I am not a Doctor

I am not a Doctor, of Medicine or anything else.  Nor have I ever claimed to be a Doctor. I have indeed completed a medical training course of two weeks’ duration.  I do, in fact, research a particular commodities industry, and the journalist who just called me a Doctor in the pages of a national newspaper knows this because we first met when I brought his attention to a story about the price of building materials and the cost of the London Olympics. If he’d forgotten that, he needed to simply check with me as to my profession, or to the extent of my medical training, and he didn’t.

This is simply so that we don’t get Press Officers saying that I’m some nutter who has awarded himself a medical degree. No I’m not, and no I haven’t. I also note that I am entirely in agreement with Ministry of Defence policy, that serving soldiers should not speak to the Press without permission, and should not make political statements under any circumstances. Reservists- who include a number of MPs-  may do both so long as they do so as citizens, without identifying themselves as soldiers or doing so whilst they are in uniform, or revealing sensitive or classified military information.

How to Invite your MP

Another excuse dies the death: the Americans, or at any rate their Congress, are doing what the British Government lacks the moral courage to do. (Hat tips to these two gentlemen.)

There will be a meeting at Parliament on Tuesday October 9th, to call for the British Government to recognise its responsibilities and give shelter to the Iraqis endangered by their work for this country’s troops and diplomats. You can invite your MP.  And if you care about these people, you should. 

The more MPs we get in the meeting, the better. They are not going to listen to Mark Brockway, who is getting desperate emails from the Iraqis he hired, and walk away indifferent; they are not going to listen to Richard Beeston of the Times and decide that they can ignore this. We are going to make it impossible for the Home Office to carry on with its delaying tactics.

This is how to invite your MP:

1) Find your MP: type your postcode into ‘They work for you’.

2) Copy-and-paste or better still, adapt this form invitation below (and make any changes you want, but we have to keep these letters courteous).  Also; make sure that your address and postcode are on the letters

3) You can then either email it to your MP (email addresses for MPs take the form surnameinitial@parliament.uk- thus Gordon Brown is  BROWNG@parliament.uk ) or you can post it to ‘MP’s name,  The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA.’ If you have the time, printed letters are better than emails: and it’s not that hard to write a letter, is it? If you get a bounceback from an MP’s email address, get in touch with me  (danhardie.blog@gmail.com ) as I have a bunch of alternative contact details now, or -better still- write the print letter and post it.  Please make sure that your address and postcode are clearly written on either emails or print letters, so that the MP realises they are dealing with one of their own constituents.

4) If you are in London on the evening of Tuesday 9th October, please come along to the meeting in person. Go to St Stephen’s entrance, facing College Green (the police tend to be helpful here) and ask for admission. There will be at least one campaigning blogger at the entrance, ready to point you in the right direction: remember the meeting starts at 7pm.

Thank you- and, hopefully, see you there.

FORM INVITATION:

Iraqi Employees of British Forces – Parliamentary Speaker Meeting, Tuesday October 9th

Dear NAME

As your constituent, I am writing on behalf of ‘We can’t turn them away’, an online campaign for resettlement for those Iraqis threatened by death squads for their work with British forces. We would like to invite you to a meeting in Committee Room 14 of the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday October 9^th from 7 to 9pm .

As you may well have seen in The Times, Iraqi citizens who have worked as interpreters for British forces are being tortured and murdered by death squads for having worked with the occupying forces.

Speakers will include:

Mark Brockway (a former Warrant Officer in the Territorial Royal Engineers, who ran the

British Army’s Quick Impact Reconstruction Projects in 2003,  when he hired a great many

Iraqi staff in 2003. Mark has been in close contact with them since and knows of at least

one who has been recently murdered;

Richard Beeston, senior Foreign Correspondent for ‘The Times’ newspaper.

Ed Vaizey MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

Lynne Featherstone MP, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for International Development.

A senior Labour MP.

A number of reporters from television, the national press and BBC Radio will attend the meeting.

This is a cross-party, moral issue, on which both opponents and supporters of the Iraq war can agree. Whilst the Government has said that it is reviewing the policy, no change has yet been made, and further delay is likely to leave Iraqi employees at the mercy of the local death squads. Attendance at this event certainly does not imply any agreement with the aims of our campaign: you are welcome to come and ask searching questions, or to send a Researcher to represent you.

If you cannot come to the meeting, I would also ask that you write to the Home Secretary, and to the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne, asking for an explanation of why policy has not changed despite the announcement of an ‘urgent review’ of the matter on August 8th this year.  

Thank you very much for your time.

There’s only one Alisher Usmanov

This blog’s ex-Soviet affairs correspondent writes, in response to my request for details about Alisher Usmanov, that he is ‘one of the worst’ of the current Russian oligarchs, and notes that ‘Central Asia was infamous for its mafia even in the late soviet period’, which is when and where our boy cut his teeth.

