How UK Foreign Investment Creates Refugees and Asylum Seekers
Public seminar held 8 December at the Kurdish Community Centre, 11 Portland Gardens, London N4

Report by journalist, David Morgan

This was an ambitious attempt to recast the public agenda on asylum and immigration policy in order to focus on questions of the economics of asylum, why people leave their homelands and the responsibilities of host countries reluctant to accept the newcomers despite the demonstrable benefits they bring in terms of labour, skills and enrichment of culture.

The event, which attracted an encouragingly diverse audience of about 100 people on a wet Sunday afternoon, marked the beginning of the latest initiative from the Ilisu Dam Campaign (IDC), which successfully challenged the government on public financial support for a project that would have led to the destruction of the ancient city of Hasankeyf.

An objective of the seminar was to begin to draw together besieged asylum communities, such as Kurds, Tamils and Afghanis, as Europe-wide state sponsored intolerance takes an increasingly ugly turn, and link them up with NGOs and individual solidarity campaigns active in the crossover fields, such as development, environment, human and asylum rights. It would use the experience acquired from the coalition forged around the IDC to contribute to current debates on asylum which has dominated the political agenda for some time.

It was entirely appropriate that the seminar should be held in the Kurdish Community Centre, itself still in the process of being rebuilt after an arson attack some years previously; the Kurds representing one of those marginalized communities deliberately singled out for stigmatisation by a rabid press bent on stirring up prejudice. Diyari Kurdi, from the Kurdish Community Centre, warmly welcomed the seminar participants and paid tribute to the IDC which had more than any recent campaign highlighted the plight of the Kurds in southeast Turkey. The threatened submersion of Hasankeyf under the proposed Ilisu Dam was symbolic of the mistreatment of the Kurds and attempts to obliterate their culture from history.

Fazil Kawani, from the Asylum Rights Campaign, himself an Iraqi Kurd resident in Britain for more than two decades, chairing the first session, set the tone of the discussion by stressing the topicality and importance of the subject. The rights of asylum were basic to human rights and it was necessary to get to the root causes of the apparent rise in asylum seekers. He invited people to imagine what it would be like to leave and lose one's own land, one's family and friends, and possessions, and to be ripped from one's cultural origins. In view of the negative publicity in the UK and across Europe, it was vital to see the issue in an international context to understand the real reasons why people had to risk life and limb to move. Why indeed would people leave everything simply in order to be recognised as a refugee under the terms of the 1951 Convention unless they desperately needed that protection?

Basing his observations on the facts as personally experienced, Mr Kawani, stated that refugees were normally portrayed as selfish people, moving for economic motives, but when one took into account the actual conditions in countries where most asylum seekers currently came from such as Iraq, it was understandable why people continued to seek this protection. The issues were complex and it was difficult to simplify and separate questions of economic and political distress. As long as gross violations of human rights occurred in the world people would move and we should not be surprised at this steady trend. As long as lives were put in danger it did not really matter if people were fleeing civil war, politics, human rights abuses or economic impoverishment.

He pointed out that the 1951 Convention was the only international instrument in law available to protect refugees. The adoption of minimum standards by all governments was needed to prevent persecution of people as minorities, women and the like, but it was double standards that operated in international relations and until this changed there would always be refugees.

Marta Hinestroza, the first speaker, was a human rights defender and lawyer just arrived from Columbia where she has been fighting for the rights of peasant farmers displaced from their land to make way for a BP pipeline. Marta described how she has been working since 1993 to obtain redress for displaced farming communities now forced to scrape out an existence on the urban slums while their lands had been destroyed by the developers. When BP embarked on the project in 1991 there was no requirement on them to carry out a social and environmental impact assessment of the likely effects in local people. In the event, pipeline did not respect existing housing, water resources and the local economy based on farming, mining and fishing. In 1995 a second pipeline was a catastrophe for many people and representations were made to government, but nothing was adequately resolved. The government opts to protect the interests of multinationals like BP rather than the needs of its own people, Marta said. Paramilitaries are enlisted by the brutal regime in order to intimidate those who stand in the way of its policies. Indeed, Ms Hinestroza herself became the victim of paramilitary forces herself who visited her home on 26 October this year and threatened to kill her.

Today a pipeline corridor of 100 metres either side was protected by the national army along with paramilitaries who viewed even farmers seeking to tend their crops as legitimate targets and were given a free rein to carry out their intimidation by the government. As it was simply impossible to seek redress by legal means within the country, campaigners in Colombia were forced to appeal for international action.

