refugees | ukwatch.net

Report on Abuse of Refugees and Asylum Seekers

JamieSW — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 21:01:23 +0000

The British government has been implicated in the abuse of refugees and asylum seekers, according to a report published this month by a group of human rights campaigners and medical legal experts.

The report, Outsourcing Abuse: the use and misuse of state-sanctioned force during the detention and removal of asylum seekers, contains a detailed dossier outlining cases of systematic physical and verbal abuse against refugees and immigrants who face deportation to their country of origin. Most of the alleged assaults took place at the hands of security guards during transit between detention centres, during deportations to airports, or removal from places of residence.

Outsourcing Abuse was a response to a demand by the Home Office to corroborate an earlier dossier, which hit the headlines after the Independent published details in October 2007. Home Office ministers and officials dismissed the claims of abuse as unfounded, saying that many of the alleged victims had not come forward with further information to prove their mistreatment.
The new report contains nearly 300 cases of alleged assault, which took place between January 2004 and June 2008, and draws on a wide range of sources including solicitors, journalists, airline passengers, hospital staff and doctors. Many refugees and asylum seekers were also prepared to recount their ordeals, despite fears of retribution from the Home Office or the private security companies it employs to detain and deport them.

The report states that “Many additional allegations of assault have been reported to us that we simply have not had the resources to consider and therefore have not been included in the dossier. Because of this, coupled with the fact that other victims are fearful of coming forward, we feel our dossier is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Outsourcing Abuse paints a picture where appalling physical and verbal abuse is condoned and accepted, if not actively encouraged. People are routinely kicked and punched, or otherwise injured by excessive use of force, and many are subjected to racist verbal abuse.

Some victims allege they were given injections to sedate them or forced to take pills. Others tell how they were denied access to emergency hospital facilities after sustaining injuries.

Typical of the 48 case studies contained in the dossier are:

A 19-year-old Congolese man who claims that in 2007 he was thrown to the ground and kicked in the face, whilst being transferred to a segregation unit. An independent doctor advised care for head injury and noted abrasions to the forehead, bruising and swelling around the face.
A Malawian man in the same year who alleges that he was pinned to the floor by Detention Custody Officers (DCOs) and “kicked all over his body, including his head”, at Dungavel detention centre.
A Sudanese woman whose escorts repeatedly jabbed her in the eye and assaulted her after the pilot refused to fly.
An Armenian man was left with a punctured lung after escorts stamped on him in the back of a van and then left in an immigration holding bay without medical support for hours.
A Cameroonian man who claims he was detained without sufficient food or water and denied medication for treatment of hepatitis C. When, because of his illness, he refused to co-operate with efforts to move him on board a Kenya Airways flight for deportation he said, “They started beating me, kicking me all over. They put me on the floor and continued to kick me everywhere. I was agonising of pain. I thought that they will kill me.”

The report comments that,

“Usually removals are stopped when the pilot refuses to proceed, which may be because the detainee is screaming and / or because there is a physical struggle with escort staff occurring and the pilot considers it will be unsafe to fly.”

A total of 78 charter flights were arranged between February 2006 and March 2007, 60 of which were flights to Eastern Europe and 14 to Afghanistan. It is not known how many airlines are contracted out by the government for deportees, or what the budget is for this policy, though it is likely to be in the millions.

Many of those affected by this process are small children and babies, who may be separated from their parents for days or weeks. John Wilkes, chief executive of the Scottish Refugee Council, said,

“The UK government has signed up to protect the rights of children under the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, but shamefully except for children in the asylum and immigration system.”

Many refugees and asylum seekers are suffering mental health problems as a result of the abuse they are subjected to. The report reveals that 85 percent have chronic depressive symptoms and 65 percent contemplate suicide. In 2007 there were 1,517 immigration detainees on “suicide-watch”.

Many of the abused immigrants were of uncertain legal status when they were detained or deported. In some cases the state “pre-empted” the legal process altogether by intervening before they had access to legal representation—clearly breaching the Geneva Conventions and International law.

The situation is so bad that the former Chief Inspector of Prisons, David Ramsbotham was forced to caution the government in the introduction to Outsourcing Abuse.

He states,

“Of course there will always be cases that are less than genuine, and they must be dealt with accordingly. But every case must be investigated and, in line with the law of the land, individuals regarded as innocent until proved guilty. That applies to those whose cases are outlined in this dossier. If the Home Office, Ministers and officials alike, is sensible it will pay due attention to the dossier, which is not written in an emotive way, but contains constructive advice that should not simply be rejected.”

Ramsbotham’s exceedingly modest appeal is likely to fall on deaf ears.

Requests for further information under the Freedom of Information Act regarding forced removals on charter flights, as well as the government’s contract with the private security firms, have been rejected by the Home Office on the grounds of “commercial secrecy”. The same secrecy surrounds the detention centres used to hold asylum-seekers pending the outcome of their application. Seven out of 10 in the UK are managed by private companies on behalf of the Home Office.

Labour’s immigration minister, Liam Byrne, boasted in May, “We now remove an immigration offender every eight minutes—but my target is to remove more, and remove them faster.”

The government announced in August 2007 that it intended to “fast-track” the deportation procedure and in May this year announced a 60 percent increase in the number of detentions. Despite a 72 percent fall in asylum applications between 2002 and 2007, there has been a 106 percent increase in the number of applicants detained.

In Europe, in the name of combating “illegal immigration”, a Return Directive is being set up across the continent to send undocumented workers to neighbouring countries without any administrative formalities. This legislation will allow states to hold immigrants for up to 18-months and impose a five-year ban on their return to the EU. According to a representative of the European Association for the Defence of Human Rights, the Directive will establish detention as a “norm”.

The website Inter-Movement Committee for Evacuees commented on the new directive, “Retention has been slipping little by little into the logic of internment, transforming these centres into camps.”

Between False Refuge and the Peril of Return

Ellie Keen — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 00:00:00 +0000

Peace, or something like it, breaks out in Iraq. US-led foreign forces declare violence has tapered off to the lowest levels in years, thanks to additional troops, security cooperation with Sunni tribal leaders and erstwhile insurgents, and a tentative halt to the activities of Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army. An Iraqi government derided as sectarian and dysfunctional steps up to promote political accommodation and begins taking more responsibility for security and providing services. Stability takes hold, paving the way for about two million Iraqis who have fled the country to make their way home.
An uncertain future
The scenario outlined above can be, and is, disputed. Whether or how long a period of relative calm will last remains to be seen; Iraq's political future – including a long-term US military presence being negotiated in Baghdad and Washington – is itself an open question. But on the subject of refugees, a dangerous certainty now unites Iraq's government, the United States, and some Western countries, notably Britain, where Iraqis have sought a haven from the bloodshed that the US invasion ushered in. They are encouraging – and in the case of Britain, forcing – the return of Iraqi refugees on the grounds that the country is now stable enough to receive them. Politically attractive though this may be, it also contradicts international law prohibiting the forced return of anyone to territory where his or her life or freedom is threatened.

