Those with knowledge of the Serbian arms deal said they knew of no specific crimes, but warned that with so little transparency and such poor oversight, problems were likely to emerge, as they did with the 2004 deal.

So no actual problems, just the hint of problems to come! It’s a whole new form of predictive journalism over there at the NYT.

All I can think of, however, is that there’s something vaguely yet deeply ironic about one country that we invaded buying arms behind our backs from another country that we invaded. Gosh, anybody would think that the international arms trade was riddled with corrupt practices that undermine efforts to establish transparency and accountability in developing countries, and clearly that can’t be right!

I’m proud to say that I knew Rupert before he became a big vlogging star and sold out to The Man - he directed our award-winning (ahem) short film “Tracks”, back when we were in short trousers. For a while I was worried that he would drop out of film-making completely, but he came back from a completely unexpected angle - using his mobile phone camera to shoot and edit short films about his life.

Video-blogging can easily turn into navel-gazing, but he managed to avoid this when he started out by posting what were essentially comedy sketches about a movie geek trapped in a dull office job in his dad’s company. The fact that Rupert was in fact a movie geek trapped in a dull office job in his dad’s company only made the sketches funnier. And sadder. But mainly funnier.

Now he’s all growed up - married to Kate, father of Amy, and no longer working in the dull office job - and his vlogs focus on his real life as opposed to his fantasy life. It’s great stuff, mainly because his slightly manic delivery makes for compelling viewing, but he’s also just a great bloke. Witness one of his recent posts, where he laments the annihilation of the local Post Office and interviews his local PO manager Mrs Patel.

The Minute wishes him the best of British in the New World. Please do keep videoblogging - I would join you, except my cellphone is nowhere near as flash as yours.

A small number of Iraqis - fewer than a dozen, according to people close to the operation who are in contact with me- were removed from Iraq in the early autumn of 2007. Since the Prime Minister’s admirable declaration of October, how many Iraqi ex-employees have been evacuated from Iraq? According to all the Iraqis that I am in contact with: none.

Aside from the usual bureaucratic obstacles, which are understandable but objectionable when people’s lives are at risk, Dan describes how

… the policy itself is being used to keep out Iraqis who can prove that they worked for British forces, and who can prove that their lives are at risk as a result. One man, Hamed, worked for British forces on Shaibah Logistics Base for over two years, as the Government accepts. He was threatened by the militias, and gunmen went to his house, so he moved his family to Syria and slept on the base’s floor. He continued to work for the British. Hamed finally was given ‘notice to quit’ Shaibah when the base closed, and fled to Syria, where he cannot legally work and where he and his family are safe (so far) but hungry. The British Government knows who Hamed is. A British Army NCO who knew him has confirmed every detail of his story to me, saying that he knew that Hamed had reported the threats against him to the military authorities. The Government has written to Hamed to reject any claim for help, since he was ‘not directly employed’ by the military.

My last post on Mark Steyn drew a number of comments, one of which accused me of “moral self righteousness” and being a “traitor to reason”. Presumably my interest in saving the lives of those threatened with death - solely because of their own willingness to defend an embryonic democracy, however flawed, and provide for their families - is part of that complex. However if you are also a self-righteous traitor, perhaps you’d like to contact your MP to try and save some lives.

Write a letter to your MP, c/o The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA. If you don’t know who your constituency MP is, go here and type your postcode in. When you’ve sent a letter, follow it up with an email: his or her address will normally be SURNAMEINITIAL@parliament.uk - for example BROWNG@parliament.uk. Two or three days after you have written the letter, call the Parliamentary switchboard on 0207 219 3000 and ask for your MP’s office. Repeat your concerns to the secretary or research assistant you speak to (and be nice: most of these people work damn hard for little reward), check that your letter has been received, and politely request that the MP ask questions of Ministers and reply to you. In your email, your letter, and your phone calls, you must be courteous: insulting an MP or a research assistant will discredit this cause. Talking points for the letter are on Dan’s blog.

