Afghan stowaways have right to care and support

The country was rightly shocked and troubled by the recent arrival of 35 Afghan Sikhs, discovered in a shipping container at Tilbury docks. One of them is dead. Thirteen of them are children, the youngest a baby. The oldest is a man in his 70s. The Sikh community of South Essex rose to address the challenge, the horrors faced and the suffering endured by its brothers and sisters, as they were found, processed, taken to hospital and then to a holding facility. The families have claimed asylum in the UK. Their wellbeing, health and likely fate if their claims were to fail remain central concerns.

The nation has apparently decided that these people were the victims of trafficking. Two lorry drivers have been arrested, taken to court and are now remanded for their part. The press has moved on, the cameras have left the docks and the hospital car parks. No doubt there will be more to say later.

These are the facts. But we need more than the cold hard facts, surely. However these families are dealt with over time, we need to consider what we cannot imagine: what drove these people to take the extraordinary step of leaving their homes and heading for who knew what, who knew where.

Here are some blunt facts before we start to take hardened stances about what should happen next.

The Sikh community in Afghanistan has dwindled to less than 3,000. It has been actively persecuted to the verge of extinction over many years, and the persecution has extended to its children, however much work has been done by arms-bearing and peacekeeping troops drawn from nations across the globe. Nations that are signatory states to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, which guarantees the child's right to be kept safe from abuse, harm, neglect, violence and religious or other prejudice.

Singled out

Afghan Sikhs have long been known to their non-Sikh neighbours, and not only because of the distinctive cultural and faith-based artefacts of dress and personal decoration they adopt. Under former Taliban rule, they were made to wear yellow armbands, just as in some European nations that are now our allies, in darker periods of our history different groups were singled out so their humiliation could be complete.

Afghan Sikhs have been forbidden from practising their faith's rites of passage. They have been scared, threatened and held to ransom by racketeers, and hounded from where they live, work and worship. This community has lived in fear in plain sight of all the Western agencies involved in this war-torn, riven nation.

These 35 members of that community fled. If their stories match those of others who flee, they would have paid somebody a lot of money they could ill afford to be brought out of their country and take a frightening journey that ended so awfully on Tilbury docks. Whether they fled because somebody made them pay to come here "for a better life" when in fact they were to be forced into domestic, agrarian or sexual slavery - which is what trafficking is - we do not yet know, and we should not speculate or jump to conclusions. That a third of them were children is the concern I share with readers of this column.

Whatever the rights and wrongs, two lorry drivers from the UK seem to have been knowingly involved and there will be legal proceedings. We owe these children what we would expect were our lives to be so threatened and we had to flee: dignity, safety, assurance, orientation, care and support, until the dust settles and we know what will happen next. You would expect that if you ran in the clothes you stand up in now and landed in a foreign country with one of your friends dead alongside you and all of you sick, scared and grieving for your loss. So would I. And so should they.

Maggie Atkinson is children's commissioner for England