UK

As any fule kno, Dan Hardie has been leading the blogging campaign to change the British government’s policy on how we deal with our ex-employees in Iraq. He’s been like an unholy cross between a workhorse and a terrier on this issue, and even though the blogging has been quite light in the last few weeks, he’s continued to lobby and network on the issue.

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.

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If you want an update, read the post below. If you actually want to do something about ensuring that Iraqi employees of the British government have the opportunity to protect the lives of their families and themselves, you should do the following (courtesy of the unstoppable Dan Hardie).

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.

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The relationship between an employer and an employee is like any other relationship. For example, if you went to your best friend and said, “Mate, I really need your help – I think somebody’s trying to kill me!” and they told you “Sorry, but we’ve only known each other for 7 months”, you probably wouldn’t be sending them a Christmas card.

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.

So where are we on the whole Iraqi translators issue?

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.)

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