attacks
Sarah Parker
A storm of protests has
forced the Home Office to
back off their intended
plans to begin forced deportations of Kurds to
Northern Iraq/Southern
Kurdistan. The first
planned flight to Erbil on
Sunday 28 August, a bank holiday weekend, Was unable to go ahead.
Countrywide demonstrations, by Iraqi Kurds and refugee Broups: from Plymouth to Nottingham to London were supported by an unusual call to action from the Refugee Council. The Kurdish parties that are part of the Iraqi government, the KDP and PUK, under strong pressure from public opinion in Kurdistan, also lobbied the British government. There was coverage unusually sympathetic to the asylum seekers in the British media and plus repeated statements from UNHCR that no part of Iraq is safe. All of this forced the Home Office to stay their hand.
It is not known when the Home Office will now try to send the first flight, so the Iraqi Kurdish community and anti-deportation campaigners remain on alert.
38 Iraqi Kurds remain in detention, out of an original total of maybe 300 arrested, mostly when signing at police stations, during the last three weeks.
Having been defeated by the Zimbabweans, the Home Office will be very determined to succeed in due course with the Iraqi Kurds.
The stakes are high, both for the individuals who face imminent deportation, and for the Kurdish population in Europe. Many European governments announced some time ago that they would expel as many Iraqi Kurds as possible. If the British start large scale forced returns, it will be a green light from Sweden to Holland to Italy, causing immense suffering to thousands of people.
The Home Office affects to believe that Erbil is safe, but implementation of specific US plans to control and remould the Middle East, an element of which of course involves suppressing and controlling the Kurdish national struggle.
Finally as part of the overall "war on terror" is to criminalise and incapacitate suspect (ie potentially rebellious) communities, if necessary sending them ILO places where they can be dealt with more summarily than is possible in Europe.
Increasing numbers of Turkish Kurds are already being returned to Turkey from Europe, including Britain.
A special report on asylum in Wednesday 24 August's Guardian quoted Home Office sources as saying:
"The decision to deport was taken in February 2004 but two new factors have stiffened the government's resolve: a reassessment of immigration priorities after the London tube bombings and the first flight this month into Irbil of those returning voluntarily."
This latter reference is completely disingenuous. The flight, organised by the International Organisation of Migration voluntary flight was publicised by them as transparent manoeuvre to prepare the ground for forced removals. There is no guarantee that the flights will continue to be safe, and in any case some asylum and immigration rights our bond to ruden TAMIL rig
righ lend people have been returning by various means for some time.
In the aftermath of the London bombings as factor, we need to step up the argument that the implication that asylum seekers per se pose a terrorist threat has no basis in fact, and only serves to further stigmatise dark-skinned/ Muslim
Ending the occupation of Iraq would do a great deal more to make London safe than devoting considerable state resources into harassing and deporting large numbers of vulnerable asylum seekers.
It is one of the bitter ironies of the situation that many of those being slandered by the Home Office in this way and threatened with deportation actually fled Kurdistan in the first place because they had fallen foul of Islamic groups of just the sort that the British government claims to be trying to combat.
The Home Office has also indicated that it will no longer allow new cases of section 4 hard case support and that from now it will be writing to 50 Iraqi Kurds per week demanding that they sign a letter agreeing to return "voluntarily" to Iraq on pain of losing their current hard case support (ie what they get because they have already been deprived of normal benefit).