So far, the campaign has resulted in the Government changing its policy - but the changes weren’t comprehensive enough and are not being implemented quickly enough to make a difference to many of our former employees. So there’s a need to keep up the pressure on the government in order to secure further changes and a more rapid response. Dan has therefore proposed the following:

Your MP’s address is The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA. His or her email address is probably SURNAMEINITIAL@parliament.uk (eg BROWNG<at>parliament.uk ). Please use the talking points below to send an email and a print letter to your MP, and chase them for an answer. And be courteous: an insulted MP will not raise this matter with Ministers, and that will lead to more avoidable deaths. When you get an answer, email me at danhardie.blog<at>gmail.com and let me know what they said.

I agree that it seems egocentric for me to ask you to put your MP in touch with me: but what alternatives do we have? I am in direct contact with Iraqi employees pleading with me to do something to help them. I cannot help them. Members of Parliament- including David Miliband- need to read what these Iraqis are saying.

If you want to take part in this campaign, then you may find the following information useful. However I urge you to read up on the situation for yourself and make your own judgement - this is important not just for individual lives but for the precedent it sets.

• On October 9th David Miliband announced that the British Government would assist former employees in Iraq, so long as they had worked for it after 1st January 2005 and for 12 months or more. That abandons several hundred Iraqis who have been targetd for murder because they worked for the British before that date- and in 2004 fighting between the Mahdi Army and the British was at its peak- or because they worked for less than that period, often leaving their jobs at the end of a British battalion’s six-month tour. The British Government must help Iraqi employees on the basis of the risk they face, not according to an arbitrary time stipulation. This only affects a few hundred Iraqis, whom we are well able to shelter, and for whom we have a direct moral responsibility.
• Even those Iraqi employees who qualify for assistance are not being properly assisted. Iraqis in Basra are not able to apply via the British Army in Basra Interational Airbase, since it is ringed with militia checkpoints. Iraqi ex-employees in Damascus are being screened by Syrian policemen guarding the British Embassy and delayed by lengthy bureaucratic procedures when they apply for asylum, although many of them are illegally overstaying their Syrian visas and face deportation back to Iraq.
• A blogger called Dan Hardie is directly in touch with a number of Iraqi employees via email and phone. He is willilng to brief MPs- as concisely as possible- either over the phone or via email. He can be reached at danhardie.blog@gmail.com.

With all that in mind, what exactly is at stake here? Who are these people that we’re campaigning for? Below the fold, you can read about some of the discussions that Dan has had with former UK government employees in Iraq who have been affected by this situation - and who are not being helped by the current government policy.

I’ve had emails from three people who claim to be - and who almost certainly are- Iraqi former employees of the British Government. All three say that they and their former colleagues are still at risk of death for their ‘collaboration’.

We’ll call the first man Employee One. He worked for the British for three years: ‘I started in the beginning of the war with Commandos (in 30 of March 2003) then continued with 23 Pioneer Regt, and in 08 / 07 / 2003 I have joined the Labour Support Unit (LSU)’. His British friends knew him as Chris. The British Government has announced that he can apply for help if he can transport himself to the British base outside Basra, or to the Embassies in Syria or Jordan. It doesn’t seem to occur to anyone that there might be problems with this. I can email and telephone this man: so can any Foreign Office official. It should not be impossible to verify his story and then send him the funds he needs to get to a less unsafe Arab country. But that is not happening.

Here’s an email exchange we had the other day. My questions are in italics.

1) Are you still in Iraq?

‘Yes, I’m still hidden in somewhere in the hell of Basra.’

2) Is there any reason you cannot travel to the British Army base at Basra Airbase to ask for asylum?

‘Of course, we cannot travel to BIA (Basra International Airbase) due to the militia keep watched all the ways to BIA and they got their own fake check points there although, we claimed for asylum through the internet (we sent our application to the claim office at BIA) . But we afraid that the British are going to take a long time to process our claims also we are very worried if they will offer just some money instead of asylum, please sir inform all the British people that we looking for asylum and just the asylum will save our lives, also we can’t travel to Syria anymore to claim for asylum there as the Syrian government issued new conditions for Iraqis who want to travel to their country.’

3) Can you tell me how and when the militias threatened you?

‘In 2006 I have threatened by militia that hated me because I work and help coalition forces in Iraq, I told my bosses about that but they said we can’t do anything for you because we have nothing to do with civilian and we don’t have any army rules or orders to help you, then I continued my daily work with British army, few days later the militia attacked my house trying to catch me but I was at the work at that time, they beaten my family and told them: we want your son or we will kill all of you!!!!