There has been something sinister for a while now about the unchallenged ‘populist’ status given to any rich man who buys a football club.  Since at least 1986, in fact, when Silvio Berlusconi bought AC Milan. At about the same time, Bernard Tapie was attempting to use Olympique Marseille for the same reasons: buy the love of a crowd of football supporters, in the hope that you can then buy the love of further crowds of journalists and voters. It didn’t work in France, since Tapie wasn’t quite clever enough to hide his many crooked deals, but it worked for Berlusconi, for long enough to enable him to do further damage to the vandalised brothel that is the Italian State.

British millionaires don’t want to buy themselves political careers- presumably because they are smart enough to know that there are better ways to get your mitts on power than becoming an MP. But at least two shady rich men have bought themselves security by purchasing an English football club. The dumbly uncritical British media has surpassed itself in its treatment of Roman Abramovitch: aren’t there even a few questions you want to ask about how a near-penniless accountant became a billionaire in the most violent, unrestrained asset-grab of the last hundred years?

As for Mr Mohammed Al-Fayed, owner of Fulham, the dirt has already been uncovered, by Tom Bower, who wrote an excellent biography of the man. He’s a liar, he’s a thug, he’s a racist. Among the many foul details uncovered, we learned that Al-Fayed had a particular detestation for black people, often ordering his security detail (who had suspiciously close links to certain parts of the Metropolitan Police) to eject ‘fugging black bastards’ from his premises. Bower published his book in the UK, which has strict libel laws; the multi-millionaire Mr Al-Fayed, normally the most litigious of men, has never chosen to sue him for libel. Strange. Even stranger is the fact that our newspapers’ football correspondents, those tribunes of the People’s Game, have never chosen to repeat these facts (which, given Mr Al-Fayed’s reluctance to sue, is surely what they are) in any article about good old Fulham Football Club.

A nasty phenomenon is getting nastier. Usmanov is far worse than either Al-Fayed or Abramovitch. Russia, over the last few years, has seen the systematic destruction of what had been a burgeoning free media, as a company called Gazprom has bought up dissenting news outlets, changed their editorial line to one singing the praises of a the ex-KGB man in charge of the country, and fired inconvenient journalists and editors. Well, fired the ones who didn’t mysteriously fall out of windows.  And Gazprom is owned by - Alisher Usmanov.

Do you think the football-loving MPs and celebrities of the UK will mention that Arsenal should not be bought by an animal who does things like this? Do you think British journalists will feel even a twinge of sympathy with Russian journalists, or will they merely despise the fools for trying to write about genuine threats to people’s lives when they could just be obsessing about sport?

Answers on a postcard. We’ve erected a fake populist culture in this country which is all too ready to connive at bullying the powerless, and all too suited to pampering the powerful. Why does Abramovitch own Chelsea? So that if the wheel turns in Russia and Putin or his successor try to do to Abramovitch what they did to his fellow oligarch billionaire Berezovsky, and throw him in jail he can always  rely on British diplomats to plead for him to be flown to Heathrow. You think any British Prime Minister is going to ignore the screaming front pages of every tabloid in the country? And Fayed- he has never got British citizenship, for reasons that will be entirely apparent to any reader of Bower’s work- but his ownership of Fulham greatly diminishes any chance that the authorities will ever make trouble for him.

This, by the way, is the Craig Murray text Mr Usmanov’s shyster lawyers have worked so successfully to ban:

‘Alisher Usmanov, potential Arsenal chairman, is a Vicious Thug, Criminal, Racketeer, Heroin Trafficker and Accused Rapist

I thought I should make my views on Alisher Usmanov quite plain to you. You are unlikely to see much plain talking on Usmanov elsewhere in the media becuase he has already used his billions and his lawyers in a pre-emptive strike. They have written to all major UK newspapers, including the latter:

“Mr Usmanov was imprisoned for various offences under the old Soviet regime. We wish to make it clear our client did not commit any of the offences with which he was charged. He was fully pardoned after President Mikhail Gorbachev took office. All references to these matters have now been expunged from police records . . . Mr Usmanov does not have any criminal record.”

Let me make it quite clear that Alisher Usmanov is a criminal. He was in no sense a political prisoner, but a gangster and racketeer who rightly did six years in jail. The lawyers cunningly evoke “Gorbachev”, a name respected in the West, to make us think that justice prevailed. That is completely untrue.

Usmanov’s pardon was nothing to do with Gorbachev. It was achieved through the growing autonomy of another thug, President Karimov, at first President of the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic and from 1991 President of Uzbekistan. Karimov ordered the “Pardon” because of his alliance with Usmanov’s mentor, Uzbek mafia boss and major international heroin overlord Gafur Rakimov. Far from being on Gorbachev’s side, Karimov was one of the Politburo hardliners who had Gorbachev arrested in the attempted coup that was thwarted by Yeltsin standing on the tanks outside the White House.

