By Anthony O. Miller
A YOUNG Chinese student facing deportation after she was jailed for allegedly working illegally, appears to have been the victim of a trap to lure her into prostitution.
Li Yun has already spent 10 days in jail after being arrested by Immigration Department officers on December 4. Foreigners can be detained indefinitely pending deportation.
The 20-year-old hotel management trainee from Shanghai says she was duped into working at a Nicosia pub, earning £12 a night. She told the Cyprus Mail she had been assured that everything was above board, and that a work permit had been arranged.
Now, Interior Minister Christodoulos Christodoulou and Acting Chief Migration Officer Kyriacos Triantafyllides are all that stand between her deportation or the completion of her studies.
Her troubles began at a November birthday party in the pub for a fellow Chinese student. She never dreamed it would lead her to jail facing deportation.
“Sir, I am afraid, very afraid. I come here, crying,” she pleaded as she was led back to her cell. “If I had known, I wouldn’t have worked, because I have money.”
Li Yun’s plight is a far cry from her parents’ dream of a Western education in hotel management for their only child. If she is deported back to China, they will greatly lose ‘face’.
Until her arrest on December 4, Yun was “attentive, a very innocent girl, a good student,” recalled the director of the local college at which she studied.
She is still unclear about what happened that night. But several people close to her believe she was the victim of a scheme by some pubs to entrap young women, for either cheap, disposable labour, or blackmailing into prostitution.
Yun said that soon after she and her four friends arrived in the pub, its owner greeted an older man, who had come to the pub with them. The pub owner then sat down with the students, homed in on Yun, and began asking her about her studies.
At her mention of hotel management studies, Yun said the pub owner offered her some on-the-job experience in his bar.
“I said: ‘I don’t know if students can stay here and work’,” Yun said. She recalled her college’s warning not to work in Cyprus without proper permits.
Just as the pub owner was pledging to square things with the Immigration Department, Yun said, an “Immigration man came into the pub” – or at least the pub owner introduced him as such.
“He is my boss’ (the pub owner’s) good friend,” Yun said. “My boss and ‘Immigration man’ came and sat down. My boss told ‘Immigration man’ I was a student,” she said, adding the “boss” then said: “‘I want this student to come here and work. Can she or can’t she?”
At this point, the alleged immigration man told Yun to give her passport and student visa to the pub owner, who would get her a work permit. She said she did, and a week later, her “boss” called her to pick up her documents.
In reality, she had no work permit. But she said the pub owner told her: “‘No problem. Yesterday ‘Immigration man’ went to Immigration Department. Immigration said because you study hotel management, there is no problem” working.
Brought up to respect authority back home in China, and convinced that her boss, the ‘immigration man’ and the older man with the students in the pub that night were trustworthy, Yun began waiting tables two nights a week from 7pm to 1.30am five weeks ago in a Nicosia pub for £12 per night.
She insisted her boss had not asked her to sit and drink with customers – as cabaret ‘artistes’ often do. “No, no, nothing… Only drinks. Only work as a waitress,” she said, the light beginning to dawn on what might have been up the pub owner’s sleeve.
One source, who said he feared underworld reprisal if identified, claimed the pub’s owner and the older man who went with the five students to the pub “co-operate together to trap girls, especially nice girls… She is a very innocent girl. She is not suspicious at all.”
“They trapped her,” the source said. “They made her believe they actually got a permit from Immigration – which is actually the whole secret of it. Luckily – I say luckily – she was arrested, because after a few days, who knows that they might ‘promote’ her to other dirty things.”
“Of course this was a trap,” he said. “I don’t know if they have any co- operation with somebody in the Immigration Department. But I don’t believe they had in their hands any work permit. They told her (to surrender her passport and visa) just to make it seem official,” he said.
Yun’s lawyer, Yiannakis Erotocritou, has asked the Supreme Court to quash her deportation order. He has also asked Christodoulou and Triantafyllides to reverse her deportation order on the grounds she was an innocent, lured into working illegally by deceit.
Erotocritou said he agreed that Yun was the victim of a trap. The next step could have been choosing between being a prostitute, or being turned over to Immigration police as an illegal worker, and deported.
