'I came here looking for safety and they attacked the hotel' - Asylum seeker's memories of last summer's riots
“I’m still shocked from that day. I came here looking for safety and the people, they attacked the hotel.”
Memories of a violent mob besieging the Holiday Inn Express, in Manvers, remain close to the surface for 24-year-old Abdul, an asylum seeker who fled civil war in Sudan.
“Those people, I don’t know what happened to them [to make them do this]. We didn’t come here to hurt anyone or to steal anything, we’re just here looking for safety.”
“A group of people came to attack us, and they wanted to kill us I think, I don’t know what’s the reason for that. My message for them is – stop doing these things. This behaviour will not benefit you.”
Caroline Norman, who works for the Refugee Council in South Yorkshire, experienced the attack via livestreaming sent to her phone from asylum seekers in the hotel.
“It was distressing because there were points at which the hotel was on fire or the fire had started… and our clients were trying to put out the fire out from the inside and they were basically trapped inside, more than 200 of them. It was really terrifying to be honest.
“It does shock me and with hindsight you think it should have been prevented prior to that, when we think about some of the things leading up to it. But nobody would have expected it would have led to actually trying to set the hotel on fire.”
‘Those things’ included regular racial abuse, objects thrown from cars and an asylum seeker being attacked only weeks before the day of rioting.
The fear generated by the Manvers attack rippled out to other asylum seekers in hotels elsewhere.
Daastan (not his real name), in his 20s, recounted how his father and a brother were killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan. He lives in another South Yorkshire hotel. He recalled seeing another asylum seeker in tears.
“It’s a human issue. If you see something like that and you have got the same status as those people who have been a victim in that way you feel scared, worried and you don’t know what to do, what will happen to me and a kind of stuck feeling, in a hard situation.
“It was really hard. I hadn’t done anything wrong and don’t know why people would just attack us because we’re just here to seek help, to seek asylum because we already had a problem in our home country. It was a hard thing to suffer.”
In common with Rotherham Council and local Labour MP John Healey, Ms Norman believed Manvers was the wrong location to place around 200 asylum seekers, being in a relatively isolated location and a predominantly white neighbourhood.
All the asylum seekers were moved to other accommodation after the riot and the hotel is no longer used to accommodate migrants.
Ms Norman, who runs the Health Access for Refugees Project in South Yorkshire, said: “One good thing is the number of people who were arrested and received fairly harsh sentences, which they deserved. It was a reflection of how serious it was. It made our clients, not just the ones at the hotel, feel better that that some level of justice was done.”
Amid a continuing febrile atmosphere, the Refugee Council’s work in local schools with asylum seekers has offered a note of optimism.
Ms Norman said children were “very willing to engage in discussion about the reasons why people have to leave their homes and why they have to make journeys across the world to claim asylum and interested to know more. That's really encouraging.”