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Beatings and Sugar Plums: New Labour's War
on the Kurds
1.11.2006
By Stuart Crosthwaite - Contribution |
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Early morning on
September 5th security guards burst into the
sleeping quarters of Colnbrook detention centre in
west London. The guards had come to take thirty two
Iraqi Kurdish men away. Barefoot, handcuffed, with
the guards swearing at them, the thirty two were
taken to RAF Brize Norton. Their threatened forced
deportation to Erbil in Kurdistan (northern Iraq)
was imminent. In response, one man slit his throat
and up to fourteen others took overdoses or cut
themselves in a desperate attempt to avoid
"removal". One eye witness described the scene at
the holding area at the airport as "carnage with
blood on the walls".(1) The Kurds knew the danger of
returning to Iraq. They had fled the country years
before because of that danger.
The UK Home Office is alone in their view that
northern Iraq is safe for Kurds to be forced back
to. Amnesty International, the Refugee Council, and
even the UK Foreign Office all stress the lethal
danger to those entering northern Iraq. (2) But if
northern Iraq, like the rest of the country, isn't
safe; if Saddam's weapons of mass destruction never
existed, then why was the war on Iraq waged?
In a speech entitled "A War Not of Conquest But of
Liberation", delivered in March 2003, Prime Minister
Blair laid out Labour's reasons for its planned war
on Iraq. "Our objective is to protect the people in
the Kurdish autonomous zone" and, he added, "to
secure the northern oilfields" (of northern
Iraq/Kurdistan) (3). The latter was certainly true.
This article aims to show that the first stated
objective - protecting the Kurds - was a calculated
lie. That Britain has in fact waged war on the Kurds
over eighty years; that this war has followed the
Kurds from their homeland to the streets and
detention centres of this country.
The Kurds are the biggest stateless ethnic group in
the world. (4) This fact is not unconnected to their
repeated abuse and manipulation by the imperial
powers and their proxies. Britain's record is
particularly shameful. Winston Churchill set the
standard in 1919 when he told the War Office
(referring to the Kurds and Afghans): "I do not
understand this squeamishness about the use of gas.
I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas
against uncivilised tribes". (5) Six years later the
RAF did just that against the Kurdish town of
Sulaimaniyah. In 1988 Saddam Hussein took
Churchill's advice and killed five thousand Kurds at
Halabja using poison gas supplied with the knowledge
of the West.
After the first Gulf War in 1991, the UK joined the
US in encouraging a Kurdish uprising against Saddam
Hussein. After one month, Kurdish fighters and
civilians were fleeing Saddam's (western-supplied)
tanks, artillery and helicopter gunships. Thousands
of peshmerga (militia fighters) and civilians were
killed, hoping for a western military intervention
that never came. Over one and a half million people
were made refugees. Most Kurdish refugees tried to
escape to Iran or Turkey. Over one thousand people
died each day as they crowded at the borders,
abandoned by their self-appointed "protectors" in
the West.(6).
In the following decade, many abandoned their lives
in Iraq in an attempt to reach the apparent safety
of Europe. No surprise then, that the UK's Iraqi
Kurdish population rose from a few thousand in the
early 1990's to over 30,000 in 2006. (7) They were
trying to escape from an Iraqi state that terrorised
them because they were Kurdish; from a civil war
between the two main Kurdish political parties
during the 1990's; from ethnic tensions deliberately
fostered by the Iraqi state and, particularly for
Kurdish communists, from repression by Islamic
groups.
It wasn't the opportunity to claim UK state benefits
that brought them to this country. As one Iraqi
Kurdish man explained at a public meeting in
Sheffield in September 2005: "I am a solicitor in
Iraq, Kurdistan is a rich country. I didn't come
here for a £35 a week food voucher." Nor did Kurdish
engineers and scientists arrive with the hope of
serving kebabs or working in a car wash. It was the
chance to live safely, to find asylum in the UK -
the country that had claimed to protect them. Most
hoped to return soon to northern Iraq, to their
families, to their oil-rich and culturally rich
homeland. But northern Iraq, like the rest of the
country was, of course, never made safe by the
West's war and occupation. These refugees were to
find that the cynical manipulation that led to them
fleeing their homes in Iraq was echoed by their
treatment in the UK.