Usmanov is just a criminal whose gangster connections with one of the World’s most corrupt regimes got him out of jail. He then plunged into the “privatisation” process at a time when gangster muscle was used to secure physical control of assets, and the alliance between the Russian Mafia and Russian security services was being formed.

Usmanov has two key alliances. He is very close indeed to President Karimov, and especially to his daughter Gulnara. It was Usmanov who engineered the 2005 diplomatic reversal in which the United States was kicked out of its airbase in Uzbekistan and Gazprom took over the country’s natural gas assets. Usmanov, as chairman of Gazprom Investholdings paid a bribe of $88 million to Gulnara Karimova to secure this. This is set out on page 366 of Murder in Samarkand.

Alisher Usmanov had risen to chair of Gazprom Investholdings because of his close personal friendship with Putin, He had accessed Putin through Putin’s long time secretary and now chef de cabinet, Piotr Jastrzebski. Usmanov and Jastrzebski were roommates at college. Gazprominvestholdings is the group that handles Gazproms interests outside Russia, Usmanov’s role is, in effect, to handle Gazprom’s bribery and sleaze on the international arena, and the use of gas supply cuts as a threat to uncooperative satellite states.

Gazprom has also been the tool which Putin has used to attack internal democracy and close down the independent media in Russia. Gazprom has bought out - with the owners having no choice - the only independent national TV station and numerous rgional TV stations, several radio stations and two formerly independent national newspapers. These have been changed into slavish adulation of Putin. Usmanov helped accomplish this through Gazprom. The major financial newspaper, Kommersant, he bought personally. He immediately replaced the editor-in-chief with a pro-Putin hack, and three months later the long-serving campaigning defence correspondent, Ivan Safronov, mysteriously fell to his death from a window.

All this, both on Gazprom and the journalist’s death, is set out in great detail here.

Usmanov is also dogged by the widespread belief in Uzbekistan that he was guilty of a particularly atrocious rape, which was covered up and the victim and others in the know disappeared. The sad thing is that this is not particularly remarkable. Rape by the powerful is an everyday hazard in Uzbekistan, again as outlined in Murder in Samarkand page 120. If anyone has more detail on the specific case involving Usmanov please add a comment.

I reported back in 2002 or 2003 in an Ambassadorial top secret telegram to the Foreign Office that Usmanov was the most likely favoured successor of President Karimov as totalitarian leader of Uzbekistan. I also outlined the Gazprom deal (before it happened) and the present by Usmanov to Putin (though in Jastrzebski’s name) of half of Mapobank, a Russian commercial bank owned by Usmanov. I will never forget the priceless reply from our Embassy in Moscow. They said that they had never even heard of Alisher Usmanov, and that Jastrzebski was a jolly nice friend of the Ambassador who would never do anything crooked.

Sadly, I expect the football authorities will be as purblind. Football now is about nothing but money, and even Arsenal supporters - as tight-knit and homespun a football community as any - can be heard saying they don’t care where the money comes from as long as they can compete with Chelsea.

I fear that is very wrong. Letting as diseased a figure as Alisher Usmanov into your club can only do harm in the long term.’

October 9th: Bring your own MP

The letters are working.  Twelve days ago I met with my MP: ‘Ah, the letters’ was almost the first thing she said. ‘We’ve all been having a lot of them, and we’ve all been on to the Home Office to get the policy changed. What are you hearing? They haven’t changed it?’ Policy is going to change, but slowly. There’s a distinct lack of speed.

What I’m hearing from soldiers who have hired Iraqi employees, and who are now in contact with these people as they flee to Syria and Jordan, or hide out in Basra, is: lack of speed is killing.  One ex-Royal Engineer told me on the phone last night about a man he recruited in 2003 who hoped to build a new Iraq, then fled the country, and then was murdered at some point in the last few weeks.

What can you do?

If you’ve already written to your MP, write or email him or her again: and this time, invite them to a speaker meeting at Parliament on the second day of the new session, Tuesday 9th October.

If you haven’t already written to your MP, please do so. You can find out about your MP here. utline what’s happening and why we should be concerned, ask them to contact the relevant Ministries (particularly the Home Office but also the Ministry of Defence and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office) and also invite them to the meeting. Talking points for both letters are below. Any blogger who has participated in this campaign is invited, and so is any blogreader who successfully invites their MP: just email me at danhardie.blog@gmail.com and an invitation will be heading your way.  Stress to MPs that mainstream print and TV journalists will be present: that is the kind of thing that tends, for some reason, to attract them. And stress that this is the first blog-based campaign in the UK: this is how politics is going, and they need to see what it looks like.