With prodding from Washington, the Iraqi government has renewed calls for refugees to return. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki announced at a recent summit on Iraqi reconstruction that his government would work to create conditions that facilitate return and provide financial incentives to Iraqis who return from abroad; the Ministry of Migration and Displacement subsequently announced that $195 million would be allocated to cover returnees' expenses.

Since 2005, Britain has returned failed asylum seekers to areas controlled by the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG), which administers the three northern governorates that are the most stable part of Iraq, on the grounds that the region is safe. On 11 June 2008, the Guardian reported that the UK Border Agency planned to expand its deportation scheme to include other parts of Iraq, recently detaining dozens of failed Iraqi asylum seekers for possible deportation, including some from areas not controlled by the KRG. If confirmed, this would harden a policy toward Iraqi asylum seekers that was unforgiving from the start.

A contradictory policy

Home Office correspondence leaked in March stated that failed asylum seekers will lose financial support unless they agree to a voluntary repatriation program under the auspices of the International Organization for Migration (IOM). The repatriation procedure as described in this correspondence included a waiver absolving the deporting authority of any responsibility for what may happen following repatriation. The basis for deportation to the whole of Iraq has drawn strength from a ruling in the UK Asylum and Immigration Tribunal (AIT) earlier this year, narrowing the scope for protection against deportation under European Council directive 15©. The AIT's ruling found "neither civilians in Iraq generally nor civilians even in provinces and cities worst-affected by the armed conflict can show they face a ‘serious and individual threat' to their ‘life or person'...merely by virtue of being civilians."

Contradictions abound in the justifications for repatriating Iraqis to the north and elsewhere. The Home Office December 2007 immigration policy statement on Iraq explicitly rejects the opinion of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) that relocation to central and southern Iraq is unsafe; yet failed asylum seekers who agree to voluntary repatriation are asked to absolve those who send them back from any responsibility for what may happen after they arrive. UK authorities express a strong preference that returns be voluntary; yet surveys of Iraqi refugees, including Human Rights Watch interviews with those who have returned, indicate that economic and administrative pressure nearly always figure prominently in even voluntary returns to Iraq.

To justify sending asylum seekers back, the asylum tribunal invokes and works to argue around a European Council directive aimed at preventing deportations back into armed conflict. That reading runs up against the UK's broad commitment, as a party to the 1951 Refugee Convention, to the principle of non-refoulement: the agreement not to return refugees to countries where their lives or freedom are at risk.
Political expediency

There is, however, one depressing note of consistency that emerges from Britain's treatment of Iraqi asylum seekers. Like the United States, its senior partner in the invasion of Iraq, Britain appears willing to use the lives of refugees to bolster political arguments for success in Iraq – the US by admitting only symbolic numbers of refugees, the UK by returning asylum seekers to danger. Perhaps the desire to claim victory or at least validation in Iraq by citing diminished violence – though by any standard other than the carnage of recent years, Iraq remains an incredibly dangerous place – as evidence of stability that could support the return of refugees, has trumped other considerations.

These considerations should include the dire conditions facing approximately 2.7 million people who are internally displaced within Iraq; UNHCR estimates that more than a million of the internally displaced lack adequate shelter and food. The head of Iraq's parliamentary committee on displacement last month suggested that the committee should simply resign over what he called the government's inability to address the needs of the displaced and refugees.

The narrative of emerging security and stability in Iraq, should it develop into durable fact, would be welcome. Meanwhile, Britain, like the United States, bears particular responsibility toward the refugees whose flight originated in the chaos and violence that the invasion of Iraq has wrought. It can begin meeting that responsibility by acknowledging that those Iraqis who seek safety in Britain have legitimate fears about what awaits them at home.

Zionism and the Palestinians

tim — Mon, 19 May 2008 15:28:12 +0000

Israel’s 60th birthday is being celebrated lavishly in Britain. The programme includes a gala fund-raising dinner at Windsor Castle in the presence of the Duke of Edinburgh, a variety show at Wembley Stadium and street parades in London and Manchester.

Meanwhile, Palestinians and their supporters will be recalling the same event in entirely different tones, without the benefit of state support or vast sums of money. In meetings, conferences and exhibitions they are seeking to remind the world of the Nakba – catastrophe in Arabic – that accompanied Israel’s birth in 1948.

In 1947 there were 1,293,000 Arabs and 608,000 Jews in Palestine. Though Jews made up 32 per cent of the population, the UN partition plan (agreed in November 1947) assigned them 55 per cent of the country, including the economically developed citrus-growing plains. Israel’s Declaration of Independence on 15 May 1948 was preceded by several months of civil war between Jewish and Palestinian forces, and followed by more months of war between the new state and its Arab neighbours.

In April and May, before the expiry of the British mandate, the cities of Haifa and Jaffa fell to Jewish forces, and more than 100,000 Palestinians fled. To the north, in Galilee, the Haganah – the mainstream Zionist defence force – systematically conquered clusters of villages, emptying them of inhabitants and often levelling them. In June, the Israelis advanced further into territory designated for the Arab state, capturing the towns of Lydda and Ramle where they killed 250 Palestinians and expelled almost all the rest – 40,000 – at gunpoint.

In the course of 1948, 531 Palestinian towns and villages were abandoned, evacuated or destroyed. In the Jaffa area, 96 per cent of the villages were totally erased. As Jewish forces proceeded with the ethnic cleansing of territories both within and outside the UN-allotted borders of the Jewish state, a British army of 70,000 refused to intervene, despite being charged under the mandate with the protection of the civilian population.

When the fighting finished in early 1949, the Jewish state had acquired 78 per cent of Palestine. 180,000 Palestinians found themselves a minority within the expanded borders of the Jewish state. 750,000 had been made refugees.

The homes and lands they left behind were quickly occupied by Jewish settlers and the new Israeli parliament passed laws confiscating their property. Of 370 new Jewish settlements established between 1948 and 1953, 350 were on absentee property. In 1954 more than one third of Israel’s Jewish population lived on absentee property. Conquest and expulsion provided the material base for the building of the Jewish state.

