the times | Monday January 3 2022 19
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circumstances. Ts&Cs applyFairooz Khan misses playing cricket in
the playground of his neighbourhood
every Friday. “We used to play all day,”
he says. “That was our one day off. We
had a team of boys around my age.”
Now 23, he recalls a happy childhood
in Jalalabad, capital of the Nangarhar
province in Afghanistan, with his
father, a dentist, his mother and five sib-
lings. “I had a good life there, a happy
life. I enjoyed my childhood, I still miss
it,” he says.
Khan and his father were sponsored
by the Afghan Olympic Committee to
cycle across the world to spread a
message of peace for Afghanistan and
visited Glasgow on their tour.
Scotland would later become his
permanent home after he was forced to
leave his friends and family to seek
refuge in the UK.
He is reluctant to discuss why he had
to leave Afghanistan out of fear that
repercussions could affect his family.
But the aspiring politician, who dreamt
There were dark days
after Afghanistan...
Now I have a future
of working for the Afghan Ministry of
Foreign Affairs, remembers the day in
November 2016 when he realised he
would have to go, with no idea whether
he could ever return. “I had visited
many countries but this was something
where I was forced to leave,” he says.
“There was hope but it was very diffi-
cult and when I think about it now, that
feeling comes back.”
Two days later, Khan boarded a flight
to the UK with his father, staying with
a friend in Glasgow. “It was winter so it
was quite dark,” he recalls. “I was scared
to go out.”
Khan, then 18, was granted refugee
status six months later and began to
work with a Scottish Refugee Council
caseworker to pursue his ambition of
working in politics. The charity, with its
English and Welsh counterparts, is
being supported by The Times and Sun-
day Times Christmas Appeal.
The Scottish branch helped 1,
refugees from 52 countries to find food,
clothing and homes in 2020.
With their help, Khan successfully
applied for an undergraduate course in
community development at the Uni-
versity of Glasgow, which he will com-
plete next summer. He is now applying
to study a master’s degree in politics.
“If the Refugee Council weren’t thereto help it would have been very dark
days,” Khan says. “I feel proud and I am
looking forward to doing my master’s,
working with communities to empower
people... Scotland is like a second
home and I’m settled.”
Refugees who contact the Scottish
Refugee Council sometimes arrive in
Britain with only the clothes on their
backs after perilous journeys. A third of
new arrivals last year had left Iraq,
17 per cent came from Iran and 9 per
cent from Syria.
Sabir Zazai, chief executive of the
charity, says hearing about the deaths
in the Channel of those attempting to
reach safety brings back memories ofatrocities he witnessed during his own
journey to the UK when he fled the
conflict in Afghanistan in 1999.
“It takes me back to the time when I
was so close to death,” says Zazai, 44.
“As an asylum seeker, you don’t know
what you will eat on that journey. You
don’t know where you’ll stay, where
you’ll end up. And the most painful part
is that you don’t know when you will see
your family, parents and loved ones
again. You’re basically in prison, but
that prison is moving.
“Traffickers are not forgiving. If a
child could risk that journey for them,
they will throw the child away. When I
was brought to the UK, a womancouldn’t carry her baby any more so the
traffickers wanted to leave it in the for-
est. Some of us rushed and said we
would all carry the baby. And each time
the baby would cry, we would get
punched or hit... Our policies are
putting people in the hands of these
traffickers.”
Zazai was placed in Coventry, before
joining the Scottish Refugee Council in- It helps new arrivals to integrate,
find employment and put their skills to
use in sectors that benefit hugely from
their contribution.
“No one wants to be a burden. These
people bring their skills, their expert-
ise,” he said. “We cannot shut the door
on people at this time, especially when
the world is in conflict and there are
health inequalities from Covid.”
Donations to the Refugee Councils
of Britain will be doubled up to
£275,000 by anonymous donors.
christmas
appeal
Arthi Nachiappan
Fairooz Khan hopes to become a politician after studying for his master’s degreeROBERT PERRY FOR THE TIMES