"Protecting the Kurds": Forced Deportation #1
The UK Government is alone in western Europe in
carrying out mass forced deportations of Iraqi
Kurds. Their first attempt was in November 2005. On
that occasion, successful legal challenges limited
the number to twenty from an original intention to
deport seventy. (8) Then Home Secretary Charles
Clarke was forced to admit to a "regrettable
mistake" when one man was deported in error after he
had been denied access to legal representation. (9)
This case prompted High Court Judge Justice Collins
to criticise Government policy: "Frankly, the court
has got a little fed up with how the Home Office is
putting these removals into practice. It is not good
enough." (10)
"Protecting the Kurds": Forced Deportation #2
Judge Justice Collins would have, doubtless, been
rather peeved with Home Secretary John Reid's
handling of the second forced deportation in
September 2006. In an unprecedented move, Reid
warned the duty High Court Judge that the Home
Office would ignore any last-minute applications for
a judicial review of individual cases which would
defer or prevent deportation.(11) Despite the huge
difficulties facing potential deportees in obtaining
injunctions to stop their deportation, six of them
applied for an injunction, with the support of the
Refugee Legal Centre. Of the six applications, five
injunctions were granted, halting their immediate
deportation.
The National Audit Office estimates the cost of each
deportation at £11,000. The Home Office was
determined to get its money's worth, despite legal
niceties. Their response to the successful
injunctions was simple: select another five from the
pool of around seventy who they had captured and
served deportation notices on during previous weeks.
This gruesome version of an airline "stand-by"
system adds weight to the claim that the Home Office
has scant regard for an individual's circumstances
in its pursuit of quota-fulfilment.
The forced deportation of September 5th 2006 is
significant not just because of its calculated
brutality and its attack on the legal rights of
detained asylum seekers. It marks a shift in the
tactics of the Home Office towards Iraqi Kurdish
asylum seekers in the UK.
"Protecting the Kurds": Blackmail
In February 2004 the UK Home Office announced its
intention to deport "thousands" of Iraqi Kurdish
asylum seekers. The deportations were to begin in
April that year at a rate of thirty per week. Even
the Home Office could not claim that Iraq was safe
to return to - or that there was a safe route of
return - until August 2005. (12) Until then their
policy was to encourage voluntary return to northern
Iraq, organised by the International Organisation
for Migration (IOM). There were few takers amongst
Iraqi Kurds in the UK.
From August 2005 letters were sent to all traceable
Iraqi Kurdish asylum seekers in the UK. The Home
Office used these letters to claim that there was
now a "safe route of return" to northern Iraq.
Casual observers, not directly affected by events in
northern Iraq, could have been forgiven for
accepting this claim made by the UK Government.
However, for Iraqi Kurds threatened with forced
"removal" the claim that there was "a safe route of
return" was an incredible one. It was not lost on
them that the "safe route" included Highway 10 from
Jordan to Iraq, a road so hazardous that the
occupying US and UK military forces hesitated to use
it. Arbil airport in northern Iraq was to be the
destination for direct flights carrying those
returning to Iraq. In 2005 neither UK nor US
military aircraft were prepared to land there, such
was the danger.
These Home Office letters stipulated a new condition
for the receipt of "Section 4" support. Named after
a section of the 1999 Asylum and Nationality Act,
Section 4 support consists of a £35 per week food
voucher and rent paid on accommodation provided
through the National Asylum Support Service (NASS).
(13) The ultimatum from the Home Office stated that
unless Section 4 recipients agreed "voluntarily" to
return to "safe" Iraq they would "be required to
leave your accommodation and will not be entitled to
any other form of support". (14)
This blackmail sparked nationwide protest from
refugee support organisations and from Iraqi Kurds
themselves. One man, Naseh Ghafor in Sheffield,
sewed his lips up and refused food for over forty
days stating, "I would rather die here than go back
and get killed in my own country" (15).
"Protecting the Kurds": Kidnapping
Those Kurds who agreed to return voluntarily to Iraq
lost any legal right to contest their deportation.
They also became immediately traceable to the
authorities through the practice of monthly signing
at reporting centres. Such centres are usually at
local police stations. From late 2005 it became
increasingly common for those entering reporting
stations never to leave them: except in an
Immigration Service van on the way to a detention
centre. This practice, had it occurred in Iraq,
would have been labelled "kidnapping" by the UK
Government. One of the men deported in November
2005, Karwan, was kidnapped in this way when he
reported to Dallas Court in Bolton for a Home Office
"interview".
"Protecting the Kurds": Creating Destitution
Many Kurds refused to sign the Home Office letter
which bound them to return to northern Iraq.
Destitution became widespread. In Leeds around 250
Iraqi Kurds lost their homes and all state support
between September-December 2005. In Sheffield, about
200 Kurds were forced onto the street with
nothing.(16) These "failed" asylum seekers do not
have the right to work legally, leading to a boom
for employers wanting a desperate workforce prepared
to work for a pittance. From summer 2006 there has
also been an increase in the scale of Immigration
Service raids on those forced to work illegally.
(17) All routes, except that of returning to lethal
danger in Iraq, are being closed.