For many years Zionists claimed that the Palestinians had left voluntarily, at the behest of Arab leaders. That myth has been repeatedly disproved: there’s no evidence of so much as a single broadcast or leaflet telling people to abandon their homes. There is, on the other hand, a great deal of evidence that the Zionists used the war to alter the demographic facts on the ground. On April 6, for example, David Ben-Gurion told a Zionist meeting: “We will not be able to win the war if we do not, during the war, populate upper and lower, eastern and western Galilee, the Negev and Jerusalem area, even if only in an artificial way, in a military way … I believe that war will also bring in its wake a great change in the distribution of Arab population.”

The facts of the Nakba are now well documented and beyond serious dispute. Yet Nakba denial remains widespread, and shamefully acceptable in polite circles. That is partly because its victims have been so demonised and dehumanised. Acknowledgement of the Nakba is also resisted because it undermines Israeli and Jewish self-definitions; for many, it is a truth that simply cannot be assimilated.

The Nakba is far more than a historical controversy. It’s an unresolved and pressing global issue. The Palestinian refugee population – descendants of those driven out in 1948 – now numbers more than five million, one half of whom live in Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. One million remain stateless, with no form of identification other than a card issued by UNWRA, the United Nations refugee agency. This is the world’s largest and oldest continuing refugee crisis. Each year since December 1948, the UN General Assembly has reconfirmed Resolution 194, which enshrines the refugees’ right to return and compensation. The right of refugees to return to their homes is a necessary protection for all civilian populations in times of war. Without it, ethnic cleansing would be encouraged. Yet those who press for the implementation of that right are denounced as extremists who refuse to accept Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

There is today a huge Jewish population in Palestine whose rights as human beings must be recognised, but why should anyone anywhere be compelled to recognise the “right to exist” of a particular state formation? What’s being demanded here is ideological conformity: support for the right of the Jewish state to exist, in perpetuity, in Palestine, regardless of what that fact entails for others (or indeed for the welfare of Jews). For Palestinians, recognising Israel’s right to exist – as opposed to the fact of its existence – is tantamount to an historical seal of approval on the Nakba. Those who refuse to certify as legitimate a national project built on dispossession and ethnic supremacy are condemned as “anti-Semites” or, if they are Jews, as “self-haters”. The allegations rest on a false conflation of Israel and “the Jews”, one propagated by Zionists, who use it to exempt the Jewish state from the requirements of international standards of human decency.

Israel is “Jewish” in a sense that no existing state is Christian, Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist. Though these religions are privileged in various states, none of those states claims to be the sole global representative of the faith; none grants citizenship to people solely because of their religion (without regard to place of birth or residence). Maintaining a Jewish state in Palestine means maintaining a sizeable Jewish majority population which enjoys privileged access to land, work and civic rights.

The founders of Israel were secularists; they saw Jewishness as a national rather than religious identity. Many were atheists and contemptuous of rabbinical culture. Like MA Jinnah, the secular Muslim founder of Pakistan, they would be shocked and dismayed if they could see the influence obscurantist religious sects now wield in the polities they established.

From the beginning, the notion that the State of Israel could be both “Jewish” and “democratic” was unsustainable, and was seen as such by significant numbers of diaspora Jews. Indeed, it’s important to remember that anti-Zionism was a Jewish ideology long before it was anything else. But in the wake of the Holocaust, and with the evolution of big power politics in the Middle East, Zionism came to dominate the diaspora. And the truth of the Nakba was shrouded beneath the myth of Israel’s “David versus Goliath” struggle for survival against irrationally hostile Arabs.

But what of the plight of the Jewish refugees in postwar Europe? Without Israel, what would have become of them? The answer is that they would have shared the same variety of fates as the general refugee population of Europe, of which they were part. The roots of that crisis lay in the refusal of the US, Britain and other countries to admit large numbers of displaced persons. It could not be resolved by allocating each group a “state of their own”, inevitably at the expense of another people. The right of refuge is a universal right (and need) but instead of shouldering that collective responsibility, the Western powers, with the support of the Soviet Union, dumped it on Palestine, demanding that a people who bore no responsibility for the Holocaust make way for its victims.

Many Zionists who do acknowledge the Nakba characterise it as tragic but “irreversible”. The Nakba was not, however, an isolated episode; it was a paroxysm in a process that continues to this day. The Jewish state remains incompatible with Palestinian rights and increasingly the very existence of Palestinians, as illustrated by the current siege of Gaza and the continuing assault on Palestinian society on the West Bank through the construction of the apartheid wall and the extension of Jewish settlements.

It has become ever more apparent that Zionism will not tolerate any meaningful form of Palestinian independence. The exigencies of maintaining a Jewish state will not allow it. Within Israel, expansionist claims – in which the Jews are declared the rightful owners of the whole of the West Bank and even beyond – are commonplace, as are calls for the permanent transfer of the remaining Palestinian population. Some respectable voices speak openly of the need to finish the work left undone in 1948 – in order to ensure the survival of “the Jewish state”.

As ever, much of this is cloaked in Biblical sources. The paradox of Zionism was always that it was a secular ideology whose foundation lay in a religious discourse. At its heart is an obscurantist claim to historic territory. There is indeed much in the Hebrew Bible that gives succour to the wilder Zionist ambitions. But there is also another strand, one that warns against the menace of marrying religion to the state. In particular the Prophet Amos, a champion of the universality of ethical standards, explicitly denies the exclusivism of the Zionist claim to Palestine:

To Me, O Israelites, you are
Just like the Ethiopians – declares the Lord.
True I brought Israel up
From the land of Egypt,
But also the Philistines from Caphtor
And the Arameans from Kir.

Refugees abandoned on our doorstep

JamieSW — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 23:35:18 +0000

Gordon Brown’s government is complicit in the misery of tens of thousands of refugees attempting to flee the “war on terror”. Many of these “non-people” are trapped in the French port town of Calais. They risk their lives trying to enter Britain.

Socialist Worker visited Calais and spoke to refugees. They were from Palestine, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea. We found Kurds fleeing sectarian and ethnic hatred and educated women forced out of Eritrea as the “war on terror” washed up on their shores. We met Palestinians who have no country to return to, Africans living in fear of French police and racist gangs, Iraqis fleeing sectarian killers. Among their number was a 14 year old Afghan boy who had travelled across seven countries looking for some kind of future.

According to the United Nations there are “8.4 million refugees and as many as 23.7 million uprooted civilians in their own countries”. The vast majority of these refugees wander from country to country – only to find doors slamming in their face everywhere they go. There are four million refugees from Iraq alone – driven from their homes by the US and British invasion and the death squads that followed in its wake.

