GO HOME AND DIE, OR STAY AND STARVE

Go home and die, or stay here and starve: that’s essentially the message which the British government is now sending to Iraqi refugees.

From yesterday’s Guardian:

“More than 1,400 rejected Iraqi asylum seekers are to be told they must go home or face destitution in Britain as the government considers Iraq safe enough to return them, according to leaked Home Office correspondence seen by the Guardian.

“The Iraqis involved are to be told that unless they sign up for a voluntary return programme to Iraq within three weeks, they face being made homeless and losing state support. They will also be asked to sign a waiver agreeing the government will take no responsibility for what happens to them or their families once they return to Iraqi territory.”

The Guardian goes on to point out that this decision – from the Home Secretary Jacqui Smith, via her callous and indifferent bureaucratic underlings at the new Borders and Immigration Agency (BIA) – comes after more than 78 people have been killed in incidents across Iraq since last Sunday.

Iraq is not – I repeat, not! – a safe country in any shape or form. Violence continues to plague the north, south and centre of the nation. Over the past week, there have been shootings, car bombings and suicide bombings in all corners of that country – Baghdad, Basra, Diyala, Hadita, Mosul, Tikrit, Samarra, Kirkuk. This blog has, on previous occasions, drawn attention to the 650,000-plus death toll there, as well as the recent post-surge spike in civilian deaths. And if, by now, you still don’t trust ‘Radical Opinions’ or ‘The Radical’ (i.e. me!), then simply turn your attention to the Foreign Office website, where Iraq is listed s one of the countries that the British government officially advises its citizens to avoid all travel to several parts of. Here is the stark statement from the FCO summary on travel to Iraq:

“The security situation in Iraq remains highly dangerous with a continuing high threat of terrorism throughout Iraq, violence and kidnapping…”

So we have an absurd and amoral situation in which the Home Office is forcing Iraqi asylum-seekers to go back to Iraq, which it claims is now safe, while the Foreign Office warns us that Iraq is unsafe and should be avoided. I am not sure what is worse: the mendacity of Home Office bureaucrats who choose to ignore the Foreign Office travel advice when it comes to making decisions on whether or not a country (in this case, Iraq) is safe, or a British government as a whole which seems to worry deeply about the lives of its own citizens while abroad, but chooses to forcibly send foreign refugees (Iraqis) back home to their own deaths. And, if you think I am exaggerating here, simply ask the family of Solyman Rashed. After spending fifteen months, penniless and impoverished in a UK detention centre, he agreed in 2006 to ‘voluntarily return’ to northern Iraq, which is supposedly ‘safer’ than the rest of Iraq.

He was killed just two weeks after he arrived back, in a car-bomb attack in the city of Kirkuk.

Is this what a Labour government was really elected to do?

(Incidentally, and on a side note, it would be worth tuning into Channel 4 this Sunday evening at 7pm, as the channel’s current-affairs strand, ‘Dispatches’, is devoted to 'Iraq's Lost Generation' and the plight of that country’s penniless, homeless and maimed refugees, who now number over 2 million).