"Protecting the Kurds": Bribery
"The Kurd has the mind of a schoolboy...He requires
a beating one day and a sugar plum the next." So
wrote Major WR Hay, a political officer in the
British army, stationed in Arbil, northern Iraq in
1919. (18) Eighty six years later, the UK Government
supplemented the beatings of deportation, kidnapping
and destitution with a £500 sugar plum. The
Voluntary Assisted Return and Reintegration
Programme (VARRP) was extended from June to December
2006. Operated by the IOM, the scheme offered
voluntary returnees to Iraq a £500 cash "relocation"
grant and a further £2500 conditional on strict
"reintegration" criteria.(19) Immigration and
Nationality Directorate figures show that only 1,020
Iraqi Kurds in the UK took up this offer in the
whole period from June 2004 - December 2005. (20)
The latest forced deportation of September 2006 is
surely aimed (along with the weapon of destitution)
at increasing the number of "voluntary" returns. I
met Kawa (not his real name), a local Kurdish man,
in the Sheffield restaurant where he worked
illegally, and asked him why he planned to return to
Iraq with VARRP. Kawa was working twelve hour shifts
for £1.50 an hour and sleeping on friend's floors at
night. He explained: "If I go back I might die, but
here I die every day." He also recounted the story
of a man who had previously returned to Iraq with
VARRP. After the plane landed at Arbil airport this
man was robbed of his £500 (in $US) by a taxi
driver. He knew other men who had stepped off then
plane at Arbil and were immediately taken into
detention by the security forces of the Kurdish
Democratic Party (KDP). (21)
"Protecting the Kurds": Corruption and
Collaboration
The establishment of the Kurdish Regional Government
(KRG), was cited by the UK Government as a
vindication of their war on - and occupation of -
Iraq. However, the human rights abuses and
corruption of the KRG have been well documented.(22)
Ahmed (not his real name), from Sheffield's Kurdish
community, described the KRG: "That dictatorship -
it's worse than Saddam Hussein's." Why, he asked,
did the leadership of the KDP need to travel around
Kurdistan in 200-car convoys for its own protection?
(23)
The two main Kurdish parties, the KDP and Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan (PUK) have long collaborated with
Western governments (and with Saddam Hussein at
times) in their desperate attempts to achieve
Kurdish statehood, or any form of regional or
national autonomy.
Since 2005 there have been regular meetings between
senior civil servants representing the UK Home
Office, Iraqi Embassy officials, representatives
from Iraqi Kurdish community organisations and KRG
officials, including members of the KDP and PUK.
Publicly both KDP and PUK have opposed forced
deportations of Iraqi Kurds from the UK to Iraq.
(24) However, at a meeting in March 2006, KDP
representatives urged the UK Home Office to continue
and to increase deportations of Iraqi Kurds from the
UK. Iraqi Embassy officials at the meeting supported
this position. (25) In northern Iraq young Kurds are
fleeing KRG persecution, corruption and poverty at a
rate of 2000 per week. (26) This leaves the area
short of labour and potential recruits to the armed
and security forces of the KRG and its main
constituent parts - KDP and PUK.
The return of political opponents, through forced
deportation, from the UK to northern Iraq also gives
the KDP and PUK the chance to settle political
scores. These two parties, now in an uneasy
governmental alliance, spent much of the 1990's
embroiled in a civil war between themselves and
against communist and Islamic Kurdish organisations.
Sherzad Ahmed, an Iraqi Kurd demonstrating against
the September deportation, told a reporter: "I don't
understand how anyone could think I will be safe if
I'm sent back." He explained that his wife had been
murdered and his family targeted for their communist
sympathies and opposition to the KDP and PUK.(27)
The KDP has not condemned the September 5th forced
deportation of thirty two Iraqi Kurds from the UK.
With the cooperation of at least one of the two main
Kurdish political parties, all the links in the
chain of the deportation process have been fastened:
an Iraqi Kurdish asylum seeker signs at a reporting
centre each month to entitle him/her to Section 4
support. There they can be seized and held by
police. Immigration officials can then take them to
a detention centre. They are then served deportation
notices en masse, denied access to legal support and
taken (usually at night) to an airport. When the
plane flies to northern Iraq, its destination is
Arbil - controlled by the KDP.
"Protecting the Kurds": Abandonment
What happens to people after they get deported to
northern Iraq?
According to European Council for Refugees and
Exiles (ECRE) guidelines "member states should
implement an effective system for monitoring forced
returns." (28) Questions to Home Secretary John
Reid's office have yielded replies explaining that
the UK Government has put no such monitoring system
in place for northern Iraq (or indeed for anywhere
else). Nor, it seems, does it have any plans to do
so. Reports about those forcibly deported have come
only from the International Federation of Iraqi
Refugees and phone contact between individuals in
the UK and their fellow Kurds back in northern Iraq.