‘Since that day I decided to leave my job and change my home place but until this moment the militia trying to find and kill me, I’m always changing my place trying to hidden from them, they know that I left my job but they don’t care, they just want to kill me they called me collaborator and traitor and they asked everybody know me about my place, they told them: anyone know anything about (name) he should tell us immediately and also they said: we will never give up until we catch (name). They work for ministry of interior so they controlled most of government departments and they work under that cover.’

4) Do you have any family members who are also threatened by militias or who depend on you? If so, how many of them are there and how old are they?

‘Of course, my family depends on me especially in the finance side as I’m the older son between seven sons and daughters they got, on other hand my parents cannot working as they are very old.’

Employee Two is in Syria, and is applying for aid from the British Embassy in Damascus. He can prove that he has worked for the British for over 12 months, after the magic date of 1st January 2005. But he still isn’t safe.

He is staying illegally in Syria, having considerably over-run the 15-day visa on which he entered the country. He’s been obliged to get forms for asylum or resettlement aid from the Syrian Government security men who guard the British Embassy. He tells me ‘If I see any syrian officer i really get fear , becuase of my expired visa.’ The British Government, which asked us to accept that it was invading Iraq in part because of its horror at the brutality of the Ba’athist dictatorship, is now perfectly happy to leave its own former employees to the mercies of Syrian Ba’athists.

Colleagues of this man are also hiding in Damascus and are even worse off than he is, because they don’t meet the perverse and arbitrary time stipulations. He writes: ‘I know 4 former interpreters worked less than a year (for the British: DH), but they went to the embassy and they filled the paper with out telling the guards we had worked for less than a year. The syrian guards have got instructions from the embassy (British Embassy in Damascus: DH), that (they) do not give that form to any interpreter who worked for British less than a year or any former interpreter who worked in 2003 and fled to syria before 2005.’

Employee Three sent me copies of his Army ID card and photos of him with smiling Scottish soldiers. He worked for the Army in 2003, who then recommended that he work for Erinys- a private security firm which the British Government hired to form an Oil Protection Force. Both when working for the Army and when working for the British Government’s proxies, he was identified as a target by the militias. The British Government made him a death squad target.

That same British Government will not be giving him any kind of assistance; not even a small cash handout to help him live elsewhere in the Middle East. It has announced that it will not help any Iraqi whose direct employment ended before the 1st January 2005: that Johnson Beharry was awarded the Victoria Cross for acts of courage in May and June 2004, when the Mahdi Army attacked the British and were fought off with many hundreds of casualties.

Bear in mind that letters, faxes and phone calls to MPs do work. You can get all the contact details for your local MP from theyworkforyou, and you can write to them online at writetothem. Tell other people about this at church or at work, wherever, or write a letter. Here are some bullet points for a letter - don’t send it unchanged, you can edit it so that it reflects your own views. If you write to your MP, include your full address (including the postcode) to indicate that you are a constituent.

Bullet points:

• David Miliband’s Statement on ‘Iraq: Locally Recruited Civilians’ of 9th October stated that Britain will help to resettle- in the wider Middle East, or in the United Kingdom- Iraqis who can prove that they have worked for this country’s soldiers or diplomats for a continuous period of twelve months.
• Hundreds of Iraqis have been targeted for assassination for having worked for this country. Some have worked for a period of twelve months exclusively for the British and can prove this. Some have not but have been pinpointed for murder anyway. We have a responsibility to save these people from being murdered for the ‘crime’ of working for the British.
• There are a lot of local employees who fled their jobs before 12 months precisely because they had been targeted, or who did a 6-month tour for one British battalion and were then told to go and work for the Americans, or who did 12 months or more with interruptions, or who the Army didn’t give proper documentation too.
• Iraqi staff members must be given shelter not because of their provable length of service but according to whether they have been identified for murder by local death squads. This can be investigated on the spot by Army officers and referred rapidly to London: the process needs to start now.
• Mr Miliband’s statement did not mention the families of Iraqi employees. As Iraqi militias also murder the families of their ‘enemies’, we must resettle our employees’ families as well. Mark Brockway, an ex-soldier who hired many Iraqis, estimates that we are talking about a maximum of 700 Iraqis to resettle: this country admits 190,000 immigrants net every year.
• Iraqis have already been targeted for murder for having worked for this country. We will be shamed if we allow more to be killed for the same reason. Our soldiers, who are angry at this betrayal, and our diplomats, will be placed at risk if they gain a reputation for abandoning their local helpers.