Ms Hinestroza pointed the unscrupulous role of BP who had hoodwinked local villagers by promising compensation at derisory levels. It was in fact BP who was creating fear among the communities and this British link to the sufferings of the people of Colombia needed to be more widely understood in this country.

Mary Dines, a veteran activist and speaking on behalf of Dr Helmandi (absent on account of family illness) from the Afghan community in London, traced the origins of the present crisis in Afghanistan to the Western, and specifically US, support for numerous Islamic factions led by unpredictable warlords including the Taliban during the period of Soviet intervention. The country was left in turmoil and no government was immediately in place after Soviet troops left, which was filled by the Taliban as part of a national uprising against the warlords. After the recent war against the Taliban, the country could have been reconstituted, but the present government lacked legitimacy as its leaders mainly came from US universities and General Dostum, one of the powerful warlords paid to remain on side by the US, was actually an Uzbek.

Mary Dines described how the drugs trade was now flourishing again in the country and how the repression of women was again on the rise. There was widespread destitution in Afghanistan today and concern about what will happen when foreign troops eventually leave. Foreign aid was mostly not forthcoming which meant that the country lacked basic infrastructure and few schools existed for example. The future looked bleak, she said. In response, it was pointed out that there were now 40 thousand Afghanis living in the UK. Developments were ongoing and despite the current situation in Afghanistan, the UK and Europe were planning a programme for the mass repatriation of Afghanis.

Azize Asan, from the Kurdish community, asked the question do we want to be here or do we have to be here? She reminded those people who were unwelcoming to asylum seekers in the mistaken belief that they were simply coming here for a better life, that Kurds, for example, were often leaving a beautiful homeland, stable families and all their possessions when they came to Europe. The UK economy was not the prime attraction, asylum seekers were looking for a safe country. To illustrate the wider plight of the Kurds, Ms Asan described the history of her own family who since the 1960s had been displaced and more than once exiled. finally to North Cyprus, just as many thousands of villages in Turkey had been destroyed by Turkish troops. There was simply no means of redress from the state in Turkey and she asked everyone to try to understand what it feels like to be unable to seek justice when the agencies of the state were both the perpetrators of the crimes and administrators of justice.

Human rights violations in Turkey were a daily occurrence when you have a government suspicious of people just for being a Kurd. Ms Asan described the incident which led to her own need to seek asylum as five minutes that have led to years of problems, (as yet unresolved in her own case). She had been teaching and had been asked by a student about the Kurds. When she replied with a true history of the sufferings of the Kurdish people, rather than repeating the required response of condemning the Kurds, she received a complaint and was threatened by soldiers who later confronted her in the classroom.

She said that Kurds like herself as well as other asylum seekers were victims of UK government policies typified by its support for the Ilisu Dam and that despite their treatment here, Kurds and others were contributing as employees and taxpayers to the country's economy. Ms Asan's comments were complemented by a brief but dramatic performance from the Kurdish theatre group, Sanoya Jiyana Nu (New Life), which movingly portrayed the desperation and vulnerability of asylum seekers coming to Europe.

Mr C K Bandara, a Tamil journalist, traced the problems in his own country to the British Empire which altered the character of the local economy to suit external needs when tea plantations were established to grow tea primarily for export. Tea was not an indigenous beverage at the time. The key issue was land and the present conflict was basically about land ownership rights. He said one resource given by the British empire was the roads that they built roads, but this was to make it easier for them to fight guerrillas, not to benefit the local population. Despite the conflict and suffering endured by Tamils for decades, it was not until the 1970s that they began to understand that they even had human rights in international law.

Free trade policies of successive governments in Sri Lanka designed to open up the country to foreign investors had dispossessed Tamil farmers and led to the conditions that gave rise to the Tigers. Today, the country does not give land back to the Tamils, rather it gives Tamil farmlands over to companies such as Tate & Lyle, who had received 18,000 acres for sugar cane. Mr Bandara stated that one third of the Tamil homeland was now under the occupation of the Sri Lankan Army who had designated it as a "high security zone". Not only were Tamils still being forced off their own lands, they did not even have the right to be buried in their own lands. In this situation it was unsurprising that large numbers of Tamils were forced to seek asylum elsewhere.

He suggested that the new campaign should take up specific issues such as the role of companies like BAT whose growing of "cash crops" was making the land infertile. He urged support for a call to end cash crop production in Sri Lanka which was a short-term financial benefit but one that marginalizes the farmer. The question of continuing bans of organisations should be taken up.

Other speakers included veteran peace activist Bruce Kent who looked at the links between war and asylum and the widening gap between rich and poor in the world which was a complex issue. He saw some signs for hope of seeking legal redress in the international court of human rights and international criminal justice. Bruce Kent was pleased to lend his support to the seminar and sympathised with its aims.

