A REFUGEE who fled Egypt against the threat of organ-harvesting kidnappers has said riots across England gave him “flashbacks” to the horrors he left behind in Africa.
Glasgow University academic Hyab Yohannes, 37, said far-right rioters across England were spreading “terror” as he accused the political establishment of emboldening them with policies including the now-abandoned Rwanda deportation scheme and the “hostile environment”.
Yohannes, who is originally from Eritrea, said successive governments had created an environment where “any person who feels like it can hunt refugees in the streets”.
He claimed asylum in the UK in 2015 after a four-year ordeal which saw him flee his home country for a refugee camp in Khartoum, Sudan from which he was kidnapped and taken to Egypt.
In North Africa, he feared he would be trafficked to the Sinai desert, where refugees were taken by smugglers who demanded ransoms, raped and even harvested organs from their captives.
“They wanted to take me to Sinai but I managed to escape,” said Yohannes (above).
“The desert itself was a torture camp, they can just put you there and leave.
"You can’t leave, you can’t go anywhere because it’s just desert, you’re going to die somewhere.”
But in a devastating statement, Yohannes said the events of the past week have recalled the feeling of being “hunted” by traffickers and gangsters.
He said that while the unrest which has gripped parts of England since the killing of three young girls in Southport, Merseyside late last month has so far failed to reach Scotland, it has upended the feeling of safety he has enjoyed in the UK.
Yohannes, who in 2021 completed a PhD at Glasgow University where he is now a researcher, laid the blame for the riots at the door of the government and politicians.
He said: “When you’re creating a hostile environment for human beings; what does it mean, how human are these people, for you?”
And he blasted the media, which he said was “parroting” anti-migrant rhetoric from the state, helping to create “the environment where we are now”.
Yohannes said: “The things that are happening here are what the traffickers are doing in Cairo, in Sudan, in Ethiopia, in Libya, that’s what traffickers do, they just hunt people down, terror within the communities and abduct or kidnap or whatever they can.”
He now lives in Hyndland, Glasgow with his wife and baby daughter and says it is “the best place for me since I left Eritrea”.
“There are so many people who are really good, so many people who care a lot about other people and so many people who don’t even notice that you are different, that you are somebody from outside of this place,” said Yohannes.
He praised scenes on Wednesday night which saw massive anti-racist counter-protests hit the streets of England, averting further riots.
They showed the “different side of living in places like the UK, where the majority are very good people”, said Yohannes.
