LONDON LETTER:The nomadic life of a Russian family ended tragically last weekend when they jumped from the 15th floor of a tower block in Glasgow, writes MARK HENNESSY
TALL and distinguished, well- dressed and articulate, Russian asylum seeker Serguei Serykh seemed well when he visited Labour MP Willie Bain at his constituency office in Flemington Street in Glasgow last month.
But in the early hours of Sunday morning, Serykh, his wife Tatiana and their still-unnamed stepson threw themselves off the 15th floor of the Red Road flats in the Springburn district of the Scottish city.
For the last decade, the Serykhs lived a nomadic life. In 2000, they entered Canada. They were first granted refugee status, then permanent residence. While full citizenship was refused, some travel documents were given.
Unhappy about the citizenship refusal, Serykh began to accuse Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper and the Canadian security forces of pumping radiation into his Toronto home and of following the family after they left the country in 2007.
From here, the trail gets more confused. It is rumoured that they sought asylum in several European countries, including Germany, Spain and the Netherlands, before arriving in the UK in November 2007.
Like many other asylum seekers, the Serykhs were moved to Glasgow late last year under the British government’s dispersal programme, designed to share out the pressures caused by asylum applications.
The family were given one of the Red Road flats – once Europe’s tallest and soon to be demolished – alongside hundreds of others. Suicide is not unknown there. Wire netting had been erected on higher floors to stop people jumping out.
The United Kingdom Border Agency had told the Serykhs that they would be returned to Canada, but not to Russia, although it denies that it had put a date on their deportation, as some in Red Road have claimed in recent days.
However, a housing charity, Positive Action in Housing, has insisted that the family were told that they had to quit their flat within days, adding that neighbours had seen them carrying plastic bags in the days before their deaths.
Clearly mentally disturbed, Serykh told MP Willie Bain that the Canadians were now using psychotropic weapons to intimidate and terrorise his family and that they were in alliance with Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin.
The Canadian prime minister was also involved in a plot to assassinate Queen Elizabeth, he told Bain, and claimed to be an agent of the Russian FSB – the successor to the KGB.
Now, Strathclyde Police are trying formally to identify the bodies and track down family in Russia or elsewhere, although the Russian consulate in Edinburgh seems unhappy with the co-operation being offered to it.
On Monday, up to 100 people gathered outside the flats and lit candles to remember the dead, but also to bring attention to their own difficulties since many of them are likely to face deportation to places far less welcoming than Canada.
“I have four children and I have been here for 3½ years,” one man called Mohamed told a local radio station. “I have made a number of applications for asylum. If I go back to Pakistan I will be killed.”
Faced with former Scottish Parliament member Tommy Sheridan’s declaration that the deaths had made him “ashamed to be a Glaswegian”, Labour MP Tom Harris defended the asylum system.
“We have to have one [a system] where people’s situation is fully considered and a final decision made on the facts. You can’t make that judgment a hostage on the basis of threats by the individuals to take their own lives,” Harris said.
“The only thing we can consider is whether they are at risk of persecution at home. You can’t consider how well they have integrated into the community, whether they are nice people, these things are not relevant.”
In reality, few in Glasgow will grieve for long for the Serykhs: in private, the idea that someone would be brought to suicide because they were faced with a return to Canada provokes black humour.
However, the Scottish Refugee Council says the deaths highlight the wider problem of mental illness among asylum seekers. Very often, said John Wilkes, they were “fearful and traumatised” on arrival and stressed by the bureaucracy thereafter.
The issue for many is why the Serykhs’ case took so long to adjudicate upon. Earlier this month, an independent inspector found that the UK Border Agency is struggling with a backlog of nearly 500,000 cases.
Given current staffing levels and the complexity and number of cases, its target of concluding nine in 10 in six months is unachievable, due to legal difficulties and problems getting travel papers, said the inspector, John Vine.
The agency must handle 11,000 cases a month to achieve its July 2011 targets, but even then “it is likely that there will continue to be people in the legacy that do not qualify to stay but cannot be removed”, he warned.
The only light on an otherwise gloomy landscape comes from Home Office figures this week, which show that new asylum applications are falling off dramatically: just 4,765 applications for asylum in the final three months of 2009 – a third fewer than the year before.