Talking points for an invitation letter- if you’ve already corresonded with your MP on this subject:

• The Government has not yet altered policy, despite calling an inter-departmental review, and in the meantime Iraqis who worked for the British are successfully being hunted down by death squads.
• There will be a cross-party meeting, organised by the online campaign for Asylum rights for Iraqi employees. It will take place in Parliament in Committee Room 14 (St Stephen’s Entrance) from 7-9pm on Tuesday 9th October. Please arrive early to avoid hideous disappointment, etc.
• The main speaker will be a British soldier who hired a number of Iraqis and is in contact with many of them now, including many who have fled Iraq ahead of the death squads: he will give an up-to-date, detailed picture of events on the ground.
• There will also be speeches by Ed Vaizey (Conservative MP for Wantage, Spokesman for Culture, Media and Sport) and Lynne Featherstone (Liberal Democrat MP for Hornsey and Wood Green, Spokeswoman for International Development), and by at least one senior Labour backbencher.
• Stress this: It will be reported by Channel Four News and probably other TV news organisations, BBC Radio Four and Radio Five Live, and by reporters and columnists from The Times, The Guardian, The Financial Times, The Evening Standard, The New Statesman, The Observer and The Evening Standard.
• The event is supported by Amnesty International, The Refugee Council and Human Rights Watch, who will all have people present.

To write a  first letter on this subject to your MP:

Use these talking points, then give them the location and timing of the meeting, and don’t forget to tell them about the TV crews.

Thank you.

Urgent: please fax the Home Office re Pegah Emambakhsh

At the risk of turning into the needy person from hell, can I please just ask everyone to have a look at this appeal by Peter Tatchell concerning an Iranian lesbian, Pegah Emambakhsh, due to be deported back to a regime which flogs, imprisons and not infrequently executes people for the crime of having consensual sex with other adults of the same gender. (If you have problems finding the relevant article on Tatchell’s site, click ‘International’).

This is all terribly late: she is due to be shunted on to the plane this Bank Holiday Monday. I became aware of the appeal only today. It means that letters are not going to get to the Home Office in time and writing to MPs is way too tortuous a process. Have a look at Tatchell’s site, grab some talking points from his ’sample letters’ and send off a fax, fAO: Rt Hon Jacqui Smith, RE: Pegah Emambakhsh- Proposed Deportation. Quote Reference number ref. B1191057. The fax number is 0207 035 3262.

And can I just say that I don’t share Tatchell’s politics either (shorter: more wars so long as I don’t have to fight them).  It doesn’t matter, it really doesn’t. The Iranian regime has got a lot nastier since Emambakhsh lost her last appeal against deportation in 2005, and is now following the approved Mugabe line in covering up for economic failure with public beatings and killings of selected hate groups, notably including homosexuals. In Iran, ’repression of homosexuals’ means not ’halfwits making poofter jokes’, not even ‘bosses firing gays’ but ‘imprisonment, flogging and occasional judicial murder’.

I was told recently that the Home Office is monitoring the blog campaign for asylum rights for Iraqi employees. Ladies and gents: hello. I hope you and your families are well. And really, putting this woman on a plane back to a place where there’s a good chance she could be jailed or flogged or hanged: It’s not necessary. It’s not acceptable. It’s not, to be blunt with you, entirely human.

Two teenaged Quislings

Today I had a lively telephone conversation with Andrew Alderson, about the Iraqi asylum campaign. Alderson was deployed to Iraq as a TA Officer in 2003, and found himself trying to make sense of Basra’s banking system; a few months later he returned to run the finances of the Coalition Provincial Authority (South).

Whatever one thinks of the invasion of Iraq, only a nihilist or a lunatic could have wanted the country’s economy left in ruins. Alderson, being neither, had been determined to provide the people of Southern Iraq with functioning power and water systems, a stable currency and decently paid employment.

I mentioned that I’d bought his book ‘Bankrolling Basra’ and was reading it rather quickly: ‘Oh, it’s meant to be a rollercoaster‘ he said. It is. There goes our hero, with millions of dollars in his rucksack and a pistol in his chinos, off to pay the dockers or the electricity workers, demanding a power supply for a wrecked factory or scheming to circumvent the procurement rulebook to get the canal system fixed. Perhaps one notes a tendency for stories to conclude with some variation of ’so I was proved right, again’, but Mr Alderson does work in the City.

What’s impressive is his emphasis that Iraqis must be given the chance to take key decisions, his determination to outsmart those British or American officials who were not prepared to let Iraqi engineers or bankers take the lead in their own country. It’s the most interesting account that I’ve read of applied finance in a poor nation  since ‘The Economist’s Tale’.

 But I just stopped reading it. This is the last thing I came to:

‘Shaimaa Falih and Likaa Falih were sisters aged 16 and 18, who worked in the CPA laundry. Both spoke excellent English and worked 12-hour shifts uncomplainingly in the tiny laundry-room area for about $350 a month. Both of them were warm and friendly girls and they’d smile and chat with us when we dropped off our laundry.

