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01st October 2006

Glasgow Girls renew TV battle against dawn raids

The Glasgow teenagers who waged a high-profile campaign against "dawn raids" by the immigration authorities are making and starring in a new BBC documentary.

The group of girls from Drumchapel High School began their battle for asylum seekers’ rights when a fellow pupil, Agnesa Murselaj, and her family were detained by immigration officials during a dawn raid.

Their successful campaign to prevent the family being deported to Kosovo after their asylum applications failed was the subject of an award-winning BBC film shown in August 2005, Tales From The Edge: The Glasgow Girls.

But when the teenagers, now widely known as the Glasgow Girls, became involved just a month later in the controversial removal of the Vucaj family, the BBC approached them to make a second film. This time, however, the documentary will be composed of video diaries kept by the girls themselves.

Lindsay Hill, the BBC producer behind both films, said: "The first film was broadcast on BBC Scotland in the Tales From The Edge series on August 31, 2005. And in the following September the children’s commissioner for Scotland, Professor Kathleen Marshall, talked on all the media of the need to make a big public outcry about the scandal of dawn raids and the brutal treatment of asylum seekers and their children.

"Shortly after that, the Vucaj family were taken. And I realised I had to go on and cover that with the camera and keep on filming. So immediately after the first broadcast it all started off again."

Marshall said the new film will show how the girls developed from determined teenagers into seasoned campaigners.

"The second film is about the year in which they became politically aware human rights campaigners. It is an ‘observational documentary’ using fly-on-the-wall methods. It records what actually happens in the girls’ lives."

The teenagers – Amal Azzudin from Somalia, Kosovan Roma Agnesa Murselaj, Roza Salih from Kurdistan, Polish Roma Ewelina Siwak and Scots Emma Clifford, Jennifer McCarron and Toni Henderson – have become increasingly influential voices. Their intervention in the Vucaj case led to a national debate on the ethics of dawn raids.

Meanwhile, last December they helped win a reprieve for two asylum-seeker families facing deportation, the Gorbachovas from Belarus and the Hakobians from Armenia.

They have now won a clutch of awards for their appeals, including Best Public Campaign at The Herald Diageo Politician of the Year Awards last December.

They were also invited to the Scottish parliament, where they met the first minister and secured an agreement not to deport asylum-seeker families during examination times.

Glasgow Girl Amal Azzudin said she believed the second film would be more revealing than the first. "I think that the second film is going to be even better than the first, because it is going to open the eyes of the audience even more, as there are a lot of campaigns going to be in it, like when we went to the parliament and what happened since we lost the Vucaj family. It is going to educate people to what is going on in Scotland. I work with a lot of people who don’t know what’s going on, even people in college don’t know."

Roza Salih added: "In the film we speak about our lives and our problems. We have two cameras and we share them between us.

"For one year we have been doing this [video diary] and then we are taking it to our journalist and she is editing it with us and doing the voice-overs."

Rosemary Burnett, director of Amnesty International Scotland, said the girls showed that motivated young people can effect real change.

"The Glasgow Girls’ campaigns raised the issue of the devastating eff ects of dawn raids on their classmates and on themselves. This led to more political movement than had been achieved by human rights NGOs and refugee organisations.

"We look forward to seeing the second film and hope it will inspire other young people to take action," she said.

The documentary is due to be broadcast at the start of November on BBC2.

Source: The Sunday Herald