User:MauraWen/Sandbox Roza Salih

Hi Maura, 
Per conversation on my talkpage here, below is the article which was deleted because of notability issues. You can work on it here, in your sandbox, as a starting point for creating a brand new article. --Rosiestep (talk) 18:42, 11 February 2018 (UTC)

Roza Salih (born 25 May 1989) came to the UK at the age of 12 years old as a refugee. She is well known as one of the Glasgow Girls who highlighted the poor treatment of failed asylum seekers and raised awareness of Dawn Raids in 2005 in response to the detention of one of their friends, Agnesa Murselaj. Publicity grew as the girls challenged the First Minister Jack McConnell then on the matter and publicly voiced their concerns as more children at their school were being dawn raided, detained and deported.

Early life

Roza Salih was born in Kurdistan (south of Kurdistan/North of Iraq) in the town of Sulaymaniyah. She is the daughter of Saleem Salih and grew up in Glasgow with her family, including her sister, Raz Salih, and her mother, Tania Kareem. In 2002 she went to the UK just under two years before the Iraq War and the regime of Saddam Hussein was still in power. Under Hussain's Ba'athist regime the Kurdish people had long been the target of oppression and ethnic cleansing but for Roza's family there was a special danger as they (particularly her father) were vocal political activists. Tragically two of Roza's uncles and her grandfather were executed by the regime and a third uncle was tortured in Abu Ghraib prison.

Career

Roza Salih went to Drumchapel High School in Glasgow. She graduated from the University of Strathclyde with a BA Honours Degree in Law and Politics in 2013. In 2013, She stood for the election at University of Strathclyde Students' Association and was elected as Vice President Diversity and Advocacy. As one of her campaigns, Salih successfully won three scholarships to the University of Strathclyde for asylum seekers to enter into higher education in 2014. In 2015 University of Strathclyde Students' Association won the Diversity Award at NUS Scotland Awards.

The Glasgow Girls became a public campaign and obtained cross-party support on the issue. Salih and her friends decided to campaign for Agnesa's release and an end to detention and dawn raids. In the beginning, their campaign was nothing more than collecting signatures from their fellow pupils, but from there they went out into the local community and eventually spoke to politicians and journalists.

Salih with the two other Glasgow Girls, Ewelina Siwak and Jennifer McCarron, won and accepted the Scottish Campaign of the Year Award in 2005 at the annual Scottish politician of the year ceremony for their hard work as a group; however, it did not stop them from demanding to know just what had happened to the "protocol" that Jack McConnell had promised to obtain from the Home Office that social services, education services, and the Immigration police would be consulted before any decision was made on the removal of a family.

Two documentaries have been made by the BBC about their campaign, one of which won the Nations and Regions Award in the Amnesty International UK Media Awards.

In 2013 the National Theatre of Scotland produced a modern musical at the Citizens Theatre in Glasgow depicting the life of the Glasgow Girls. The musical then had a run at Stratford East Theatre in London.

The story of the Glasgow Girls has been adapted for TV and aired on BBC Three on 15 July 2014. Now, The Glasgow Girls is used by the BBC - Learning: for Schools.

References

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