Big rise in Afghan child migrants
By Martin Patience
BBC News, Kabul
As a 15-year-old, Aman Ahmedi set off on a journey for a better future - but it was to cost him his family.
His parents paid for Aman and his younger brother, Qais, who was 14 at the time, to be illegally trafficked to the UK.
They travelled through central Asia in vehicles and on foot before reaching Moscow.
From there, they travelled through Europe, eventually making it to France. The two boys were then loaded onto shipping containers and, finally, made it to Britain.
"My parents sent us because they wanted us to have a good life, a good future and to have a chance of getting a decent education," said Aman.
"That's why they spent a lot of money on sending us to the UK."
Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world, where opportunities are hard to come by, unemployment is high, and an insurgency rages in many areas.
Many Afghans see Britain as place of work and plenty - a country where a better life beckons.
Trade in human cargo
With the former ties of Empire and the international language of English, reaching London is an aspiration for many.
Every year, thousands of children attempt to make it to the UK.
United Nations aid agencies are warning of a sharp increase in unaccompanied Afghan children applying for asylum across Europe.
The trade in human cargo is a multi-million-pound industry kept hidden in the shadows.
In a rare interview, we met one trafficker who makes journeys like Aman's possible.
Yassin, who did not want to be identified, said it was a business full of hardship, danger and sometimes death.
He told me that people are first taken into Iran and then smuggled into Turkey. From there they are trafficked to Europe. But some do not make it that far.
"In Turkey the police caught us and imprisoned us for a month. We were finally released and told to go back to Iran," Yassin told me.
"But in the mountains, the Kurds chased us and we tried to escape. They killed many of us.
"Of the 45 that set out, only 15 survived."
Football hopes
Yassin said that after witnessing what happened first-hand, he gave up his trade in trafficking.
Aman was luckier. He arrived in Britain in 2001.
 |  When my parents sent us they said they would follow but I've no idea where they are  |
He stayed and studied in Bournemouth at a local college for four years, along with his brother. Aman played football for a local football club competing in tournaments across the country.
He started supporting Manchester United and had hoped to become a professional footballer.
But Aman was deported from the UK in 2005 as an illegal immigrant. He is now 24 and lives unemployed in Kabul with distant relatives and says he is desperate to find work.
Aman believes his brother, Qais, is still in Bournemouth.
But as for his parents - and nine other brothers and sisters - he has not seen or heard from them in almost a decade.
"I've got no idea where my family is," he said. "When my parents sent us they said they would follow but I've no idea where they are - no idea."
They may be in the UK, where Aman says he longs to return to.
"I can't because I don't have any money. But... it would mean a new life to go back to England." He paused. "A new life."
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The first time Ahmed saw England was when he pulled back the tarpaulin of the lorry he had been smuggled onto, and jumped down onto the street in Luton.
 Ahmed's story is typical of a growing number of young migrants |
It was early 2009. He wasn't sure of the date and couldn't say exactly how long he had been on the road since leaving northern Afghanistan the year before.
All he knew was that it was still hot when he crossed into the Iranian desert during the first days of the journey, and freezing cold by the time he neared its end in northern Europe.
Along the way he had ducked under searchlights, taken part in a car chase, been stowed away on boats and picked up by the police, on a journey that migration experts say is typical for a growing number of Afghan children making their way, unaccompanied, to Europe.
They were experiences that might force a teenager from rural Afghanistan to grow up fast, but his first reaction on arrival was apparently childlike.
"It was very cold," he says, "there was snow everywhere. There were boys who were playing in the snow and one of them threw a snowball at me, so I joined in and for 10 or 15 minutes. I played."
'Threatened'
Ahmed, who says he is now 16, made his journey alone.
He says he left Faryab province in northern Afghanistan after militants asked him to plant explosives on cars that local officials brought to the garage where he worked, and threatened to kill him when he refused.
Until then he had been untroubled by the violence plaguing many parts of his country, but the security situation was deteriorating and his family felt they had to leave.
Ahmed, whose name has been changed to protect his identity, says he was refused asylum but given leave to stay in the UK - a status commonly granted to unaccompanied minors, or under-18s.
His stated reasons for leaving have not been verified, but he gave the BBC an exhaustive account of his journey.
It was an uncle who arranged the trip, which migrants say can cost tens of thousands of dollars.
Ahmed said he was not initially told he was being sent to England - nor that he would be separated from his family. That moment came after a couple of days of driving when, as he later realised, he had just crossed into Iran.
"They were putting everyone in cars, they were in a hurry and talking in a foreign language I didn't understand," he says.
"I wanted to be with my family at that stage but two people forced me into one of the vehicles. I was crying, I didn't want to go. We didn't get to say goodbye."
Iran to Istanbul
Several days of continuous driving followed, initially in the open back of a truck.
"There were 25 people in the back of the pick-up, with some of them piled on top of each other or hanging from the rails," he says.
"The weather was so hot that some fainted. There was no cold water to drink and they didn't even stop when people needed to relieve themselves."
The group, which included Afghan men of various ages from different parts of the country, crossed into Turkey, but only after being ordered by smugglers to drop to the ground to avoid a swivelling searchlight at a border post.
The journey then proceeded at a less frenetic pace, with trips in cars and buses and a comfortable stay in Istanbul with an Afghan intermediary - who, like Ahmed, was from the Uzbek speaking part of the country.
It was there that Ahmed says he heard for the first time that he was headed for England, and was told that there were two options for travelling on to Greece - by sea or by land.
Afraid of the sea, which he had only seen for the first time in Istanbul, he chose land.