‘One evening after work they were being taken home by taxi as usual when the vehicle was confronted by four masked gunmen in a street just a few hundred yards from the girls’ home. One of the gunmen fired a bullet to stop the taxi while another tried to pull one of the sisters out of the car. She resisted and was shot in the head. When the other sister got out of the car she was also shot. The men then drove off in a getaway car. It was clear that Shaimaa and Likaa were murdered simply because they’d been working for foreigners. A few days later anonymous leaflets were left in the city denouncing the ‘traitorous’ and ‘immoral’ actions of the sisters for working with the CPA. They also threatened more attacks on Iraqi staff.’

A leaflet justifying the murder of teenage laundry girls as being an execution for treason- that means  this specimen isn’t merely a perverted cretin, but is also rather drearily unoriginal. Recall his slavering sneer, composed in between his labours as a crammer of bourgeois kids who have failed their A Levels, about the ‘excellent wages’ paid to those targeted by the death squads, and imagine what such a creature might offer in reptilian defence of these particular killings: ’$350  a month for a little laundry work? Asking for it.’

This isn’t about only ’translators’. This isn’t about just ’the 91′. This is about two teenage girls murdered because they worked folding clothes in some sweatbox, the same as I did in my eighteenth summer, murdered because they worked for people sent there by our elected representatives. It’s about safeguarding those threatened with torture and death for the same reason, those Shaimaas and Likaas who are now hiding, in fear for their lives while we welcome or bemoan the return of the Premiership and read detailed articles on ‘Big Brother.’

You can research your MP here, you can get ideas for a letter here, and when you get a reply you can let us know here. That’s ‘can’ in the sense of ’should’.  We don’t have the right to tell these people we will protect them and then abandon them to their deaths.

‘They will be treated as traitors’.

BBC Radio Five journalist Chris Vallance recently spoke to ‘Mohammed’, an Iraqi former interpreter for the US Marines. I am on the programme briefly, but the key points are made by Mohammed. Listen, please, to what he says, and listen also to the voice in which he says it.

If you haven’t done so already, you should research your MP here, and then write to them, if necessary using these talking points. Every letter to an MP so far has generated an inquiry to the Ministries concerned: the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the Ministry of Defence and above all the Home Office.

This is not solely about the 91 translators currently employed by the UK forces in Basra. Even they have not yet been guaranteed their safety despite the increase in media attention- but there are many more Iraqis facing the same threat of a horrible death for their work for British personnel. The Government must grant Asylum rights to any Iraqi who is seriously at risk of being murdered for having worked for this country.

A majority of MPs voted for this war, including such people as Hugh Bayley. They do not now have the right to announce that the price for the war will be paid in the lives of Iraqi workers, left to the death squads because a Labour Government was frightened of losing a few votes on the ‘immigration issue’.

Giving these people asylum is not our only responsibility to Iraqis. But it is the most urgent because these people are being targeted for murder, because of us, right now.

We can’t turn them away: Friday update

All new arrivals, sent here by the kindness of Neil ‘The Loony Whom Other Loonies Shun’ Clark, and looking for advice on writing to MPs about Asylum rights for Iraqi employees of the British Army: please go here first.

And now for those of you who have already written to their MPs, we have a number of things.

First, a very important point for all participating bloggers. Dsquared points out: ‘I think the phrase “Iraqi translators” is a bit dangerous, as it allows Des Browne to chew down the number of visas to the 90 people actually employed as interpreters).’

He’s right. This is a danger: not a danger that we’ll lose a point in a comments thread flamewar, but that the Government will get away with conceding Asylum rights to translators only, even if there are other employees or ex-employees (often with poorer command of English) equally at risk from the death squads. 

This is a blog campaign so it’s been completely non-hierarchical, as it should be. But I’ve consciously been avoiding the ‘Iraqi *interpreters*’ slogan, and have been using ‘employees’ or ‘refugees’ or similar terms.  

Can everyone involved in the campaign please do likewise: this is not a campaign for ‘translators’, it’s a campaign for Iraqis whose work for the British puts them at risk of murder. ’Employees’ will do fine. I know ‘The Times’ is talking almost exclusively about translators, but we can do far better than that. Thank you very much.

The most important campaign post of the last week was by Justin McKeating, who has been keeping score of MPs’ replies. Very many thanks to Justin, to whom a lot is owed, especially by me. I wouldn’t have responded the way he did to an email from someone I’d last heard of hurling abuse my way.

The most alarming post was by Tim Ireland. It’s a campaign video, its humour so black that it might have  disconcerted Jonathan Swift. Tim has also provided a button for easy downloading to other blogs and websites: easy, that is, if you’re not a technically ignorant cretin who can’t manage childishly simple business of copying and pasting a little HTML, which explains why there’s no button in this page.

