I have to remember that I was a refugee twice.
The second time I forget most of the time. I was a teenager then. “Leave the country, take early retirement or die,” General Ershad, the chief martial law administrator, told my father – who was known as an honest man and headed a civil service department while the military dictatorship was corruptly trying to grab aid money. The result was that we left Bangladesh. Honesty was not exactly conducive to life expectancy in those days.
The first time was when I was much younger, during the civil war that led to the creation of Bangladesh, which seceded from Pakistan. My father was imprisoned as a political prisoner and the rest of the immediate family fled the country here to the UK, my mother’s homeland. Two of my uncles, Billal and Dullal, were not lucky enough to escape and did not survive. My childhood memory of them is their delight in their nephews, my older brother and me, and that is how I remember them.
I know that I have been shaped by the experiences of my childhood and growing up in Pakistan and Bangladesh. I easily gloss over the darker moments of civil war, military coups and the inhumanity we humans inflict on one another.
The UK in the late 70s and 80s was not like today. Racism, riots and policing were all different. We have made so much progress as a society since then. We have laws to protect our minority communities. The Macpherson report into policing brought the concept of institutionalised racism to the forefront. When you see the riots today, you see that we don’t have a police and justice system that is with us or against us, but with our communities. When I see people fighting racism, protecting those who are being attacked and standing in the way of harm to protect others, it makes me proud to be British.
When people ask me what we should be doing at Big Issue Invest to respond, my answer is simple. We respond before something happens. Over two-thirds of our investments go to the least supported parts of the country. We have invested in communities to find entrepreneurial ways to tackle poverty, putting £43 million of investor money to good use in more than 140 investments.