This year the US has accepted a paltry 7,000 refugees from Iraq – cherrypicking the educated and those with money. In 2006 Britain accepted only 950 Iraqi refugees. Over 90 percent of applications are refused.

Britain has a moral duty to care for the victims of the war this government helped to unleash. Instead Brown has found it easy to hide behind cheap tabloid headlines.

Refugees are denounced as “scroungers” and treated as criminals and outcasts in “fortress Europe”. In 2002 the British government forced the closure of the Red Cross shelter in Sangatte outside Calais. They hoped that by making life for these refugees unbearable they would “disappear”.

Instead we found them living in woods, under bridges or in abandoned factories. Many were ill and hungry, fighting each other for meagre resources as the winter closes in.

Recent attempts by the council in Calais to open a day centre for refugees were scotched by the British government following a media frenzy that branded it “Sangatte II”.

Many of the refugees told us that even this precarious life as a refugee is better than random death back home. They are demanding Britain take some responsibility for their fate. “Let them just come and see the conditions we live in,” one Iraqi told us.

Last week 51 refugees drowned as they attempted to cross the Aegean Sea into Turkey. This winter an unknown number in Calais will perish and be buried in nameless graves. They are victims of government policy, official indifference and moral cowardice.

The Faceless & the Dead - The Guardian & Iraq's Refugees

Tim Holmes — Thu, 06 Dec 2007 15:00:29 +0000

“See The World Through Their Eyes”

For several months now, non-UK visitors accessing the Guardian website have been shown an endlessly revolving animation in three segments that would not look out of place on FAIR, ZNet, or indeed Media Lens.

The first segment depicts a blue-eyed man wearing glasses with images of anti-war demonstrators reflected in the glasses. The protestors are carrying a banner that reads: “End The War NOW!” It instantly recalls the enormous February 15, 2003 anti-war march in London.

The second segment shows a nervous-looking woman in traditional Arab dress with intense flames reflected in her eyes. The third has two grief-stricken women, again in Arab dress, with one carrying a frightened child – their images are reflected in a soldier’s goggles. The animation ends with the words:

“See the world through their eyes. The Guardian Weekly Global Network (theguardian weekly.co.uk)”

These images are shown hour after hour, week after week, to people visiting the site. This surely is a newspaper subjecting Western policies to fierce critical analysis. It must be focussing relentlessly on Iraqi, Afghan and other civilian suffering as a result of these policies.

But in reality, the Guardian has a long history of supporting Western state violence and of suppressing the truth of its consequences.

In 1956, the Guardian’s editors backed military action during the Suez crisis:

“The government is right to be prepared for military action at Suez“, the paper wrote, because Egyptian control of the canal would be “commercially damaging for the West and perhaps part of a plan for creating a new Arab Empire based on the Nile”. (Leader, August 2, 1956; cited, Murray Mcdonald, ‘50,000 editions of the imperialist, warmongering, hate-filled Guardian newspaper,’ July 2007; http://www.medialens.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2617&highlight=murray+McDonald)

In 1991, a Guardian leader hailed the righteousness of Operation Desert Storm in almost biblical terms:

“The simple cause, at the end, is just. An evil regime in Iraq instituted an evil and brutal invasion. Our soldiers and airmen are there, at UN behest, to set that evil right. Their duties are clear … let the momentum and the resolution be swift.” (Leader, January 17, 1991, ibid)

Eric Hoskins, a Canadian doctor and coordinator of a Harvard study team, later reported that the ensuing allied bombardment “effectively terminated everything vital to human survival in Iraq – electricity, water, sewage systems, agriculture, industry and health care”. (Quoted, Mark Curtis, ‘The Ambiguities of Power – British Foreign Policy since 1945’, Zed Books, 1995, pp.189-190)

The Guardian used the word ‘evil’ three times in a single paragraph in its leader. The same emotive word has not been used once in any Guardian editorial to describe the Bush-Blair-Brown invasion of Iraq – a war crime that has cost the lives of one million people and forced 4 million more from their homes.

In March 1999, the lack of United Nations approval did not deter the Guardian from again supporting war:

“The only honorable course for Europe and America is to use military force to try to protect the people of Kosovo.” (Leader, ‘The sad need for force,’ The Guardian, March 23, 1999)

Guardian journalist Maggie O’Kane later conceded of Kosovo: “this is a tale of how to tell lies and win wars, and how we, the media, were harnessed like beach donkeys and led through the sand to see what the British and US military wanted us to see in this nice clean war”. (O’Kane, The Guardian, December 16, 1995)

In December 2001, the Guardian celebrated a quick victory in Afghanistan:

“... the US-led campaign in Afghanistan continues to be far more successful than the pessimists, and even most optimists, ever thought possible. It is always harder to act than not to act, but the action taken by the US has been largely vindicated, at least in the short term… This is not a reason for silly gloating; but it certainly ought to be a reason for those who have consistently claimed to know that each stage of the operation would create some new and worse catastrophe to confess that they got it wrong. Their confidence turned out to be fear. Their apparent knowledge was in fact ignorance. Their belief that history would prove them right proved only the more useful lesson that history repeats itself until it does not. The war was largely over by Christmas after all.” (Leader, ‘They did it their way: George Bush, not Tony Blair, is the victor,’ The Guardian, December 8, 2001)

In February 2003, just four years after Kosovo, the Guardian was once again happy to lend credence to an obviously fraudulent pretext for war:

“It is not credible to argue, as Iraq did in its initial reaction to Mr Powell [at the Security Council], that it is simply all lies… Iraq must disarm.” (Leader, ‘Powell shoots to kill,’ The Guardian, February 6, 2003)

Four days after US tanks entered Baghdad in April 2003, leading Guardian commentator Hugo Young was quick to justify Blair’s war of aggression – the supreme war crime:

“For a political leader, few therapies compare with military victory. For a leader who went to war in the absence of a single political ally who believed in the war as unreservedly as he did, Iraq now looks like a vindication on an astounding scale… No one can deny that victory happened. The existential fact sweeps aside the prior agonising.” (Young, ‘So begins Blair’s descent into powerless mediocrity,’ The Guardian, April 13, 2003)

A Time To Say Goodbye

Like the Guardian’s animation, columnist and Guardian assistant editor Madeleine Bunting gives the impression that her newspaper is a compassionate voice against violence. Bunting recently lamented how the slaughter in Iraq had been “normalised into the background of our lives”. A “public revulsion” at the violence remains, but “the horror gives way to exhaustion”. (Bunting, ‘The Iraq war has become a disaster that we have chosen to forget,’ The Guardian, November 5, 2007)

Part of the problem, Bunting continued, was that the war has become almost impossible to report, taking “either terrifying courage or extraordinary ingenuity” to bring images to our screens of those caught up in the disaster.

