My old friend Dan Hardie, whom I met at university and haven’t seen for many years, pops up on blogs from time to time to have arguments with people with whom he disagrees. (They can get quite heated.) But now he’s turned his attention to starting a political campaign, which I want to publicise here, and to support.
The British have been occupying Basra and a chunk of Southern Iraq for four years now. During this time, lots of Iraqis will have worked in one way or another for the occupying forces. And those Iraqis are now the targets of local death squads: see here, for example, for details of what’s been happening to people who have worked as interpreters.
Incredibly, it seems that the British Government is not willing as a matter of course to grant refugee status and asylum in the UK to these people. Dan wants us to write to our MPs to ask that they be promised this status immediately. Whether or not you thought the war was ever a good idea, whatever you think the future of British forces in Southern Iraq should or should not be, however many other Iraqis you think the British Government ought to take in as refugees in recognition of its share of the responsibility for creating the bloody mess that is Iraq today, you ought to be able to agree that those Iraqis whose lives are now at risk because of their work for the British Government in Iraq are at the very least owed sanctuary by that Government.
So write to your MP: this website can be helpful (though politicians always take letters that arrive in the mail on a bit of paper and with a stamp on them a bit more seriously). I’ll be sending my letters off to the two Oxford MPs tomorrow.
And Dan’s original post [here], which provides more details, is reproduced over the fold:
Continue reading “Call for Asylum”