There’s a form letter below the fold here. You can make a difference, so do it today.

(MP’s Name)

The House Of Commons

Westminster

London. SW1A 0AA.

Your full name and address.

Dear (MP’s Name)

As you will have read in the Times, Iraqis who have worked for British soldiers or diplomats are being targeted for murder by local militia. An unknown number have already been killed and more have been forced into hiding.

On October 9th, David Miliband’s statement on ‘Locally Recruited Civilians’ in Iraq said that Britain would offer assistance with resettlement for Iraqis who had worked with British forces, but only if they could prove that they had worked for us for 12 months or more. This is effectively leaving hundreds of Iraqis, who have risked their lives for this country’s forces, to the mercy of the death squads.

Mark Brockway, a former soldier who employed many Iraqis, told Channel Four News on 9th October that local staff often worked for six months for British units, during which time they were frequently identified as ‘enemies’ by the local militias. I believe that the Government has a direct responsibility for the safety of these people.

I feel that it is morally unacceptable that this country is following such a policy. I also believe it will endanger our soldiers and diplomats in Iraq and Afghanistan. Can I please ask you to write to the Foreign Office, and also to the Home Office which has charge of asylum policy, to ask why the Government is prepared to ignore the plight of hundreds of people who were placed at risk serving this country’s soldiers.

Yours sincerely

Not many birthday cards, then, for Gordon Brown or David Miliband’s from our Iraqi employees. This post could get a bit long and I could get a bit ranty, so I’m just going to focus on the main points here:

1. An assistance package has been offered to some Iraqi employees, the nature of which is not clearly defined, but seems to be limited to financial assistance. That’s the positive part, but it goes downhill from there.
2. The package will only be available to staff “who have attained 12 months’ or more continuous service”. I’m not convinced that the militia that are targeting those working for the British government are using length of service as a criteria for selection, and the government should not either.
3. In addition, the statements make no mention of the families of these staff, who are equally at risk. The offer should be automatically extended to include any members of family that staff also believe to be at risk.
4. Staff are also able to apply for exceptional leave to enter the UK or to apply through the Gateway programme for resettlement in the UK. A number of people have pointed out that this is utter bullshit - essentially the government is saying that they can apply for refugee status, a right which they already have. The point is not simply to recognise their rights, but to act on them, and quickly.
5. Former and contracted (as opposed to directly hired) staff may be covered by this offer, but the government makes no commitments in this regard. Once again, I’m not sure that the militias will make this distinction - they tend to be quite inclusive in their death-dealing.

In order to have any impact, this offer needs to be made as widely as possible - the criteria of 12 months should be withdrawn, families should be included and all categories of staff eligible. Of course this sets a problematic precedent - should any future staff also be covered by this, and will that then lead to people applying for jobs solely in order to get out of the country? Luckily I don’t have to worry about stuff like that, because I’m not the one who’s got to implement the policy.

I’m glad that the government is acting on this, but they need to act quickly and comprehensively if this is going to have any impact. As well as the rumbling of the blogosphere, the meeting at Parliament apparently went very well, the Times has been carrying sterling coverage, the BBC has weighed in, the British Army Rumour Service are on it, and there’s a MySociety-style website called weoweittothem. Even the Heavy Metal community is involved, sort of.

I knew this post would go on longer than planned. You probably stopped reading about eight paragraphs ago, didn’t you? So I’m going to break this off and tell you what you can do in a separate post. After a slice of burek and a glass of yoghurt, of course.

The venue for tomorrow’s meeting has been changed. It will still take place tomorrow (Tuesday 9th October) at the same time (7-9pm) with the same speakers in a changed venue very close to the original one: the Attlee Suite in Portcullis House. The long-suffering and highly efficient Mette Kahlin will be standing outside the door of the old venue (Committee Room 14 in Parliament) pointing the way to the new venue. To get there, walk to Parliament and find the very ugly building at the corner of Bridge Street and Victoria Embankment, facing Big Ben.