The letters are getting results- MPs are referring the matter to the three Ministries concerned, the Home Office, the FCO and Defence. There’s been only one really poor piece of Government apologetics, from Hugh Bayly (Labour, City of York) - and Peter Sanderson’s letter back to him is a model of courteous but determined disagreement.

If you haven’t done so, write a letter. This was quite probably a policy of which neither the new Prime Minsister nor the new Home Secretary was really aware. The more light is shone upon it, the more they are going to recoil, disgusted, from its actual and potential consequences.

On the campaign itself: people are starting to take notice, and that brings its own problems. But let’s have a little perspective here.  What the hell are our problems to that of the average citizen of Basra, let alone one targeted for torture and assassination?

True, we might not like the sight of this or that politician, of whichever party, vocalising on our Nation’s sacred honour. We might not like The Times, which has run article after article on this matter. We might not like some of the bloggers who have written on this subject- many of whom, incidentally, have the best of reasons to dislike me. So what?

This isn’t about us. It’s about men and women hiding with their families in Basra, praying that the death squads don’t find them. We have to welcome anything that makes it harder for the Government to allow these people to be murdered.

There are two clear dangers for the translators now. One is that a decision on flying them here gets delayed by inter-departmental wrangling between the Home Office, desperate to keep the brown-skinned hordes away, and the MoD, whose civilian heads must be increasingly aware of the fury of the field commanders in Basra who are unwillingly following their orders to abandon men and women whom they know to be at risk.

The other danger is that the Government takes a Blairite line: when reality sucks, manage the perception. They might- they just might- decide to admit only a few dozen of the staff who have worked with British forces, concentrating on those who have been or might be in contact with the British media. This would be strategically foolish and morally disgusting.

Asylum rights must be given on the basis of need, to all those whose work for this country makes them likely targets of the murder gangs. Cases can and must be assessed rapidly- the best people to do so would be Army officers with experience of Iraq, liaising closely with MI5 officers to allay Home Office fears of jihadist penetration.

The Government may want to try a news management strategy, but this news won’t be managed.  The interpreters and other workers for UK forces have British friends: principally soldiers and foreign correspondents. They’ll know if the Basra death squads aren’t deprived of all their targets- and so, in short order, will we.

If a few high-profile cases are flown out of Iraq while others are left to the tender mercies of the Sadrists, Brown and Jacqui Smith will not be forgiven. This isn’t Brown’s policy, it isn’t Smith’s. It was implemented by Home Secretary John Reid under the Premiership of Tony Blair. Brown and Smith have a chance to show that they are better than Blair and Reid. If they know that they are under public scrutiny, they will be better placed to ignore the voices arguing, Alistair Campbell-like, for a strategy that manages the news at the expense of a few nameless Iraqis.

Write to your MP: this campaign hasn’t worked yet, and if it fails people are going to die needlessly and horribly.

Lunatic fringe update: What a piece of luck: the fruitcake’s fruitcake writes his fruitiest ever article attacking us! All we need now is the principled opposition of Nick Griffin.

Seriously, if the word can be used to anyone who has just attempted to read an effusion by Neil Clark: can everyone and anyone commenting on the CiF piece please include a link to a blogpost with the talking points for a letter to MPs? Link to any blog that does so, but CiF really did the dirty on us when they posted Dsquared’s article at 7pm on a Saturday. Now that we’ve got a high-profile article, thanks to dear Mr Clark, we’ve got to use it.

We can’t turn them away: responses from MPs

Skip the first paragraph if you already know about the campaign- otherwise read on. The British Government is currently denying entry to the UK to Iraqis  whose lives are threatened for having worked for British diplomats or soldiers. Some have already been murdered: many others have fled their homes and are trying to survive as refugees in Syria or Jordan, where they are turned away from British embassies. A number of bloggers, including myself, regard this as unacceptable. As a first step, we’d like our readers to write to their MPs, perhaps using the talking points laid out here. Some of the articles detailing what is happening to these Iraqis are here,  here, here, and here.

All of you can read this paragraph, though you’re not likely to enjoy doing so. Piling on the horrors is this article about the fate of an interpreter working for American troops.  Here’s an extract: ‘Living in Baghdad she got one warning note, ignored it, and was gunned down and left for dead by masked men in the alley beside her house just two days later. That was in the Spring of 2004. But May would not die.Whisked to a hospital where her identity as an American translator was revealed, she was declared dead back in her neighborhood for the safety of her family, while in reality she went into hiding.’

And here’s what eventually happened to her, something similar to what has happened to interpreters working for this country: ‘Motherhood is a strong pull though. May would leave the Green Zone fairly often, alone in her car, to go see her children for a few precious hours… While driving through the city to see her kids, May was intercepted and kidnapped by Ansar Al Sunna. Their standard tools are the AK-47, rape, and the power drill (with which they torture their captives, drilling holes through body parts until finishing them off with a drill-bit to the head). The day before the e-mail, the police found the husk of my friend’s body in downtown Baghdad. Ansar Al Sunna had taken full credit.’

