Dream of a secure future turns sour for Florinda

WHEN planeloads of Kosovar Albanian refugees landed in Ireland in June 1999 after fleeing the terror of their war-torn homeland, they were greeted with welcome banners and civic receptions.

A year later, when a frightened mother made the same journey alone and in secret with her two baby daughters, she had to ask a stranger on the street for help.

Florinda Sylaj thought she would be safe and that her children, Eda and Eni, would have a future here, in a country that had loudly thrown open its doors to her people.

But three years on, Florinda is again living in fear. Her application for asylum has been refused, appealed and refused again and she and her children are now in hiding, knowing the men with the deportation order who came knocking at her door at 7am last Tuesday morning are not far away.

Pure chance meant she had nipped out of the house for a few minutes and she hid until the squad car with the flashing lights drove off, a long, nerve-racking hour-and-a-half later.

But Florinda can’t rely on chance forever and, with the help of a cousin who is dreading her departure and the teachers she has befriended at her children’s school, she is making a last desperate appeal to be allowed stay.

“The children were so frightened after the police came,” said Florinda’s cousin, Diana Nrejaj.

“They were asking ‘why does my mama have to go to prison?’ How will we tell them they have to leave their home and their school and their friends and all who love them?”

Úna Ferguson, a teacher at Castleknock Educate Together national school, the multi-denominational school the girls attend in Dublin, said she was very worried about the sisters.

“They have suffered a great deal of trauma in their short lives and now that they are finally settling into a normal life here in Dublin they are faced with the threat of being uprooted once again and sent back to the appalling conditions in Kosovo.”

Florinda’s main problem in convincing the asylum authorities that she needs to stay here is that she doesn’t fit into any of the right categories.

Kosovo is relatively stable now and the United Nations presence is supposed to safeguard all ethnic groups. The fact that Florinda has no home, no means of supporting herself and fears her estranged family will harm her, does not make her a refugee under strict interpretation of the rules.

Diana pleaded that the rules be sympathetically interpreted to allow her cousin stay. “She came here with nothing, only knowing she would be safe. But she is going back to nothing, not even safety.”