Michael Theodoulou| The Guardian


When Layali Ibrahim, an Iraqi Kurd with electric blue eyes, turned 16 last week, she should have had a lot to celebrate. But even though she notches up straight As in exams, there was no party at her home on Clarendon Avenue in Richmond Village. “I spent the evening with my family and a few girls from the village,” she says. She didn’t invite any school friends. “I didn’t think they’d want to come out here.”

For “here” is not the leafy London suburb of the same name but an isolated and scrubby corner of a British military base at Dhekelia, on Cyprus’s south-eastern coast. Layali has spent her entire life marooned on this colonial holdover, which is not equipped for refugees.

Layali was born on 7 October 1998 on the open deck of a ramshackle fishing boat crammed with 74 migrants. Most were Iraqi and Syrian Kurds who had given their life savings to people smugglers to ferry them from Lebanon to Italy. But the boat’s engine soon sputtered out and the Lebanese crew fled in an inflatable dinghy.

Avin Ibrahim, then 19, went into labour as the boat drifted. There was no doctor or painkillers, just a woman with some nursing skills. Others shielded her with a blanket while the men feverishly bailed out water. “The pain was terrible,” Avin recalls with a shudder. Worse still was the dread that her baby had been born only to face a watery grave. She called her Layali, the Arabic word for night.

Like many who dream of a better life in Europe, her father Farhad, now 40, knew the perils involved in setting sail. “But what choice did I have,” he asks. “To die in Iraq? It was better for me to die outside my country.”

The men managed to patch up the engine and spotted an illuminated red cross in the distance, which they used as a guide to reach land. Arriving at the foot of a 100ft cliff – more than a day after Layali was born – some clambered to safety, while a Wessex helicopter with a union jack emblazoned on its nose rescued the rest.

By chance, they had washed up on Britain’s biggest overseas airbase, RAF Akrotiri. The talismanic red cross, it transpired, was the emblem of its military hospital. Dazed and traumatised, many first thought they had arrived in Italy. The administration on Britain’s two sovereign base areas (SBAs) on the island promptly tried to pass the burden on to the Cypriot authorities but was told the migrants were Britain’s responsibility.

Cypriot media thoroughly enjoyed the predicament faced by the old colonial master. “Britannia waives the rules,” quipped the Cyprus Mail. “All of a sudden the Brits are full of respect for the Cyprus government and its sovereignty over all of Cyprus, including the bases.”

The migrants were moved from Akrotiri to Dhekelia several months later. They were housed in rudimentary, former married quarters for British service families that were due to be demolished, and provided with weekly welfare allowances. It was meant to be a temporary measure.

Sixteen years on, 21 of the boat people remain in Richmond Village. With children born there and family members who later joined them, they make up a group of 67. Just over half are children, all of whom are stateless. Layali now has four siblings: the youngest is Omar, a 15-month-old, whom Avin bounces on her knee as we sip coffee in the family’s front room.

The Richmond villagers are embroiled in one of Britain’s longest and most bizarre refugee dramas. “Our situation is unbearable,” Layali says. “We feel so cut off from the rest of the world. We’re in limbo.”

The “forgotten village” has no shops, no amenities and just a handful of dusty streets. It feels a world apart from Dhekelia’s nearby main military compound, where British forces and their families lead busy lives in a well-ordered setting that resembles a chunk of middle England transplanted into the Mediterranean.

For most Richmond villagers, England is the promised land. After all, they argue, their boat had arrived on what is legally British soil, albeit 2,000 miles from London. Driving Layali is a single ambition. “I want to study medicine in England and live there,” she says, as her proud parents show me a laminated certificate that proves she is top of her class. “I want to be the best doctor in England.”

Layali’s dream is a distant one. Her family is among 38 people in Richmond Village regarded as “failed asylum seekers” by the SBA administration, which granted the remaining 29 refugee status over a decade ago.

But Britain refuses to take in even the recognised refugees. The sole exception was a 21-year-old Syrian Kurd who moved to Britain in June, allowed in not as a refugee but because he had married a British national in Cyprus last year. Britain feared setting a precedent that could encourage other asylum seekers to regard the SBAs as a fast track to the UK from the Middle East and north Africa. Cyprus, itself peaceful, is perched on the edge of the world’s most war-ravaged region, which generates countless refugees.

Yet the Richmond villagers are an exceptional case that is unlikely to be repeated. Before Cyprus joined the EU in 2004, it signed a memorandum of understanding with Britain to take responsibility for any asylum seekers who might enter the SBAs through Cypriot territory. The boat people preceded the memorandum, but in 2005 the SBAs reached a verbal agreement with the Cypriot authorities that recognised refugees should be allowed to live and work in Cyprus and use its schools and hospitals.

So, activists ask, if the Richmond villagers cannot set a precedent, why not just let them resettle in Britain? “After all, we’re talking about a small group of people, many of them children who were born and grew up on the bases,” says Doros Polycarpou, the director of a Cypriot human rights organisation, Kisa.

Britain remains adamant. “Home Office ministers have consistently made it clear that there is no question of the families on the SBA being admitted to the UK,” says a spokesman for the British high commission in Cyprus. “It would be contrary to UK policy to accept the admission of refugees or asylum applicants who have no close connection to the UK and it would also be inconsistent with our policy on applicants who arrive on British overseas territory or crown dependencies.”