Dinghy crossing
He might have regretted it. Approaching the border by car with two other migrant teenagers, the Afghan intermediary, who was driving, had to swerve off the road into fields to avoid a checkpoint where vehicles were being searched, and was chased for a while by a police car.
And there was still water to cross at the border. The group of four used a pair of inflatable dinghies, though the one Ahmed was in capsized when his companion tried to throw his rucksack onto the far bank.
 Ahmed currently has discretionary leave to stay in Britain |
Drama gave way to boredom in Greece, with several months of waiting while the next leg of the journey was arranged. Time was wiled away playing computer games in a flat. Ahmed never learned the name of the city.
Then came one of the biggest tests, as he travelled to Italy by boat, stowed away in a tool compartment in the base of a car-transporting lorry for about 15 hours.
"There were two of us squeezed in tight," he says. "It was very cold - so cold that our backs felt like they were frozen. We were not even able to reach for our bags to get something to eat."
Calais 'jungle'
There were more cold temperatures to bear as he travelled north through Italy, where he spent several nights sleeping rough outside a large station - probably Milan.
Eventually sneaking onto a train to France, he was so exhausted that he slept, only waking as he was carried off by police in Paris and deposited on a station bench.
From the French capital, he managed to call the intermediary in Greece, who put him in touch with another Afghan in the smuggling network, this time in the northern port of Calais.
There he stayed in "the jungle", the notorious informal migrant camp that French authorities closed down in September.
At one point, after being stung during a police raid by what he suggested might have been tear gas, local authorities sent him to a French carer family.
But he escaped, determined not to be frustrated so close to his goal.
There were two failed attempts to get passage across the channel. Once, French police scanners detected him in the back of a container. Another time, he clung to the undercarriage of a lorry, but it drove for two hours in the wrong direction.
Both times, French officials simply sent him back to the Calais camp.
It may be that he has thick-padded boxing gloves to thank for crossing to England on his third attempt. He noticed them among the sports equipment that he and a group of others were told to burrow into to avoid detection.
Four were caught by scanners and dogs at the French border controls, and two more at the English ones.
"The lorry boarded the ship, which after a while arrived in port," Ahmed says. Once it was moving again I came out from my hiding place, thinking I was the only one left. But there were four others with me, still hiding under the goods."
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When an asylum seeker fleeing the world's deadliest conflict zones arrives in Europe, their chances of being granted refugee status differ drastically from country to country.
 Migrants often seek temporary shelter before moving on |
With the European Union struggling to unify it policies across member states, this uneven approach has hampered efforts to deal fairly and efficiently with applicants, experts say.
"It's what we refer to as the asylum lottery," says Bjarte Vandvik, secretary general of the European Council on Refugees and Exiles.
"If you get to Finland then you get to stay. If you get to Greece, then you have no chance."
The overall number of asylum requests in the EU has dropped sharply since the early 1990s. But conflicts such as those in Afghanistan and Somalia still drive up numbers from certain countries.
One particularly vulnerable group affected by uneven policies in the EU is that of unaccompanied Afghan children, whose numbers have risen sharply over the past two years.
Campaigners from human rights and refugee agencies acknowledge that not all of these children should be granted asylum in the EU.
Some may have fled for economic reasons, or may have invented or embellished their story - often at the suggestion of smugglers.
But the campaigners also say Afghans do tend to be fleeing situations of generalised violence, misrule or abuse, and that under the current system they are not being given a fair hearing.
"We have a lot of children coming from extremely volatile situations to Europe who are not always being treated as what they are, and that's children on their own in a foreign country without any safeguards," says Mr Vandvik.
"That should be the focus for how European governments, individually and collectively, approach this."
The EU says it is working to correct this, and an action plan on unaccompanied minors is expected under the current, Spanish EU presidency.
Tobias Billstrom, Sweden's minister for migration and asylum policy, says that under the Swedish presidency in the second half of 2009 the bloc built on earlier efforts to forge a common migration and asylum policy.
"If we look at the differences five years ago or 10 years ago, there has been clear progress," he told the BBC.
'Irrational' movements
One practice that differs from country to country is age determination for young migrants. This is needed because under-18s are given certain automatic protections under national and international laws.
Because of this obligation to protect, it is in the interests of countries wanting to limit migrant numbers to be able to prove the age of those who are 18 or over.
But there are no agreed, accurate methods for doing so. Asylum requests may be turned down because the applicant is suspected of lying about his age, even though this cannot be proved.
Other concerns over child migrants include their detention, the lack of common procedures for assigning a guardian, and a growing emphasis on returning children to their country of origin.
| ASYLUM RECOGNITION RATES, 2008 (FIRST INSTANCE) Finland: 95%Netherlands: 52% Sweden: 49% UK: 30% France: 16% Greece: less than 1% Source:Eurostat |
Greece, which is the first point of entry into the EU for many migrants, has been accused of widespread abuses, including secretly sending some children back across the border to Turkey.
With Greece's recognition rate for asylum cases close to zero, most try to move on quickly to other states.
But they may later be sent back under EU rules, which try to prevent "asylum shopping" by allowing adult applicants to be returned to the country through which they first entered the EU, and children to be returned to the first state in which they made an application.
Simone Troller, a researcher at Human Rights Watch, said that because of Greece's record some EU countries have decided to stop sending minors back there - though others, including the UK, have continued to do so.
Like some other observers, she rejected the idea that the minors target certain destinations from the start of their journeys, drawn in by a high level of protection.
"When I asked the question, 'where is the best place to go', I was asked the question back," she said of her interviews with Afghan children.
"Sometimes they move in an irrational way - I didn't get the impression that they were very clear about what the benefits were."
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