But something doesn’t add up. As Bunting noted in her own article, fully one in six Iraqis has been displaced from the country, many escaping to Syria (1.4 million) and Jordan (750,000). Are we really to believe that it takes “terrifying courage” for journalists to fly to Damascus and Amman to cover their plight? And yet coverage of the suffering of Iraqi refugees is almost completely absent from the British media. In fact, there has been so little in-depth reporting we may struggle to imagine what it looks like.

A sublime example is provided by the courageous young Iraqi writer, Riverbend, on her Baghdad Burning website: http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

In her September 7 entry, ‘Leaving home,’ she gave an insight into the tragedy that has engulfed Iraq’s 4 million refugees. The misery of lives uprooted by fear and violence was communicated through the simple truth of the details recorded. As she and her family prepared to leave Baghdad, their life-long home, each family member was able to take just one suitcase full of personal belongings. Riverbend wrote:

“Two months ago, the suitcases were packed. My lone, large suitcase sat in my bedroom for nearly six weeks, so full of clothes and personal items, that it took me, E. and our six year old neighbor to zip it closed…. I packed and unpacked it four times. Each time I unpacked it, I swore I’d eliminate some of the items that were not absolutely necessary. Each time I packed it again, I would add more ‘stuff’ than the time before.”

“It was a tearful farewell as we left the house. One of my other aunts and an uncle came to say goodbye the morning of the trip. It was a solemn morning and I’d been preparing myself for the last two days not to cry. You won’t cry, I kept saying, because you’re coming back. You won’t cry because it’s just a little trip like the ones you used to take to Mosul or Basrah before the war…

“It was time to go and I went from room to room saying goodbye to everything. I said goodbye to my desk – the one I’d used all through high school and college. I said goodbye to the curtains and the bed and the couch. I said goodbye to the armchair E. and I broke when we were younger. I said goodbye to the big table over which we’d gathered for meals and to do homework. I said goodbye to the ghosts of the framed pictures that once hung on the walls, because the pictures have long since been taken down and stored away – but I knew just what hung where. I said goodbye to the silly board games we inevitably fought over – the Arabic Monopoly with the missing cards and money that no one had the heart to throw away.

“I knew then as I know now that these were all just items – people are so much more important. Still, a house is like a museum in that it tells a certain history. You look at a cup or stuffed toy and a chapter of memories opens up before your very eyes. It suddenly hit me that I wanted to leave so much less than I thought I did.

“I cried as we left – in spite of promises not to. The aunt cried… the uncle cried. My parents tried to be stoic but there were tears in their voices as they said their goodbyes. The worst part is saying goodbye and wondering if you’re ever going to see these people again. My uncle tightened the shawl I’d thrown over my hair and advised me firmly to ‘keep it on until you get to the border’. The aunt rushed out behind us as the car pulled out of the garage and dumped a bowl of water on the ground, which is a tradition – its to wish the travelers a safe return… eventually.”

How often have we been allowed to be touched by this kind of truthfulness humanising Iraqi misery for the reader? Where is the media focus on personal details with the power to transform anonymous masses, mere numbers, into people? Where is the depth of concern suggested by the Guardian in its website animation?

In fact, the Guardian did set aside 625 words for Riverbend to publish a curiously bland piece in May (’Goodbye Baghdad,’ May 11, 2007; http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2077244,00.html) – the only time she has ever appeared in the paper in four years of searing eyewitness commentary. Even we have published almost twice as many words (1,155) in a single article in the Guardian over the same period.

The only other appearance Riverbend has made in the UK press was in a much more substantial, 2,500-word piece in the Sunday Times (April 2, 2006). The other 19 mentions she has received in national quality newspapers have been mostly brief reviews of her book Baghdad Burning.

Riverbend’s words were written in a country that has seen perhaps a million people killed since 2003, and 1.5 million more killed as a result of sanctions since 1990. In his crucial book, A Different Kind Of War – The UN Sanctions Regime In Iraq (Barghahn Books, 2006), former UN humanitarian coordinator in Iraq, Hans von Sponeck, writes:

“At no time during the years of comprehensive economic sanctions were there adequate resources to meet minimum needs for human physical and mental survival either before, or during, the Oil-for-Food Programme.” (p.144)

The result:

“The [US-UK] hard-line approach prevailed, with the result that practically an entire nation was subjected to poverty, death and destruction of its physical and mental foundations.” (p.161)

And this was the major reason why, as von Sponeck notes, the number of excess deaths of children under five during 1991-1998 was between 400,000 and 500,000. (Ibid, p.165)

This was even before the even worse catastrophe that has followed the 2003 invasion. We need to be clear, than, that Riverbend’s words describe experiences comparable to history‘s very worst tragedies – she is a latter-day Anne Frank. And these events are happening now, a few hours from London, as a result of our own government’s actions.

It is shocking to read Riverbend and to realise just how alienated we are from the truth of Iraq. We know because, in reading her words – of the 6 year-old neighbour helping to heave the suitcase closed, of the beloved table where the homework was done – the reality of the Iraqi people suddenly rushes into focus. We can picture Riverbend doing her homework, we know her tears on leaving her home, we can imagine her little neighbour, because we have known all of these things in our own lives. She could be any articulate, intelligent young woman writing from any city in Britain.

We are reading the impressions of a soul sensitive to the pain of separation from familiar objects, to empty spaces on walls, to the uncertainty of separation from neighbours and relatives – and yet it is this same soul that has endured 12 years of ferocious bombing, dictatorship and sanctions, and four more years of cataclysmic violence. This consciousness, this sensitivity, could so easily have been snuffed out at any time, like so many others have been.

On February 20, the normally restrained Riverbend wrote of the gang rape of an Iraqi woman, Sabine, by Iraqi “security forces“. She concluded her piece with these words:

“As the situation continues to deteriorate both for Iraqis inside and outside of Iraq, and for Americans inside Iraq, Americans in America are still debating on the state of the war and occupation – are they winning or losing? Is it better or worse.