Whether you are pro-war or anti-war, the occupation of Iraq was undertaken following a vote by our elected representatives. If people are being murdered for ‘working for the British’, then ‘the British’ must give them refuge.

Physically we are well able to deny these people safety- it is the simplest task to turn them away from our Embassies in Jordan and Syria. Morally, we can only do this if we wish to place ourselves beneath contempt.

Facing up to our specific duties with regards to these people does not excuse us from our wider duties to the Iraqi civilians- or British soldiers- affected by this war. But these current or former employees of Her Majesty’s Government are the people whose lives are now most endangered by our actions in Iraq. Of all our responsibilities, this is the one that must be most urgently fulfilled.

If our Government- if we - can wash our hands of these people then we can, and will, wash our hands of anyone. This must  be remembered by anyone refusing to support this campaign on the grounds that it ‘ignores the other Iraqis’. If you haven’t written to your MP, please do so. And please also take a few seconds to sign the Downing Street e-petition here.

Responses from MPs

Given that I’ll be out of the country for work reasons until the middle of August, I can’t yet share my MP’s reply. Rosie Bell, however, who also took part in the campaign, has done so, and has posted a very heartening reply from John Barrett, Liberal Democrat MP for Edinburgh West, which I reproduce below with Rosie’s permission.

Can I please ask all other people who have written to their MPs to either publish their replies on their blogs (and, if possible, let me know) or to email the texts to me, at danhardie.blog@gmail.com? If you want to redact any part of the text (your name, for example) go ahead. Even if you don’t want me to publish the letter, it would be helpful if I could have an idea of what your MP said to you.

There are two reasons for this. We will need, first of all, to see which MPs are sympathetic to this cause. If Government policy has not changed by the time Parliament  returns from the Summer recess, we will need to think about a face-to-face lobbying effort. Secondly, it is possible that MPs may be briefed by their front benches to send with stonewalling replies; some may even attempt to justify the policy. We need to identify these arguments so that they can be knocked down as speedily as possible. Thanks again to all the bloggers and blog-readers who have already taken part in this, and thanks to all those who will do so now.

John Barrett, MP, writing in reply to Rosie Bell:

‘Thank you for your email regarding your concerns about the current situation in Iraq. I voted against the initial invasion for a variety of reasons, however not even those of us who opposed the war could have foreseen just how disastrous the outcome of the invasion would be.

While Saddam Hussein was a fearful tyrant who brutally oppressed his own people, it is difficult to argue that the lives of Iraqi’s have improved for the better since his removal from power.

The plight of translators and other Iraqi’s who are working with British or coalition forces is a very serious issue that I am glad you raised. The job of an Iraqi interpreter has been described as the most dangerous job in world, and with good reason. As you mentioned, those who work as interpreters, translators or administrators for the British and American governments are often at the top of the insurgence hit lists. Once they’re identity has been revealed, it is often impossible for them to remain in Iraq and they are forced to join the approximately 2m Iraqi refugees who have been forced to flee to elsewhere in the Middle East. I believe strongly that we owe a duty of protection to those people who have risked a great deal to help our own efforts in Iraq, and to help rebuild their country.

You may have seen reports last Friday that the Danish government admitted to having secretly airlifted about 200 translators and other Iraqi employees of its troops out of Iraq under an asylum agreement offered to interpreters and aides who worked for Danish troops. As you mentioned US ambassador in Iraq has also called for all Iraqis working in support of the U.S. government to be offered refugee status. I believe the US, UK, EU and other states that have the capacity should provide resettlement programs for the refugees who are most vulnerable and at greatest risk.

The UK government announced on Friday that it was committed to looking after its troops’ Iraqi aides, estimated to number about 700, but reiterated that asylum applications would be considered on an individual basis. Often delays in visa applications are due to UK authorities needed to establish the authenticity of personal details from the applicant.

However, when individuals have been employed by and are working for the UK government, this information should be readily available and the application ought to be speedily processed. I have today written to the Foreign Secretary pressing him for assurances that we will meet our moral obligation to those interpreters and other staff who have done so much to help our own efforts to rebuild Iraq. I will send you his reply when I receive it.

I hope that this deals with the issues you hoped to raise - if you have any further queries, please do not hesitate to contact me.

Thanks again for raising this underreported issue.

Best wishes,

John Barrett MP’

We can’t turn them away

Since British troops occupied Southern Iraq in the spring of 2003, thousands of Iraqi citizens have worked for the British Army, the Coalition Provisional Authority (South) and for contractors serving UK forces. There is now considerable evidence that their lives, and the lives of their families, are at risk: some former workers for the British have been murdered, and many others have fled to neighbouring countries or gone into hiding in Basra. The British Government, for whom they were ultimately working, has not offered them the right of asylum in the UK. This is morally unacceptable. 

