Australia and refugees

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Flanagan, R. (2017, November 24). Australia built a hell for refugees on Manus. The shame will outlive us all | Richard Flanagan. The Guardian. Retrieved from http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2017/nov/24/the-shame-of-the-evil-being-done-on-manus-will-outlive-us-all

On Wednesday the UNHCR described what was now unfolding on Manus as a humanitarian crisis that was entirely preventable and a “damning indictment of a policy meant to avoid Australia’s international obligations”.

On Thursday 12 Australians of the Year signed an open letter calling on the government to restore water, food supplies, electricity and medical services to the refugees, warning it was a “human disaster that was unfolding” and that “it was inevitable that people will become sick and die”.

We should not forget the plans in 2015 for Dutton’s newly militarised Border Force officials to patrol Melbourne streets checking people’s papers, abandoned only in the face of overwhelming public anger.

Mosul Iraq

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After the liberation of Mosul, an orgy of killing

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/nov/21/after-the-liberation-of-mosul-an-orgy-of-killing

My note: what if one cannot even become a refugee? and is killed?…

In the war against Isis, they found a cause, the camaraderie of a close-knit tribe, and something akin to patriotism. They saw themselves as the defenders of the nation, warriors of a just and pure cause against an absolute evil. The cause allowed them to feel they were above the state – they did not answer to a gang of corrupt politicians in Baghdad. They have stared death in the eye many times, and that gave them the right to decide what is right and wrong.

“Sometimes we do things and we know we are breaking the law,” the commander told me one afternoon as he sat sipping his tea. He lit a cigarette and continued: “My general tells me: ‘Don’t bring me any prisoners – if you know they are Daesh, then deal with them from your end.’ My soldiers call me and say: ‘We have found a man’, and I tell them: ‘Kill him.’ I ask myself sometimes: what am I doing? Who am I to end the life of a man? I tried to consult a cleric who fights with the security forces. He said that if the prisoner was not armed, it is better to be cautious and hand him over to the state. But then who are those who are going to pass judgment on him? What qualities does the judge have that I don’t? And who appointed the judge? You’ll tell me it was the state – but who gave the state the right to rule over people? It wasn’t given by God, so I have the right to end the life of a man as much as the state has. But then, we are openly breaking the law, and if they catch me I will be strung up.” When he finished, the cigarette in his hand had burned away, and he lit another.

Like many other frontline units, the commander’s battalion had suffered heavy losses. Many of his veteran officers had been killed, and those who replaced them were killed, too. Those who survived carried the scars of major injuries, and the mental scars of a decade of war.

The commander and his men knew that the silence of guns in this ruined country did not mean peace; it simply meant the end of one kind of war and the start of another. Like those trapped in a long, destructive relationship, they were tired of this war, but feared its end much more.

 

Crimean Tatars

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HRW calls Russia an “occupying power” in Crimea, denounces persecution of Tatars

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/09/05/what-shapes-political-activism-for-crimean-tatars-the-familys-experience-under-soviet-rule-is-a-huge-factor/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/sep/29/crimean-tatar-leader-ilmi-umerov-convicted-not-seek-clemency-russia

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/nikolas-kozloff/more-than-a-year-after-annexation-crimean-tatars-need-allies_b_7235772.html

https://www.eki.ee/books/redbook/crimean_tatars.shtml

 

 

Poland and immigrants

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Klaus, W. (2017). Security First: The New Right-Wing Government in Poland and its Policy towards Immigrants and Refugees. Surveillance & Society, 15(3/4), 523–528.

https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/6627

The so called refugee crisis in 2015 coincided with the Polish parliamentary electoral campaign. The effect of it was – for the first time in Poland – the introduction of migration policy to the political agenda of the right-wing and populist political parties on a massive scale. They presented migration as an issue of security – both national and cultural, direct and symbolic.

he new government and its authoritarian style of governing has introduced a number of initiatives designed to deprive individuals of immigrant rights (like in the new so-called Antiterrorist Act from the mid of 2016, based on which every foreign citizen could be put under surveillance without any court control) or to stop refugee influx on the Polish territory in any way – directly from their country of origins

The Banality of Crimes against Migrants

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The Banality of Crimes against Migrants

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/editorial-on-crimes-against-migrants-a-1175239.html

 and  October 28, 2017

Around the world, migrants are locked up in camps, abused and often driven to the brink of starvation. Many die as a result. These crimes should finally be punished, by the International Criminal Court.

Agnes Callamard, UN Special Rapporteur on Extrajudicial, Summary, and Arbitrary Executions, presented animportant new report to the UN General Assembly on Friday. The report is on “Unlawful Death of Refugees and Migrants”

Militarized borders have soon been deployed against migrants on the fault lines between the “developed” and the “developing” worlds.

Australia has introduced windowless and allegedly un-drownable rafts to push refugees back to foreign shores. In 2015, European countries sought and obtained a UN Security Council Resolution to use force against smugglers in the Mediterranean, a extraordinary measure clearly signaling the unprecedented militarization of border controls.

Australia has struck agreements with Nauru and Papua New Guinea and used private corporations like G4S and Ferrovial to host and run camps of indefinite and inhumane detention. The EU has used Turkey and, most lately, Libyan militia to ensure migrants don’t make it across the Mediterranean.

The US Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) is increasingly accused of ‘torture-like’ practices in support of the Government’s deportation imperatives. Some of its detention facilities are also privately run.