“Let me clear it up for any moron with lingering doubts: It’s worse. It’s over. You lost. You lost the day your tanks rolled into Baghdad to the cheers of your imported, American-trained monkeys. You lost every single family whose home your soldiers violated. You lost every sane, red-blooded Iraqi when the Abu Ghraib pictures came out and verified your atrocities behind prison walls as well as the ones we see in our streets. You lost when you brought murderers, looters, gangsters and militia heads to power and hailed them as Iraq’s first democratic government. You lost when a gruesome execution was dubbed your biggest accomplishment. You lost the respect and reputation you once had. You lost more than 3000 troops. That is what you lost America. I hope the oil, at least, made it worthwhile.”

This honesty shamed just about every last journalist writing in the UK media. Riverbend now writes, far less often, as a refugee in Syria.

The Guardian Performance – Just Numbers

In the last six months, the Guardian has focused in less than a dozen articles specifically on the plight of Iraqi refugees. Mostly, these have been short, dry news pieces documenting the latest statistics of suffering from the latest aid agency reports. On July 31, Jonathan Steele covered a report by Oxfam and a network of 80 aid agencies that described “a nationwide catastrophe, with around 8 million Iraqis – almost a third of the population – in need of emergency aid”. (Steele, ’Children hardest hit by humanitarian crisis in Iraq,’ The Guardian, July 31, 2007)

On August 27, Ian Black’s report was titled “Displaced Iraqis double despite US military surge” (Black, The Guardian, August 27, 2007). No irony was intended in Black’s use of “despite”, although it would be unthinkable in coverage of any other illegal Great Power occupation.

More statistics followed from Suzanne Goldenberg on September 20: “2m Iraqis forced to flee their homes: Many move several times in search of safety and jobs Ethnic map redrawn, says Red Crescent report.” (Goldenberg, ‘Refugees in their own land,’ The Guardian, September 20, 2007)

There were no descriptions of spaces on walls, no little neighbours struggling with suitcases, no tears – just numbers.

Five days later, Richard Norton-Taylor reported similar figures in a 326-word piece. On October 11, Julian Borger noted that Amnesty International had criticised Britain over its forced returns of Iraqi refugees. The usual aid agencies were quoted:

“‘There are more and more makeshift camps in abysmal conditions, with terrible sanitation and water supply, very little or no healthcare, and no schools,’ Ron Redmond, a spokesman for the UN high commissioner for refugees, said yesterday.” (Borger, ‘Iraqi provinces shut out internal refugees,’ The Guardian, October 11, 2007)

To be sure, the details of British government indifference were disturbing enough. Out of 740 rulings on the fate of Iraqi refugees last year Britain granted asylum to 30, according to Home Office figures. The US allowed entry to 535 Iraqis last year, less than a fifth of the number it accepted in 2000, three years before the war began.

And we recall how Tony Blair insisted, with quivering jaw, that compassion for the fate of Iraqi civilian suffering was of course at the very heart of the US-UK motivation for attacking that country:

“But the moral case against war has a moral answer: it is the moral case for removing Saddam… Yes, there are consequences of war. If we remove Saddam by force, people will die, and some will be innocent. And we must live with the consequences of our actions, even the unintended ones. But there are also consequences of ‘stop the war’. There will be no march for the victims of Saddam, no protests about the thousands of children that die needlessly every year under his rule, no righteous anger over the torture chambers which if he is left in power, will remain in being…” (Blair, ‘The price of my conviction’, The Observer, February 16, 2003)

On October 20, the Guardian’s Michael Howard finally did supply a couple of paragraphs of personal testimony on the fate met by Iraqis who had fled their homes in Baghdad as they faced bombardment from Turkey in the North of Iraq. (Howard, ‘Kurdistan: Iraqis who fled homes in fear face new terror as Turkey targets PKK rebels,’ The Guardian, October 20, 2007)

And on December 5, Michael Howard wrote of “thousands of refugees and internally displaced people who are returning to their former homes following the recent lull in sectarian violence”. (Howard, ‘UN promises aid as displaced Iraqis head home,’ The Guardian, December 5, 2007)

This is the propaganda version of events being widely pushed throughout the media. A week earlier, the Guardian’s own Jonathan Steele had reported a UN survey of Iraqi refugees which described their real reasons for returning to Iraq: “only 14% felt security had improved. Forty-six per cent said they could no longer afford to stay in Syria, and 25% said their visas had expired and they were ‘obliged to leave‘.” (Steele, ‘Refugees celebrate first bus back to Iraq,’ The Guardian, November 28, 2007)

In the last six months, the Guardian has published not a single in-depth report based around eyewitness accounts of the suffering of Iraqi refugees.

This is not an isolated phenomenon linked to “compassion fatigue”, as Bunting would have us believe. Analysis of the media record shows that human beings are consistently divided into “worthy” and “unworthy” victims.

On January 19, 100 eminent doctors backed by a group of international lawyers wrote to Tony Blair of Iraq:

“Sick or injured children, who could otherwise be treated by simple means, are left to die in their hundreds because they do not have access to basic medicines or other resources. Children who have lost hands, feet, and limbs are left without prostheses.” (The Letter: ‘Sick or injured children, who could be easily treated, are left to die in hundreds’; http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article2165471.ece)

The doctors added:

“... we call on the UK Government not to walk away from this problem, but to fulfil its obligations that it entered into under Security Council Resolution 1483 during the period 22 May 2003 to 28 June 2004“.

But the government did walk away and the Guardian failed to report the story.

On September 14, a report by the British polling organisation, Opinion Research Business (ORB) revealed that 1.2 million Iraqi citizens “have been murdered” since the March 2003 US-UK invasion. (www.opinion.co.uk/Newsroom_details.aspx?NewsId=78)

The Guardian failed to report the poll.

In 2006, Hans von Sponeck published his forensic, damning account detailing US-UK responsibility for the catastrophic impact of sanctions on Iraq. The Guardian has not reviewed the book, nor even mentioned its existence.

Abandoned by the British government and the British media, the Guardian included, Iraq’s refugees continue their struggle for survival. Posting from Syria, one newly displaced refugee, Riverbend, writes:

“As we crossed the border and saw the last of the Iraqi flags, the tears began again. The car was silent except for the prattling of the driver who was telling us stories of escapades he had while crossing the border. I sneaked a look at my mother sitting beside me and her tears were flowing as well. There was simply nothing to say as we left Iraq. I wanted to sob, but I didn’t want to seem like a baby. I didn’t want the driver to think I was ungrateful for the chance to leave what had become a hellish place over the last four and a half years.”

In the same endearing spirit of endlessly thoughtful observation and indomitable optimism, she adds:

“We were all refugees – rich or poor. And refugees all look the same – there’s a unique expression you’ll find on their faces – relief, mixed with sorrow, tinged with apprehension. The faces almost all look the same.”

