Transcript

Amir arrived in the Netherlands, from Herat in Afghanistan, when he was 15 years old. He doesn’t like to talk about why or how he left...



“If I want sleep then I can’t talk about it... I won’t talk about it”.



Only that a smuggler took him to the airport and told him to wait there until he returned.



“I waited for him until it got dark, but he didn’t come back. I was just sitting there until a policeman came and asked me what I was doing there?”



“I was body searched. There was a translator who asked me if I had travelled by train before, and I said no. They gave me a train ticket and told me to take the train and get off at the last stop but when I arrived it was late at night and no one was there to help me. So I slept at the train station.”



In the morning Amir showed his train ticket to a policeman who asked Amir for the letter he had been given at the airport. He explained to Amir that he had got off at the wrong station, and took him by train to another one where he was transferred to a bus.



“I showed my finger to the bus driver. The driver understood that I was a refugee so he didn’t ask for money.”



“Then I was in a refugee camp for weeks.”



During his time in the camp Amir went to a nearby Mosque to ask for help.



“they told me to fill in a form and come back after six months. I said, ‘I need help now, not in six months’.”



The Dutch Government supported Amir for two-and-half years whilst his asylum case was under review. But when he was 17 they closed his case, stopped his financial support and told him to return to Afghanistan.



Then he met Kim who helped him appeal against the decision.



(Kim Tsai):

“I met this boy through the sports school and then was asked if I could look into his file and help him to get a grip on what was happening to him during his procedure because he had no one who was helping him to read the post, so he had many many unopened letters.”



Kim Tsai is a researcher looking into how the Dutch asylum system treats unaccompanied minors. She thinks the system is deliberately complex to encourage young people not to claim asylum.



KT: “A lot of them are completely misinformed or they don’t get help, adequate help with the procedures, they don’t understand the procedures. The guardians don’t explain well enough, the mentors don’t explain the procedures or don’t even know the procedures well enough, and the lawyer speaks on a different level.



Apart from being alone, and having to fit into a new schooling system, thinking about your future, not having any contact with your family, having traumas and stress, it’s the main thing which they tell me is the feeling of being uncared for, unseen and alone.”



Kim says PTSD is a big problem amongst the unaccompanied minors she works with, a problem the Dutch Government isn’t recognising.



KT: “The boy who lives with us [Amir] I think his interviews were stopped tens of times because he couldn’t cope during the interview. But before he came into contact with me, there’s absolutely nobody who had thought ‘well maybe it’s because of trauma that these interviews are going nowhere’. And so, yeah, they kept sending him back for the interview and stopping it and then restarting it, absolutely no attention paid whatsoever to his psychiatric condition.



The unaccompanied minors I’ve been helping were just moved around and shipped around and sent to different forms of housing when they got into trouble and the symptoms of PTSD were not recognised, they didn’t get any psychiatric help or psychological help. Authorities are very unwilling for people to get referrals to the real mental health services because of course that costs more money.“



Amir is now 18. With Kim supporting him he was able to appeal his asylum decision and was given a five-year stay. He is applying for permanent residence. Not every young person is as lucky.



KT: “I’ve had some cases of some boys in protected housing because they were not only UMs but they were also, or possible victims of human trafficking and despite all the guarantees that they were looking after them and that everything would be fine, the boy phoned me on a Monday, he turned 18 on a Friday, and on the Monday he was transferred to an adult asylum camp, never heard from his Guardian or mentor again.”



Although he has applied for residence, Amir is not happy in the Netherlands



“I think I feel homesick... it’s not my home”



He says some people treat him badly.



“Not all people but some people”



In spite of all this he doesn’t want to go back to Afghanistan - he doesn’t know where to go...



“I need to think about it, I don't want to go somewhere else and then regret it.”

Disclaimer: The Bureau has no way of verifying the full story given to us by our case studies - we are simply reporting what they have told us