Polycarpou argues that as Britain enjoys the privilege of sovereignty over 98 sq miles of prime strategic real estate in Cyprus – retained when the island won independence in 1960 – it should shoulder the responsibilities that come with its post-imperial presence. “Britain is acting as if its Cyprus bases have nothing to do with them, as if they exist in outer space,” he says.

The SBA administration rejected Farhad’s application for refugee status in 1999, saying he had failed to show he had a “well-founded fear of being persecuted” in Iraq. He was given the right to appeal, which he lost several months later while others won theirs.

Following the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the British military offered Iraqis among the boat people cash incentives to return to their “liberated” homeland. All refused, a decision Farhad never regretted.

“Today, Daesh [Isis] is in my village,” he says. British Tornado jets are now flying combat missions against the self-declared Islamic State in Iraq from RAF Akrotiri. “Given the change of circumstances in Iraq, there may be a need for Farhad’s case to be reconsidered,” says a spokeswoman for the United Nations high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR).

Other countries approached over the years to take in the Richmond villagers have refused, on the grounds that they had arrived on sovereign British soil. Among these was Germany, where Farhad had originally planned to move on to from Italy. Britain’s view is that those with refugee status should settle in Cyprus, where they are “entitled to work, reside and have access to medical treatment”. In 2010, they were served with eviction notices because “they had the means to exist outside” the SBA. These were withdrawn after protests but could be served again at any time.

The Richmond villagers have long opposed any move into Cyprus. “They don’t consider Cyprus to have responsibility over them,” says the legal representative of the recognised refugees, Nicoletta Charalambidou. Their years in Dhekelia, she adds, would not count as time spent on the island, setting back their claims for permanent residence or naturalisation.

Some made the short move into Cyprus several years ago but most later returned to Richmond Village, complaining of problems with documentation, finding work and difficulties with education for their children. “At least in Richmond Village they know they have a house to stay in and some basic welfare benefit in order to survive,” says Charalambidou.

Cyprus, in the grip of a post-bailout recession, is itself struggling to cope with migrants. There are currently 3,500 in Cyprus with refugee status or other forms of international protection, and about 2,700 asylum seekers, many of them Syrians.

As with other Richmond villagers, Farhad is grateful to the British military for helping to rescue them, and housing them rent-free. “The English people [on the base] are very nice and they feel for us.” But he is resentful of Britain itself for not taking them in. “I’m really, really tired of this life,” he says, drawing on a cheap cigarette. “I can’t raise my children properly here. We want to go to England for their sake, for their future. We’ve lost 16 years of our lives here and I still don’t have a passport.”

He feels ashamed that he could not afford to give Layali a decent birthday or reward her academic prowess. The SBAs provide many of the adults in Richmond Village with weekly ex gratia welfare allowances of €70 each and €30 for each child, which an official describes as “at least as good as equivalent payments” provided by Cyprus. The villagers say that it is not enough to cover all costs. “I don’t want welfare, I want a job,” says Farhad. “I’d be a driver, a cleaner, anything.”

A psychological evaluation of the Richmond villagers conducted for the UNHCR found that most feel “depressed, hopeless and helpless”. Many of the adults suffer sleeping and eating disorders brought on by anxiety over their unresolved status and their inability to “satisfy the basic needs of their children” who “feel they belong nowhere”.

Layali’s birth certificate, for instance, issued just three years ago by the SBA administration, states that she was born “off the coast of Akrotiri”. “Their suffering must end,” says Emilia Strovolidou, the UNHCR’s spokeswoman in Cyprus. Because Dhekelia is a military base, their “access to the full spectrum of refugee and integration rights is restricted”.

A makeshift school in the village where the children were taught in English was closed a decade ago. They were not entitled to attend the school in Dhekelia for children of the base’s military and civilian personnel, so started over at a Cypriot village school where they learned Greek from scratch and struggled to make friends.

Life for Layali is split between two worlds – and she is comfortable in neither. “I never see my school friends outside class,” she says. And she has no contact with her British peers in Dhekelia, who live a mile down the road but, as far as she is concerned, might as well be on the north pole.

Charalambidou is about to start litigation in the British courts, hoping to establish that Britain is responsible for the recognised refugees and must take them in. The situation is worse for the Ibrahims. In 2007, the SBA administration passed Farhad’s and other claims it had rejected to the Cypriot authorities to consider. But in August, the administration informed Farhad by letter that Cyprus had stopped considering his asylum claim, and he should regard it as failed.

They should make plans to leave Richmond Village by the end of January, says the letter, “failing which consideration will be given to deport” them. The administration is willing to pay their travel costs to Farhad’s “country of origin/nationality or to any other country outside Cyprus that agrees” to accept them on a permanent basis. An SBA official told me: “As failed asylum seekers, they cannot expect to remain on a British military base for ever.”

Layali’s parents are quietly despairing, but her dream of becoming a doctor in Britain keeps her strong. “They can’t just kick us out after all we’ve suffered here for 16 years. The only way we’ll leave Richmond Village is when they tell us we can go to England.”