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Onward,
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November
2, 2006
Beatings and Sugar Plums
New
Labor's War on the Kurds
By STUART CROSWAITHE
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 Arbil in 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 Sulaymaniya.
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 the 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.
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 beforesummer
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.
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
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,
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
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