But for British journalism, their faces do not look the same – they do not even exist.

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The Iraq war has become a disaster that we have chosen to forget

JamieSW — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 21:01:56 +0000

‘You think you are innocent, but you’re not,” said the British Muslim suicide bomber in the Channel 4 television drama Britz last week. As the compelling actor Manjinder Virk recited her suicide statement to camera, she went on: thousands of women and children are dying every day in Iraq and Afghanistan, and yet the governments responsible have been returned to power.

Her assertion sticks in the mind because it goes straight to the heart of how we choose to forget, choose not to understand; and how from such choices it becomes possible to imagine our innocence.

That’s not to say that her own moral choices were defensible – she blew up herself, her beloved brother, fellow Muslims and plenty of women in the crowd – but the challenge even from such a morally flawed character persists. Can we claim innocence of the chaotic violence of Iraq now normalised into the background of our lives? Suicide bombs have long since become routine radio noise. We’re numbed to the atrocities; except for some stalwarts, the initial anti-war activism has been crowded out by other responsibilities. Life goes on, even if in Baghdad it frequently doesn’t.

And to accompany the indifference is the creeping denial of responsibility. Government ministers now talk of Iraq as a tragedy, as if it was a natural disaster and they had no hand in its making. There’s a public revulsion at the violent sectarian struggles best summed up as “a plague on all their houses”, as even the horror gives way to exhaustion.

The irony is that in this great age of communications and saturation media, this is perhaps the most important war to become nigh on impossible to report. Unless the reporter is embedded with the occupation forces, it takes either terrifying courage or extraordinary ingenuity to bring images to our screens of those caught up in the awful maelstrom of this imploded country. Without the human stories that bring people and their suffering so vividly to life, there is little chance of public opinion re-engaging with the biggest political calamity of our time.

The Iraq war represents the end of the media as a major actor in war. In Bosnia journalists stirred western Europe’s conscience with their vivid accounts; these were people we came to understand, recognise and empathise with, and public opinion forced recalcitrant governments to take note and act. It was a lesson not lost on the Kosovans: they ensured the media saw every atrocity, and the coverage was used to secure a comparable outcome to Bosnia – western governments were forced to act. But in Iraq the number of journalists killed (now at least 138) means that this war is near private – the images and people who might make the horror of this war real don’t reach our screens. It’s no longer a war that is accessible to public scrutiny or to democratic engagement.

It may have been Iraqi suspicion of western media that ensured this outcome, but it’s one that serves US interests nicely. The indifference, the exhaustion and the difficulty of reporting leaves the US forces with arguably a freer hand than they have had in any field of operations for decades. While the Americans and the British keep trying to persuade their public that the war is over – a habit initiated by George Bush himself when he announced his pyrrhic victory on an aircraft carrier in the Gulf in May 2003 – they can carry on fighting it. And there are plenty of people only too eager to hope their political leaders are right and that the whole problem of a country they never knew much about just goes away.

All of which makes the achievement of the few who do break through this news blackout all the more remarkable – Ghaith Abdul-Ahad on this paper, and the Guardian’s Emmy-winning film made by an Iraqi doctor on his Baghdad hospital, for example. This week a book is published by another: Dahr Jamail was a mountain guide in Alaska in 2003 who began to take an interest in US foreign policy and ended up picking up his backpack and swapping American mountains for Baghdad and Falluja, driven by a fierce moral imperative that “as a US citizen he was complicit in the devastation of Iraq”. After more than three years of reporting he has post-traumatic stress disorder, but has not lost his conviction that “if the people of the United States had the real story about what their government has done in Iraq, the occupation would already have ended”.

What is chilling about Jamail’s accounts is the routine destructiveness of the US forces; how they demolish nearby homes after a roadside bomb, leave unexploded munitions in the fields of farmers who don’t give information, bulldoze orchards. Livelihoods destroyed, families displaced every day, incubating hatred. One of the worst episodes occurred when Jamail’s friend was caught by chance at prayer time in a mosque when worshippers were shot dead, with children trapped in the mayhem: a holy place desecrated in a US operation. We may know nothing of such routine details of the prosecution of this war, but these are the stories filling the Arabic media. Across the Muslim world they are taken as irrefutable evidence of the humiliation and persecution of their Islamic faith. We can only pretend we don’t understand.

In the meantime, the biggest human displacement crisis in the Middle East for 60 years is unfolding, the fastest growing refugee crisis in the world. One in six Iraqis has now been displaced, 60,000 a month are leaving the country, spilling into Syria (1.4 million) and Jordan (750,000). In an uncanny magnification of our own anxieties about migration and the strain on public services, the capacities of these two Middle Eastern countries to educate thousands of traumatised children or provide basic healthcare have been swamped. The UN’s budget for refugees in Syria for 2007 is $700,000 – less than a dollar per person. But this crisis offers no telegenic vistas – people are crammed into the apartments of friends rather than tents on a windy African plain. So it gets even less attention.

Of these millions, Britain confirmed last week that it will take just 500 refugees with a record of having worked for British forces. It drags its feet over offering any more assistance for dispersal, despite requests from the UN; of 123 from Jordan whom the UN have allocated to Britain on tight criteria of having relatives in this country to provide for them, we have so far accepted only three. Britain washes its hands of the consequences of its invasion with the US. There’s a horrible contradiction here: those in power accept no responsibility. Those who might have a sense of responsibility feel utterly powerless.

It can take a generation or more for people to grasp the significance and magnitude of historical events. Facts that are infinitely more bizarre and awful than fiction – as Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine documents – take a long time to be fully absorbed. The Iraq war has been about the abject failure of democracy: governments have not been held to account for a war that has squandered lives, billions in public money and the stability of an entire region with reckless criminality.

- Dahr Jamail speaks at War, Truth and the Media, a conference at the London School of Economics, on November 17

The Refugees Fleeing Iraq are Our Responsibility

Ellie Keen — Mon, 29 Oct 2007 22:16:07 +0000

If the Prime Minister has refused to apologise for invading Iraq, he should at least accept responsibility for its consequences. Two million Iraqis have fled the violence unleashed by the invasion and occupation. And as the violence escalates, so does the exodus.

Yet, at the beginning of 2007, the British had still given no support either to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), or to Jordan and Syria, the two countries which are currently bearing the main burden and who are both now acting to close their borders to refugees, with which they say they can no longer cope.

