Afghan boy?s hope of new life in Europe ends in suicide
 

Mustafa Ansari’s journey ended one April morning in his bedroom in a quiet Swedish village. At around 7am, staff at the young asylum-seekers’ centre where Ansari was staying found him dead. The sheets of his metal bunk bed were tied so tightly around the Afghan teenager’s neck, an inquiry later learned, the staffer who found him had to cut the **ose with a knife. Around the soccer-mad boy’s room were brightly coloured Post-It **tes scribbled with Swedish words he had been learning. An autopsy found Ansari, who had ** papers but was described in the autopsy as 17, had committed suicide. During nine months in Sweden, the authorities had **t managed to carry out a single interview for his asylum application. The young Afghan was a new kind of casualty in Europe’s migration crisis. While thousands have died on the journey to Europe, Ansari made it, only to become caught up in an overloaded system. His story highlights the limits on capacity even in a country like Sweden, which has one of the most open policies towards migrants and refugees. It also underlines the anxieties and risks faced by the more than 100,000 unaccompanied young asylum-seekers who have reached Europe since 2015. Sweden has long been welcoming of refugees and is proud of its humanitarian record. It threw open its doors to all Syrians in September 2013 and has taken in more asylumseekers per head than any other European country. But as more than a million migrants reached Europe illegally last year, mass applications choked systems everywhere. Sweden said it couldn’t cope. Processing times for asylum- seekers in the country have nearly tripled over five years to a median of longer than nine months, from just over three months in 2011. Care-workers have lost track of more than 1,000 unaccompanied mi**rs, a third of whom are Afghan males, since 2014. Last **vember, the country started to restrict the number of migrants it lets in. The deputy prime minister wept on TV when she an**unced the curbs. “We have taken in too many for too long,” said Prime Minister Stefan Lofven at the time. Sweden’s migration minister said last week he did **t believe any other country had given unaccompanied mi**rs a better reception than Sweden. When authorities struggle with asylum applications, psychiatrists say they incubate multiple problems. Applicants are often isolated. Some are already traumatised by their experiences and prone to mental illness and self-harm. Others fall into crime or - in the worst case - recruitment by militant groups. “The longer they wait, the angrier they become,” said Edgar Jones, a professor of the history of medicine and psychiatry at King’s College, London. S weden’s agency for managing asylum-seekers took on more staff and has simplified decision-making, but wait times have still increased. It says it expects them to peak later this year at 12 months. “I have people writing to me every day, saying, ‘I’ve been here for 12 months, 14 months, and **thing happens,’” said Mikael Ribbenvik, director of operations at the Migration Agency. The agency does **t comment on individual cases. Migration Agency records show at least 500 occasions when asylum-seekers of all ages threatened or attempted suicide between January 2014 and the end of August, a period when more than a quarter of a million people applied for asylum in Sweden. Three attempts ended in death. What motivated them is **t clear - the records show some were directly related to delays in applications. Ribbenvik conceded the records are likely an undercount: Suicidal behaviour is only **ted when it affects immigration staffers’ working conditions in some way. Ansari’s case, for example, is **t included in the data. Asylum-seekers are generally more likely to attempt suicide than the general population, studies have shown. They suffer high rates of depression, psychosis and other mental health conditions, largely because of the trauma they have fled. In Sweden, government and other groups have estimated that around a quarter of asylum- seekers suffer from mental illnesses like depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Ansari had travelled alone. His autopsy report says he was suffering from depression and bipolar disorder. Friends say he desperately missed his family. He waited months for a meeting to process his claim, but the agency cancelled one meeting and messed up the venue for the other. “He used to speak about his frustration,” said his fellow asylum-seeker, 18-year-old Afghan Mohsen Naghawi. “He saw himself as unlucky. “Peter Valverius, chief medical ******r for psychiatry in Blekinge, the county where Ansari lived, was involved in the county’s inquiry into the young man’s death. He said the cancellation of Ansari’s second asylum interview seemed crucial: “There is a big probability that it was the trigger.” Ansari was the eldest child of an Afghan housewife and factory security guard who live in Shiraz province in Iran. The boy had travelled for a month through Turkey, Greece and on to Germany, said his father, Ali Yawar Ansari. He arrived in Sweden on July 24, 2015, one of more than 23,000 unaccompanied Afghan mi**rs to reach the country that year. Like many Afghans, Ansari was actually a double refugee. He was a member of the Hazara, a community of possible Mongolian ancestry. His people have long faced persecution in Afghanistan; many fled to Iran in the 1990s after they were targeted by the Taliban. Ansari grew up in Iran, among hundreds of thousands of Hazara refugees. Because of their Asiatic features they stand out and face harsh discrimination including jail or deportation, rights groups say. There are ** official figures, but Kasim Husseini, an official at the Swedish Committee for Afghanistan, an aid group working in Afghanistan, estimates that more than 70 percent of Afghan asylum-seekers in Sweden are Hazaras. A Hazara himself, he travelled alone when he was 15 and arrived in 2001.Rights groups say Hazaras have recently been recruited by Iranian forces to fight in Syria. It was that risk that drove Ansari, who was working in a plastics recycling firm in Shiraz, to try Europe, his father told Reuters. At first, his father said, he tried to stop the boy from leaving. But when Mustafa threatened to go anyway, the family leased land they own in Afghanistan and borrowed money from cousins to raise 4,000 euros to pay smugglers. That’s more than double the annual GDP per capita in Afghanistan in 2015, according to World Bank figures. Those who knew Mustafa say he was warm-hearted with an easy smile and a love for Real Madrid soccer club. “Among my children, he was the brightest,” said Ali. “He was interested in electronic gadgets and when he went to Sweden he had a plan to study mobile tech**logy. “Like many Afghans, Ansari planned to bring over his family from Iran once he had won asylum. In a cafe in the nearby town of Karlshamn, Ansari’s Afghan and Iranian friends said they had raised their own cash on the road for their journeys. One, Amir Hassanzade, made money in Greece by allowing trainee tattooists to practise on his arm for 20 euros a time. A**ther said Kurdish human traffickers had forced him to work on a construction site in Turkey to pay his way. “You have to remember that it is a very big responsibility for these boys,” said Ansari’s 18-year old friend, Naghawi. “Their families have sold everything and this is on their shoulders.” That sense of responsibility intensifies the moment the boys touch Swedish soil. When children arrive without passports, officials typically assign them a birth date based on the age they say they are when they land. Ansari said he was 16. So for the Swedish authorities, his birthday became July 24, 1999. At the time, it was relatively easy for unaccompanied asylum- seekers who were under 18 to bring family to Sweden to live with them. By giving his age as 16, Ansari had started a two-year countdown to get his family in. Svangsta is a riverside community of 1,700 in southern Sweden best k**wn for making fishing reels. It is also home to a government- run asylum-seekers’ centre, a two-storey brick building where Ansari lived with 20 other boys from Afghanistan, Syria, Somalia, Eritrea, Morocco and Iran. —Reuters

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