Recent reports suggest that the September 5th forced
deportation was not the last: at least twenty two
more Iraqi Kurds were seized through dawn raids and
kidnapping at reporting centres in September. There
were at least two workplace raids by immigration
officials in Sheffield during October. Many of those
held are now in detention centres. We can now expect
beatings without sugar plums.
The Tony Blair regime is in its final months. Home
Secretary John Reid is positioning himself to
continue Blair's work. The same Labour Government
that launched a war in 2003 against Iraq to "protect
the Kurds" has now declared another war: on Iraqi
Kurdish asylum seekers in this country.
Notes:
1. The Sun Online, "32 Iraqis are booted out of UK",
7/9/06
2. Amnesty International, "Forcible return to Iraq
would be unlawful". www.amnesty.org/library/Index/ENGEUR
450342005 Refugee Council, "Forced removal of Iraqis
expected to begin today". www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/news/press/2006/September/20060905.htm
UK Foreign Office, "We advise against all but
essential travel to the north of
Iraq".www.fco.gov.uk
3. "A War Not of Conquest but of Liberation",
24/3/03
www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page3337.asp
4. Kurdish statelessness makes exact figures
impossible. A reasonable estimate seems to be 30
million. See D McDowall, "The Kurds: A Nation
Denied".
5. War Office minute of 12/5/1919, quoted in Martin
Gilbert, "Winston Churchill" companion Volume 4,
part 1.
6. Observer, 14/4/91.
7. Precise figures are not available: official
figures do not recognise Kurds as a nationality. The
quoted figures are arrived at through use of
Immigration and Nationality Directorate (IND)
statistics for asylum applications from Iraq along
with estimates from the Refugee Council on the
number of Kurds in the UK and the proportion of
those Kurds who are from Iraq. See the Refugee
Council's "Asylum by Numbers 1985-2000" and IND
website. See also European Council on Refugees and
Exiles (ECRE) report. ECRE gives numbers of Iraqis
(not solely Iraqi Kurds) seeking asylum in the UK as
increasing from "about 4,200 in 1989" to "over
41,200 in 2001". www.ecre.org/publications/gmfreport.pdf
8. Refugee Council, "Response to the Forced Removal
of 15 Iraqis", 20/11/05
9. Daily Telegraph, "Clarke to bring back wrongly
deported Kurd", 20/12/05
10. Independent Online, "Search for Kurdish refugee
deported to Iraq by mistake", 20/12/05
11. Guardian Society Online, "Reid warns judges not
to block Iraqi's deportation", 5/9/06
12. Refugee Council briefing, "Iraq-return and
Section 4 support", December 2005 It was also
difficult for the UK Government to carry out their
policy because before summer 2005 Kurdish members of
the interim Iraqi Government were vocal in their
opposition to forced deportations from the UK to
northern Iraq.
13. The NASS vouchers (set at two-thirds the rate of
UK subsistence benefit levels) can only be used at
certain supermarkets and no change is given.
14. Home Office letter, undated. Copy held by
author.
15. Personal communication to author, July 2005
16. Leeds Today, "250 Iraqis forced on to the
streets", 14/12/05 and estimates made by Sheffield
Kurdish Community Centre.
17. See Committee to Stop Deportations to Iraq (CSDIraq),
www.csdiraq.com/archives/000037.html
18. FO 371/5068, "Note on Rawanduz", 26/12/1919.
Quoted in D McDowall: "A Modern History of the
Kurds".
19. European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE),
"Guidelines on the treatment of Iraqi asylum seekers
and refugees in Europe", PP1/03/2006/EXT/SH, March
2006
20. IND figures quoted on CSDIraq website,
www.csdiraq.com/archives/000011.html
21. Personal communication to author, January 2006
Ominously, all returnees are required to sign a
waiver stating, "I acknowledge that IOM has no
responsibility for me or my dependents once I return
to Iraqi territory and I hereby release IOM from any
liability in this respect." See Refugee Council
briefing, Iraq-return and Section 4 support, October
2005.
22. See, for example, Amnesty International's view
quoted in The Guardian, "Home Office makes sure
asylum flight is full", 6/9/06. Also, ECRE March
2006 report and CSDIraq website, www.csdiraq.com/archives/000043.html
& 000054.html & 000039.html
23. Personal communication to author, September 2006
24. For example, Kurdmedia, "Barzani slams Britain
for returning Kurds to war-torn country", 20/8/05,
www.kurdmedia.com/news.asp?id=7534
25. Personal communication to author, March 2006.
26. CSDIraq website, www.csdiraq.com.archives/000043.html
27. Quoted in Independent Online, "Iraq: Deported
refugees fearful of persecution on their return",
8/9/06.
28. ECRE guidelines,
www.ecre.org/positions/returns.shtml#MONITOR Also,
"All returns should be safe, dignified and
sustainable", www.ecre.org/positions/comretdir.pdf
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