There is no British programme for resettling Iraqis in the UK, even for those who have served the UK authorities. And the vast majority of asylum seekers who manage to get here on their own are seeing their applications refused. In the 12 months to September, out of 780 applications processed only 55 were granted some form of asylum.

The British policy on Iraqi refugees is not only morally indefensible, but also extraordinarily shortsighted. Experience from elsewhere – Afghanistan, West Africa, Somalia and Sudan – has shown very clearly that refugee flows on the scale now seen in Iraq can often contribute to serious regional instability.

The last time so many people were on the move in the Middle East was in 1948 in the aftermath of the war which led to the creation of the state of Israel. We are still living with the consequences of that refugee crisis.

Having engaged in a pre- emptive war of choice that directly or indirectly caused this massive displacement, the US and the UK have a clear and compelling duty, as well as an interest, to take the lead in addressing the refugee crisis their actions have precipitated. Belatedly, the US government has begun to pay attention. On 14 February, Condoleezza Rice announced a programme under which 7,000 Iraqi refugees will be resettled in the US this year. It’s not much, but it is a start. And the UK must follow suit.

Here’s what the UK should start doing now. First it needs to provide financial and logistical support to the Jordanians and the Syrians, as well as to other countries in the region, in order to help them to provide support for Iraqi refugees living in their midst. As Human Rights Watch has documented, refugees from Iraq (including 20,000 stateless Palestinians) need international support and protection, particularly inside Syria and Jordan, where many face acute hardship, a lack of access to education and health services, and discrimination.

Second, the Government should establish its own resettlement programme for Iraqi refugees. Priority should be given to those who have worked for the British authorities in Iraq, who may be particularly at risk of reprisals as UK forces withdraw. One former Iraqi employee wrote in an e-mail in February: “Most of my old CPA, FCO, and DFID colleagues are disappeared, killed or moved out of Iraq, I do not think that I or my family have much luck here in Basra.”

Third, the UK needs to review its approach to Iraqi asylum seekers already in the UK. Hundreds of Iraqis have fled the violence and insecurity of Iraq only to be caught up in the legal and bureaucratic nightmare of the British asylum system. According to the Refugee Council, thousands have been denied asylum since 2003. Of those, almost a hundred Iraqi Kurds have been forcibly returned to northern Iraq on the grounds that it is stable there and they face no risk. The rest are waiting in the UK without any clear legal status until the British Government deems that the rest of the country is safe enough to consider returning them home, too.

Finally, a demonstration of the British Government’s willingness to help Iraq’s neighbours cope with the financial and human refugee burden must be combined with intense diplomacy to convince Jordan and Syria, in particular, to keep their borders open for Iraqi refugees. Both countries already host as many as one million Iraqi refugees each, and both have recently taken measures to close their borders or to restrict residency permits for Iraqis.

Continued British inaction could result in a breach of the most fundamental principle of international refugee law – that refugees should not be forcibly returned into the hands of their persecutors – with all its tragic and horrifying consequences.

It may be too late for this British Government, with its US partner, to succeed in making Iraq a safe place for Iraqis to live in or return to any time soon. But it is not too late for the Government to address a massive refugee crisis that is a direct or indirect consequence of its actions in Iraq.

The author is London director of Human Rights Watch

UK Must do More to Ease Iraqi Refugee Crisis

Ellie Keen — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 23:37:52 +0000

The Iraqi refugee crisis is reaching breaking point, said a new Amnesty International report today following a research mission to Syria and Jordan which host the bulk of Iraq’s refugees. Help from the international community has been ‘seriously inadequate,’ concludes the report, focusing particularly on countries like the UK which participated in the invasion of Iraq and hence ‘carry particular responsibilities to Iraqis’.

The report, Millions in flight: the Iraqi refugee crisis, commends the Syrian and Jordanian governments for largely keeping their borders open to date but accuses other states of doing too little to help them meet the needs of almost two million Iraqi refugees whom they now host. As a result, the two countries are taking steps to tighten border controls and so cut off the main escape routes for people fleeing from sectarian and other violence in Iraq.

The new report highlights the ‘negative measures’ employed by some countries, identifying the UK as forcibly returning more Iraqi refugees than any other country in Europe. The organisation opposes forcible returns to any part of Iraq, including the North, noting the persistence of violence and instability and the potential for civil war to spread to the Northern Governorates. It also criticises the UK policy of cutting-off support to refused asylum seekers who cannot return home, a policy that has left some Iraqi asylum seekers destitute.

Amnesty International UK Director Kate Allen said:

‘The international community has largely ignored the plight of millions of Iraqis displaced inside and outside Iraq.

‘With Syria and Jordan now preparing to tighten border controls, desperate people fleeing violence and death threats may have no escape route available.

‘It’s staggering that the UK is sending people back to Iraq when it should be helping Syria and Jordan to cope with this refugee crisis. As one of the countries involved in the invasion of Iraq, it has a moral obligation to help those displaced by the bloodshed that has followed.’

Amnesty is also co-hosting an event at the Labour Party conference, Iraqi refugees: our responsibility? with Human Rights Watch and the Refugee Council. The event is at 12.45 on Monday 24 September at the Wessex Hotel, Bournemouth. An Iraqi man who served with the coalition forces in Iraq and is now seeking asylum in the UK following threats against him will be speaking at the event.

At least four million Iraqis are now displaced and their numbers are continuing to rise at an estimated rate of 2,000 people per day, making this the world’s fastest growing displacement crisis. Syria now hosts 1.4 million Iraqi refugees and Jordan 500-750,000 – making up 10% of Jordan’s population – while 2.2 million people are displaced but still remain within Iraq.

Kate Allen said:

“The international community – including the UK – must do more to assist Jordan and Syria by providing increased financial, technical and in-kind bilateral assistance and by accepting greater numbers of especially vulnerable refugees for resettlement.”

‘The modest steps taken by the international community simply do not measure up to the magnitude of the crisis.’

Although many pledges for assistance have been made, some have not yet been honoured and the level of support delivered has been seriously insufficient given the actual needs on the ground.

Amnesty International is also calling for on-going assistance to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), as well as national and international humanitarian organisations to enable them to continue to provide and expand their current work to protect and assist Iraqis in need.

The report criticises the slow pace of resettlement of those considered most vulnerable among the Iraqi refugees in Jordan and Syria, including victims of torture and other grave abuses. It notes that between 2003, when the US-led invasion toppled Saddam Hussain, and 2006, the number of Iraqi refugees who were resettled in third countries fell by more than a half, despite rising political violence. According to UNHCR, 1,425 Iraqi refugees were resettled in third countries in 2003 but only 404 in 2006.