The meeting is still going ahead in order to keep the pressure up on the government. Today, Gordon Brown announced acknowledged the existence of these Iraqi staff (in his words, he “paid tribute” to them - ho ho ho) and announced a new more policy:

Existing staff who have been employed by us for more than twelve months and have completed their work will be able to apply for a package of financial payments to aid resettlement in Iraq or elsewhere in the region, or - in agreed circumstances - for admission to the UK. And professional staff — including interpreters and translators — with a similar length of service who have left our employ since the beginning of 2005 will also be able to apply for assistance.

Apparently more details will follow later this week, but the bloggers involved in this campaign will keep up the pressure to ensure that a) the government follows up on this announcement, and b) that the “agreed circumstances” that Brown mentioned are broad enough to have an impact on the lives of Iraq employees of the government.  Frankly the terms outlined above leave a nice back door for the government, since it’s safe to assume that all locally employed staff will have contracts that are less than 12 months.  Let us join together in holding Mr Brown’s feet to the fire on this one.

Oh, and Dan Hardie is not a doctor.

Let’s put it this way - they’re still dying. There was an interesting podcast on Iraqi asylum from 5Live the other day, which you can listen to here courtesy of Ministry of Truth. The podcast has words from Dan Hardie, the co-ordinator of this campaign, and Mark Brockway, a former UK soldier who hired many of the people who are now persecuted for their employment. It’s fairly depressing stuff, but what will be more depressing is if the UK government fails to live up to its most basic obligations as an employer.

The US Senate has now acted on the issue of allocating visas for Iraqi government employees, much to its credit (and against the efforts of the Bush administration, but now probably isn’t the time for scoring cheap points). Meanwhile the British government is still failing to respond to calls from various campaigners (yes, including the bloggers) to take similar steps for their employees and ex-employees from Iraq.

So the meeting at Parliament will be going ahead 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. If you want to support this campaign - and you should, because it is literally a life or death issue - Dan Hardie has a guide to how you can invite your MP, and a form letter you can use to invite them.

Although this is a complicated issue (in terms of what it implies about the situation in Iraq, and setting precedents for refugee claims) it’s not a particularly difficult one from a moral point of view. Let’s hope that this meeting starts to shift the Home Office towards taking some action - or we can expect to see a lot more dead Iraqis whose only crime was to take up a job offer.

(Details on inviting your MP beneath the fold.)

This is how to invite your MP:

1) Find your MP (start by typing 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.

They really need to think of a better title for the campaign but, as you know, I feel that there is a certain moral and legal obligation that the British government must address.

Dan Hardie has now sent around an update and a request for anybody who’s interested in supporting the campaign.  The short version follows below, and Dan has more talking points on his blog:

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.  Outline 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. 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.

That last point interested me - I hadn’t thought about it in those terms.  To me it feels like the good old days at Amnesty, but with more RSI.  Unfortunately I probably won’t be in London on the 9th - something about a mountain and some guns - but I’ll be cheering from a distance.

Clark objects to two things. Firstly, that the bloggers

who cheered on a brutal, murderous assault on a third-world country that was always going to result in mass loss of life would now like us to believe they are concerned over the fate of 91 people. But what I suspect worries the pro-war brigade most is not the future of the interpreters but that future military “interventions” may be jeopardised unless Britain promises citizenship rights to locals who collaborate.

I frankly could care less about Clark’s views on the motives of those organising this campaign. I suspect that there is almost nobody who would have been interested in his views on this issue, had he not yoked those views to his second argument. In his own words, that argument can be summarised as follows:

A group of pro-war bloggers is playing a prominent role in a campaign to grant asylum to Iraqis who have been working as translators for [an illegal occupying force]… the Iraqis in question live in real fear of their lives in their newly “liberated” country… they are paid around £16 a day, an excellent wage in Iraq… Let’s do all we can to keep self-centred mercenaries who betrayed their fellow countrymen and women for financial gain out of Britain. If that means some of them may lose their lives, then the responsibility lies with those who planned and supported this wicked, deceitful and catastrophic war, and not those of us who tried all we could to stop it.

