Caught between a hard place and the `standard'

It was the sixth time they had tried to expel Semira Adamu. This time there would be no mistake.

The two police officers bundled the handcuffed 20-year-old into the back row of the Sabena flight to Lome, and as she fought back, shouting to other passengers for help, they pressed a cushion over her face to silence her. It is a "standard" method of restraint, police say.

Suddenly she collapsed. An emergency medical team brought her back to consciousness but a second heart attack was to plunge her into a coma. She died a few hours later. A judicial inquiry has been opened.

Tuesday's death has profoundly shocked Belgium, prompting calls for the resignation of the Minister for the Interior, the veteran Socialist, Mr Louis Tobback. There are also demands for an immediate moratorium on expulsions of asylum seekers pending a review of the For many people the death was a tragedy waiting to happen. In the first eight months of this year some 5,000 asylum seekers were deported, 193 of them forcibly. Police used a cushion on 12 of them.

Some, like Adamu, in a sometimes successful, last throw of the dice, desperately struggle and shout as they are strapped to their seats in the hope passengers will demand their release. Police use the cushion to silence them and punches to the stomach to make them sit.

Mr Tobback deeply regrets the death but defends the system of expulsions. Yesterday he blamed agitators for giving deportees "the impression that all you need to do is to fight and shout to be able to stay in the country. Those who told that to this poor girl bear a heavy responsibility".

Until now, public sympathy for their plight has been largely confined to human rights activists and small but vociferous groups like the direct action Collective Against Expulsions (CAE). It organised a mass escape earlier this year from the very detention centre in which Adamu had been confined. Locked up in isolation, she had been one of those unable to flee.

Her plight had been publicised by the group and had become the focus of much of the campaigning. The young Nigerian, who had been in Belgium for six months fighting for asylum, claimed she was being forced by her parents into marriage with a 65-year-old polygamist who had a history of violence.

But her case was not covered by the strict Belgian interpretation of its obligations under the 1951 Geneva Convention.

Mr Georges-Henri Beauthier, President of Belgium's Human Rights League, argues that every time Belgium reforms its asylum law it is to the further detriment of refugees. The Socialist ministers, he says, fearful of the growth of the far-right Vlaams Blok, are responding by trying to outdo the extremists in their zeal to expel refugees.

The convention protects those who, with reason, fear persecution at home for reasons of race, nationality, membership of a social group, or political opinions.

"But the Convention is broad enough to protect all those who face discrimination at home," Mr Beauthier argues, citing Belgium's willingness to allow Algerians fearful of Islamic terrorism to stay.

Canada has also shown itself willing to accept similar grounds to Adamu's as a basis for protection under the Convention.

Adamu had described the attempts to expel her and her fears of the next attempt in a letter to the Collective Against Expulsions. The first and second times, she said, they had not tried to force her on to the plane when she refused to get on. The third, having warned her they would use force, ended in farce when the authorities, "fearing demonstrators", claimed they had not reserved a seat.

"The fourth time was awful," Adamu wrote. Woken at 6.30 a.m., she was given 20 minutes to get her belongings together before being driven to the airport.

"On arrival my arms were strapped in two places, and then my legs . . . When we got to the plane I started to cry and shout. Eight men gathered round me, two of them Sabena security guards, the others, policemen.

"The two Sabena guards forced me: they were pushing all over my body and one of them pressed a cushion on my face. He nearly choked me . . .

"Then some passengers intervened and warned that they would leave the plane unless I was freed. One of them insisted they also return my luggage. There was a big row in the plane and they were forced to take me off."

A fifth attempted expulsion had similar results, but Adamu knew they would not stop and expressed considerable fear of the violence she might face. She warned that security at the airport seemed to be getting tighter. "These people are capable of killing," she wrote. "I don't know when they will come for me next."