The most detailed recent report, by Jonathan Miller of Channel Four news, notes the murder of 17 translators in one single incident in Basra. It cites the cases of hundreds of others who have fled to a refugee existence in nearby Middle Eastern countries or are in hiding in Iraq.  The British Government response has come from the Home Office, which has suggested that Iraqis put at risk by their work for British troops ‘register with the UN refugee agency’. Other reports provide supporting detail: Iraqis are being  targeted for murder because they have worked for British forces. 

Marie Colvin’s report for the Times of April 8 speaks of desperate former workers for the British Army being turned away from the British embassy in Syria by staff who had orders not to admit any Iraqis. These brave men and women have testimonials written by British officers stating that they are at risk from jihadi violence: and yet we are still refusing to admit them to the United Kingdom.

If you feel that this is unacceptable and that Britain should prevent Iraqis from being murdered for the ‘crime’ of working for British troops, could you please write to your MP and ask him or her to press the Government for action. Updated following good advice: The best course of action is to look up your MP, if you don’t know who she or he is, on this site, and then write and post them a letter. Second best, due to MPs’ technophobia, is to use the admirably-intentioned website ‘Write to Them’ ( http://www.writetothem.com/ ).

Please be courteous when writing to your MP. It would be a good idea to read the reports above, and cite relevant facts. We would suggest that your letter could contain the following points:

• It is morally unacceptable that Britain should abandon people who are at risk because they worked for British soldiers and diplomats.
• This country will be shamed if any more Iraqis are murdered for the ‘crime’ of having supported UK forces.
• Iraqis who worked for British forces should not be told to leave Iraq and throw themselves on the mercy of United Nations relief agencies in Arab countries: these agencies are already being overwhelmed by the outflow of Iraqi refugees, and Iraqi refugees who have worked for British diplomats or troops may well be targeted by local jihadists.
• There is plentiful evidence that armed groups in Iraq kill the families of those they consider ‘enemies’: for this reason we must extend the right of asylum to the families of those who worked for us.
• It is entirely practical for this country’s troops in Iraq, and its embassies in neighbouring countries, to take in Iraqis who have worked for us and fly them to the UK. Indeed, there is already considerable anger among British servicemen that Iraqis are being abandoned in this way.
• This country is large enough and rich enough to accommodate several thousand Iraqi refugees. Denmark has already given asylum to all 200 Iraqis who worked for its smaller occupying force.
• It does not matter what your MP’s views (or what your views) are on the invasion and subsequent occupation of Iraq. People who risked their lives for this country’s soldiers are now being abandoned by the British Government. Their lives can and must be saved by their being granted the right of asylum in this country.
• This policy should be implemented regardless of whether British soldiers stay in Iraq or are soon withdrawn. But it must be introduced soon: applications for asylum cannot be processed in a lengthy fashion, as the security situation in Basra is deteriorating rapidly, and delay is likely to lead to further killings of Iraqis who worked for British troops.

If you really do find letter writing daunting, I’d suggest you copy and paste the letter below and adapt it somewhat. But you are strongly advised that the best thing to do is to compose your own letter:

Dear (MP’s name)

As your constituent, I am writing to discover your views on the treatment of Iraqi citizens who are working or have worked for the British Army, for the contractors supporting it, and for the Coalition Provisional Authority in the South of Iraq. In particular, I would like to know if you support the right of these people to indefinite asylum in the United Kingdom. I strongly suggest that they do indeed have this right. They have, by definition, put their lives at risk by the support they have given to British soldiers who were sent to war by a vote of the House of Commons.   

Whether you- or I- supported  or opposed  the invasion and occupation of Iraq is  immaterial. The risk run by Iraqis working for British troops is even greater than that run by the soldiers themselves. British soldiers are now suffering very high casualties in Iraq, and are continuing to serve bravely- but their local staff are obliged to live among neighbours who will, in many cases, be sympathetic to or even belong to the armed groups fighting the British army. We owe these people a clear moral debt. We cannot allow them to be murdered for the ‘crime’ of helping our service men and women.

The most effective way of helping these brave Iraqis is to offer them indefinite right to remain in the United Kingdom. There is plentiful evidence that armed groups in Iraq make a practice of murdering not only their ‘enemies’ but their families too: and for this reason we must extend the right of asylum to the families of those who have worked with us. This policy should be enacted immediately whether our forces stay in Iraq or are soon withdrawn. Applications for asylum cannot be ‘processed’ in a lengthy fashion: the situation in Basra is deteriorating, the ability of British soldiers to protect those that work for them is seriously compromised and any delay is likely to lead to the murder of Iraqis who have worked for the British military. I would appreciate your views on this matter.Yours sincerely
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