Clark is free to air his opinions, no matter how wrongheaded, and the Guardian is free to publish them, no matter how little they contribute to the debate around this particular issue. I am less interested in the questions around free speech and editorial standards raised by the publication of the piece, and more in the astonishing absence of compassion that Clark exhibits. This is combined with his poor understanding of international law, which is ironic since his main argument against the war in Iraq is that it was illegal.

Clark’s argument is that these people should be refused asylum on the basis that “all those who aided the occupation are complicit” in a criminal enterprise. Despite what he would like his audience to believe, people’s rights under international law are generally not determined by one’s opinion of their employer, and the basic argument against Clark’s position is vanishingly simple.

Clark is very fond of lauding the Iraqi “resistance”, but if he believes that there is an organised resistance, then he must also acknowledge that the Geneva Conventions apply to them, since “all parties to an armed conflict whether States or non-State actors are bound by international humanitarian law.” The distinction between combatants and non-combatants is a basic principle of international humanitarian law, outlined quite clearly in common Article 3 of the 1949 Geneva Conventions, which states that

In the case of armed conflict not of an international character occurring in the territory of one of the High Contracting Parties, each Party to the conflict shall be bound to apply, as a minimum, the following provisions:

(1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria.

To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons:

(a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture;

and Article 48 of the 1977 Additional Protocol I.

In order to ensure respect for and protection of the civilian population and civilian objects, the Parties to the conflict shall at all times distinguish between the civilian population and combatants and between civilian objects and military objectives and accordingly shall direct their operations only against military objectives.

Interpreters are clearly not taking an active part in hostilities, and therefore are not legitimate targets for US forces, the “resistance” or anybody else. Clark does not disagree that the interpreters and their families have become targets - on the contrary, he appears to relish it. Essentially he acknowleges that they have a “well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of… membership of a particular social group or political opinion”.

Under the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, this is the basic test of whether somebody is eligible for refugee status; clearly these people meet that requirement, and the only real question is where they should be granted asylum. If they choose to apply to the British government for asylum, the government has no legal argument against granting asylum.

I’m no lawyer but it seems to me that the legal principle of duty of care means that the British government should accept liability for this claim by their Iraqi employees, since their actions have “caused a loss or harm to the individual which would have been reasonably foreseeable in all the facts and circumstances of the case.” This seems to present a fairly compelling legal and moral case for why the British government should grant asylum to those who, as a direct result of their employment, are now subject to persecution.

As far as I’m aware, there is no international law which states that “collaborators” occupy a special category which places them outside the protection of either of these two existing laws. If there were, presumably Clark would also like to see anybody who works for the current Iraqi regime kidnapped, tortured, raped and murdered, since the Iraqi government also “collaborates” with the US.

Clark believes that the “true heroes in Iraq are those who have resisted the invasion of their country”, although I doubt that his understanding of the nature of that resistance is particularly nuanced. This would, however, explain his support for a “resistance”, whose recent targets tend not to have been US forces but have included schools, hospitals, police stations and football fans (I’m not sure how the football fans were “collaborating” with the occupation, but I’m sure that Clark can furnish us with some shabby justification).

Clark stands in firm opposition to the war in Iraq - an opposition which I share, having campaigned fairly vigorously against it prior to the UK parliament’s decision to go to war, but which is the only thing we have in common. My opposition was based on my professional experience in Kosovo and Afghanistan - specifically the likely negative impact that such an intervention would have on the people of Iraq. Clark’s is based solely on knee-jerk disapproval of US foreign policy and a bizarre defence of the principle of sovereignty which has a peculiar focus on those leaders who have been accused of crimes against humanity.

He is motivated more by his desire to score political points than by any concern for the lives of people who are affected either by interventionist wars or his favoured dictators. His stance on this issue only reveals that he is prepared to sacrifice peoples’ lives in pursuit of his political hobby-horse - a position which he of course shares with his favoured dictators.

UPDATE: Neil Clark has now changed his position to say that they should be allowed in to the country, but he is now campaigning instead to force people who supported the war to pay for the costs of resettling these refugees. My only reply must be “Doh!”