see url:
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2021/7/11/anwar-ditta-the-mother-who-took-on-the-uk-government-and-won
see full article...A tough story with a happy ending about a Muslim
mother's struggle to be re-united with her children who were stuck in
Pakistan, and the procrastination and prevarication games played by the
racist UK Home Office to delay and prevent her and her family from being
brought together again in the UK...as was her right...
Quote<<<
A photograph from 1982 shows the legendary late Labour MP, Tony Benn,
marching in Trafalgar Square alongside the Namibian revolutionary, Sam
Nujoma, the South African freedom fighter Oliver Tambo and a sea of male
trade unionists holding banners denouncing apartheid and offering
solidarity to the people of Namibia and South Africa. In the middle of
this image stands a striking, yet petite lady: Anwar Ditta.
Today, Anwar, 67, is an unassuming housewife of Pakistani heritage who
resides in Rochdale, Greater Manchester. But, between 1975 and 1982, she
found herself at the centre of an anti-racist movement because of her
fearless fight against Britain’s Home Office which had separated her
from her three children in Pakistan.
Anwar’s story came to define an era of Asian anti-racist resistance, due
to the explicit institutional racism it exposed within the British
government. Her fight against the country’s racist immigration laws was
by no means unprecedented. But what separated Anwar’s case from the many
others like it was the rainbow coalition of support she managed to
garner and her ability to mobilise people both nationally and
internationally in her defence.
Her experience exposes Britain’s deeply shameful history of racism and
the traumatic consequences many faced as a result of its prejudicial
institutions.
Born in Birmingham, the UK’s second-largest city, in 1953, Anwar’s early
years were mainly spent in Rochdale, where she lived with her younger
sister, Hamida, and her parents.
Anwar’s mother, Bilquis Begum, and her father, Allah Ditta, were from
Pakistan, born there while the nation was under British colonial rule.
Spurred by curiosity, her father, who was born in 1921, left his
teaching job in Pakistan and moved to the UK in the 1950s. When he
arrived, he was employed as a bus conductor and foreman in a crystal
factory while his wife, who moved to Britain a few years later, stayed
at home with their children.
>>>End of Quote
