in an improvised living site called “Old Lidl” (as it had once housed a branch of the supermarket) where hundreds of transient migrants had set up tents in an empty field. Every day, Fati would sneak onto lorries hoping they were headed towards the UK. Sometimes he would end up in neighbouring countries instead. Other times he was caught by sniffer dogs and police at security checkpoints. Once they released him, he would make his way back to his living site. After four months of countless attempts, he felt he would never reach the UK. He grew exhausted and depressed. During this time, he says, he turned 17. Without any news from his family, Fati gave up. He just stayed in his tent, hopeless. The older Sudanese men staying in the Old Lidl site took pity on him. They each pitched in to pay a smuggler who would take Fati to the UK in an inflatable dinghy. Again, the elders placed him with the children in the centre of the raft, from where he watched, once more, as big waves rocked the 60 migrants onboard. After eight hours in the English Channel, they were rescued and taken to the Western Jet Foil processing centre in Dover, on the south-east coast of England. [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/5050/-asylum-age-assessment-tests-sudan-migrant-calais-dover-rwanda-deportation/ Published and (C) by OpenDemocracy Content appears here under this condition or license: Creative Commons CC BY-ND 4.0. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/opendemocracy/