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“I have no future”: Asylum seeker Mohammad Azzari

What the Afghan-born man from Basel-Landschaft experienced, whose asylum application has been pending for 32 months

From Anna Wegelin

The Federal Office for Migration is taking more personal measures to combat the excessively long processing times for asylum applications. But Afghan Mohammad Azzari* has not yet benefited from this noble measure. The 28-year-old asylum seeker from Basel-Landschaft has been waiting for over two and a half years for the official paperwork that can free him from an untenable situation.

Mohammad Azzari speaks impeccable standard German. He has only been in Switzerland for two and a half years and had never learned another foreign language before. OnlineReports met the 28-year-old asylum seeker from the Basel area in the “Advice Center for Asylum Seekers in the Basel Region” (BAS) to talk about the anxious waiting and doing nothing until the final asylum decision is made. The BAS is located near the Spalentor in Basel.

The gentle-looking man with the baseball cap, earrings and casual shoulder bag actually has a different surname than the one he has today. But he was unlucky enough to have a Hazara for a father. The Persian-speaking Hazara are an ethnic and religious minority and are repeatedly victims of discrimination in Afghanistan, especially by the Pashtun elite.

Mohammad fled to Iran with his parents and five siblings when he was three years old. His family, who had to leave all their belongings behind in Afghanistan, fared no better there. At home they lacked everything and had to constantly move, “because of my father,” said Mohammad, who was active “for I don't know exactly what.”

Honor lost

When Mohammad was seven years old, his mother died in a traffic accident. His father, who was suffering from bomb fragments in his back that he had sustained during the war in Afghanistan, could not get over her death and also died a few years later. And then this: Mohammad's younger sister, who was nine years old at the time, did not return home from school. A week later, she was found on the street, completely distraught. She had been kidnapped by four men in a car. “They did what she wanted with her,” says Mohammad: “Honor plays a central role for us.”

He reported the crime to the police. But they did nothing, he says, and instead put him in prison for three days and tortured him. “I was treated like an animal because I am Afghan.” But he doesn't really feel like one: “I've hardly lived in my own country.”

Constantly on the run

“We were always afraid,” he says, looking back on his childhood with seemingly no emotion. “I was always on the run and had a difficult time, until now.” Now, that is the grueling wait for a final asylum decision. He has been practicing patience for two years and almost eight months. “I will live!” he says with surprising intensity. He has calculated how many days, hours and minutes he has already waited. “Sometimes I think I'm slowly going crazy.”

Nevertheless, he is not waiting for things to happen and wants to take the entrance exam for “Link zum Beruf”, a course for adults from the cantons of Basel-Stadt and Basel-Landschaft who want to obtain a state-recognized secondary school qualification while working. “But I have no future,” he says, shrugging his shoulders.

When he arrived in Switzerland in November 2009, he still felt a lot of drive and zest for life. At that time, he must have improved his German skills: mainly through self-study, but also with the support of Afghan friends in the region and in language courses in the Kleinbasel Internet café “Planet 13” and “in a church near the Habermatten bus stop in Riehen,” says the young man, who is not a religiously practicing Muslim. But now he has lost interest in anything, he says: “If I'm honest, my feelings have died.”

Fear of the information board

Mohammad has an N permit and lives in a transit home for asylum seekers. Every time he walked past the information board in the home with official mail for the inmates, he said, he was overcome by an oppressive feeling: Maybe the asylum decision would finally arrive.

When Mohammad came to Switzerland, he had been on an odyssey lasting several years, which had taken him over the mountains in Turkey, overland to Greece and by ship to Italy, and had temporarily left him homeless. He was looking for his little sister: a friend of Mohammad's had taken the violated girl to Istanbul. The friend was picked up by the police before he could travel on to Greece. To this day, there is no trace of Mohammad's little sister. But Mohammad is convinced that she is in Europe, “perhaps in Baku”, alive or dead.

“The worst thing is that you don't know what's coming,” he says, describing his current situation. He's trying to make the best of his situation, says Azzari, who is also counteracting the prescribed inactivity by volunteering in the containers of the ecumenical pastoral care for asylum seekers at Otterbach customs: “Being there for people who are much worse off than me helps me to forget my own situation,” he says.

What will Mohammad do when the final asylum decision comes? “Look for my sister,” he answers.

* Real name known to the editor

7 June 2012