Official visits asylum seekers’ protest

AN Interior Ministry representative yesterday visited 100 asylum seekers camped outside the Red Cross building in Nicosia to collect personal information on their pink slips, welfare status, alien books and medical cards.
The immigrants have been demonstrating for exactly two weeks yesterday. Initially they had been camping out in Nicosia’s Eleftheria Square but on Friday moved to the Red Cross premises.

They want the right to work without limitations, government housing, access to benefits where the right to work is refused, medical and pharmaceutical care, an end to police mistreatment, an end to deportations to countries which persecute them, and genuine examinations by an independent body of each asylum application.

The president of immigrant support group KISA, Doros Polycarpou, told the Cyprus Mail: “There was a meeting between ourselves and the Asylum Service and they agreed to form a working task force to look into the above matters. It’s a good development and is important, but it’s not a solution to the serious problems faced by the island’s 11,000 asylum seekers.”
He went on to say: “We insist the government open a dialogue with the asylum community and NGOs to find practical ways to improve the system within the framework of the law. It seems as though the government doesn’t want to deal with the 11,000 but only the 100 or so outside the Red Cross.”

On Saturday, the asylum seekers launched a hunger strike in a desperate effort to get the authorities’ attention.

Ten Kurds from Syria decided to stop eating after talks with Interior and Labour Ministry officials broke down, with one man needing hospital attention on Sunday night. The hunger strike is still ongoing.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.