Joseph Okieno, from the Ugandan People's Congress, the largest party in his country, described the experience of being a "stateless person" refused refugee status in the UK so far, but a victim of a military regime that was actually being backed by the UK government. He described how he was recently invited to participate in a fact-finding mission to Zimbabwe but was refused a Home Office travel document to do this.

UK policy was full of double standards and hypocrisy, which was illustrated by Tony Blair's speech on a "new vision for Africa" at last year's Labour Party conference, which came as the media and ministers were getting tough on asylum seekers and singling out Nigerians and Congolese.

Akif representing the KNK in London welcomed the new initiative building on the success of the IDC which Kurds had supported. On behalf of the Kurdish community, he paid tribute to everyone involved in these campaigns. As a reason for why Kurds continued to leave Turkey, he stressed how the state was refusing to recognise even that a ceasefire has been taking place for four years now.

Following a lively discussion, Liz Fekete, from the Institute for Race Relations, chaired the second session which opened with an address by barrister Frances Webber on the process of criminalizing refugees that had been taking place long before 11/9, but which had escalated in frightening ways since that time. The profound concern was how refugee law was being undermined to deny protection to those in need of protection most of all, that is the political refugees who were now being defined as "terrorists" under the new loose definition. Terrorism had in fact been re-defined to include all forms of political direct action, at least since the UK Terrorism Act 2000. She referred to one of her own cases involving a PKK activist who had been tortured in Turkey, but who was described by the UK adjudicator as a "war criminal". Ms Webber went on to describe how the UK was deporting people to countries which carried out systematic torture and how it wanted to make refugees invisible in this country, by implementing policies which prevented asylum seekers integrating within the community. This would make it easier for the UK to export its responsibilities to third countries, such as Turkey, which would be where initial claims to asylum could in future be made.

Ann Feltham from CAAT spoke of the joint campaign organised with refugee communities against UK arms exports, including the Kurds, Chile, South Africa, Indonesia, all cases where the UK had sold arms to repressive regimes. In the public imagination, the fact that the UK was selling arms to a country abroad made that country seem respectable, even though in reality they were carrying out repressive policies. She said CAAT would continue its work with communities and expressed support for the seminar.

Nick Hildyard, environmentalist with the Corner House research group, said that millions were spent by the UK supporting murderous regimes. The IDC had been successful in exposing the role of the previously little known government department, the ECGD responsible for £4bn a year in exports and involved in exports to many of the torturing states throughout the world. He condemned newspaper headlines that referred to asylum seekers as a "welfare drain" which dehumanised refugees and colluded in the process of avoiding our government"s responsibilities for creating asylum seekers in the first place. Nick Hildyard concluded by highlighting a new campaign on the new Baku-Ceyhan Pipeline project which had serious implications for future human rights legislation. BP had forced a form of contract on the participating countries so draconian that it completely exempted itself from any liabilities and violates the basic rights of people affected. There would be a militarised corridor along either side of the pipeline where the country's usual laws would not apply. Needless to say, the UK government via the ECGD was being asked to put money into the project.

Other speakers included Hannah Griffiths from Friends of the Earth, who described how the NGO had widened its remit to include human costs of development and Teresa Hayter from Barbed Wire Britain, who argued passionately for a policy of "Open Borders", the theme of her book of the same title.

Dr Robert Biel, from the University of London, and author of "The New Imperialism", set the issues in a international economic framework and examined the changes in the global economy over recent decades. He said that today's globalisation could be characterised by a weakening of the national state sector through structural adjustment policies. A new fragmentation of labour had arisen as a result of the internationalisation of production.

Jean Lambert, Green MEP, gave a view from the European level and said that EU policies had a great impact overseas where they led to people being forced to move. One example, was the EU Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) whose subsidies were responsible for unfair competition that was impoverishing farmers in countries outside the eurozone. There was a clear link between the way people in the West led their lives and impact elsewhere, she said. Issues included debt and access to water. She called for greater transparency in dealing with asylum seekers and condemned the current UK policy of removing asylum seekers from the community, including the removal of children from ordinary schools.

Dr Siddiqui, from the Moslem parliament, also lending his support to the campaign, spoke of the criminalisation and marginalisation of the Muslim community.

The organisers were extremely pleased by the number of participants and the general interest in practical campaign work on the issues. The seminar certainly laid a strong basis for the formation of a more formal campaign in future. To take the ideas forward a further meeting to discuss where we to from here will be held in the early New Year (9 January 2003) to which all anyone interested is welcome to participate.

 

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