The executioners wear suits and ties to match. Clean-shaved, hair brushed back, a news camera crew follows all five of them into a sterile lobby at the University Hospital of Wales in Cardiff, its capital city. They came for Ama Sumani, in her wheelchair, and dying of malignant myeloma she requires kidney dialysis three times a week. At precisely 8:00 am, the Immigration Officers rolled her out of the hospital and drove her straight to the airport.
Ama Sumani came to Wales five years ago and studied accounting. The money she earned she sent back to Ghana, to her two children. She developed a terminally ill cancer and was hospitalized. And then her visa expired. Appeals to the United Kingdom's (UK) Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND) were denied. In Accra, Ghana's capital, the hospital charges $6,000 for three months of dialysis, prohibitively expensive for a country where the average income for those employed is just $2,500. But no matter, the drugs to treat her cancer are not even available in Ghana.
She would be sent to her death and her 16 year-old daughter and seven year old son were to become orphans. Upon her arrival in Ghana, she began to deteriorate. Back in Wales, friends and community movements raised $116,000 US in public donations for her cause – to send her back to Wales, to get the treatment she required, to care for her children. A pharmaceutical company had agreed to supply her the medication free of charge. But Ama died in Ghana and her death is a blight on a UK immigration and asylum system gone terribly wrong.
The IND is outlining a program to provide "the confidence that our borders are secure, that those who have no right to be here be removed". This includes sending a cancer patient in a wheelchair to her death. For Habib Rahman, Chief Executive of the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, the UK government's attack on immigration and asylum seekers is unprecedented. "It seems this Government is looking to set a record for the number of immigration-related bills it can introduce," he said. While Ama's case is tragic, it is not an exception. The UK charter's four to five flights a month, sending the "illegals" back to whence they came or escaped; sometimes knowingly to their death.
