Belgium: Zairian asylum-seeker disappears
01 May 1995
A thirty year old Zairian woman has died in Kinshasa in what the Belgian newspapers are describing as "mysterious circumstances" after being deported from Belgium. The case has led to sharp attacks by Belgian politicians on asylum policies.
According to the Agalev party, Marie-Louise Shingila Issomoko arrived at Zaventem Airport on 28 August 1994 with her two children, aged 5 and 2, after having been held in a Zairian prison since April, following her arrest whilst attending a meeting of the Zairian opposition group, UDPS. She was then held for a month at an unknown location before phoning her sister in Holland on 27 September to tell her that she was being deported. Shingila was then deported on 29 September when she was put on a plane for Zaire. Her family never saw her again.
The family finally found out what had happened to Mrs Shingila when a worker in a mortuary recognised her because of a necklace she had been wearing with her name on it. The mortuary worker told the family that she had died as a consequence of infected wounds after she had been tortured and raped by soldiers. The whereabouts of the children are still unknown.
According to the lawyer representing Mrs Shingila's sister, there were obvious political reasons why the Zairian regime would have wanted to kill her. Her father was a leading member of the Zairian opposition. He was also the organiser of the meeting at which Mrs Shingila and other members of her family were held by the Zairian army.
The case has raised a number of questions in relation to Belgian and European asylum rules. It appears that, because Mrs Shingila travelled without any papers, the Sabena airline company handed her straight over to the Belgian security forces without allowing her to make a claim for political asylum. This is linked with the law which allows the government to fine any company allowing people to travel without the relevant travel documents. It would also appear that Belgium security forces are increasingly inclined not to allow anyone entering the country without documents to claim asylum. As the Agalev senator Frans Lozie puts it:
"There are two official procedures that a persons file must go through before asylum is granted, however in addition to these two - the first admissibility procedure at which point 90 percent of the applications are rejected and the more detailed background research - it would appear that there is a third hurdle. More and more asylum seekers fail to even deliver their file to the relevant institutions, because they are headed off by the security services or the gendarmerie at the border".
According to Lozie at least part of the blame for this new phenomenon must be put at the door of Belgium's new laws on "carrier liability" through which transport companies are liable to be fined if they carry passengers without valid travel documents, laws which are now widespread throughout the EU.
De Morgen 6.5.95