Nowhere to run: Iraqi asylum seekers in the UK

Introduction

The US-led and UK-supported war on Iraq, launched in 2003 and officially concluded at the end of 2011, set in motion a tidal wave of mass killings, devastation of infrastructure, destruction of social institutions and sectarian violence that is unprecedented, even by the standards of modern warfare. Yet, despite the widespread havoc wrought on Iraqi society, would-be Iraqi asylum seekers who reach fortress Europe have been met with widespread rejection and subjected to the logic of deterrence that characterises UK and, more generally, EU asylum policy. It is a situation that gives the lie to the humanitarian claims that were cited in part justification of the invasion. For, while many Iraqis have suffered and even died in their attempt to reach safety, once inside the EU or the UK, their problems do not disappear. Having asylum claims heard properly has remained a challenge for most Iraqis across Europe since 2003. Rejection rates for Iraqi claimants have remained high in the UK, despite the war – at around 83 per cent during the years 2006–2007, for instance. Throughout the bombing and the rise in sectarian and gender-based killings and violence in Iraq since 2004–2005, Iraqis’ requests for refugee status have continued to be refused at similar levels. Those who come without children can become destitute once their claims are finally rejected. Unless they agree to leave voluntarily, they can be detained and deported. Those who remain are not allowed to work. Some have died on the streets or of medical neglect, others have committed suicide. Every Iraqi without status in the UK is equally subject to the whims of a ‘deportation machine’ embedded within the heart of the state. ³

Iraqis on the run

Within the EU today, most migration regimes are governed by a similar ‘deterrence-based’ logic to the one that operates inside the UK immigration system. The war with Iraq did not lead to granting more Iraqi asylum applicants full refugee status. Their claims of genuine fear of persecution were mostly dismissed. The human rights-based norms embodied in the 1951 Geneva Refugee Convention, for instance, or in the European Convention on Human Rights, are not respected for these asylum applicants. ⁴ Even as the war started, with heavy aerial bombing of Baghdad in 2003, Iraqis were being forcibly deported from the UK. ⁵

Official justifications for detaining those who arrive and claim asylum are that only ‘tough’ official policies can put ‘bogus’ migrants off coming to the UK or the EU. ‘Preventative harshness’ has had its own casualties, including those who die following deportation and whose numbers are not recorded in any systematic way. Whether they fear religious persecution, ethnic intolerance, sexual or political violence, Iraqi Kurds, Christians, Sunni and Shia, women and men, children and old people, gay and straight, come to the EU (and the UK) to seek safety. ⁶ Very few find it.

The European Council on Refugees and Exiles (ECRE) reports that over 100,000 Iraqis applied for asylum in the EU between 2003–2007; they were ‘the largest single group of asylum seekers arriving in industrialised countries in 2006 and in 2007’. ⁷ These figures, of course, represent just a fraction of the estimated total of 2.4 million Iraqis who fled their country to seek somewhere safer to live. The UNHCR reported that, in 2007, 39,610 Iraqis applied for asylum in the EU compared with 19,496 in 2006, a 50 per cent increase in one year. ⁸ Acceptance rates of these applications were high in some countries, such as Cyprus (87.5 per cent), Sweden (82 per cent) and Germany (85 per cent), but in the UK, the acceptance rate in 2006–2007 was just 13 per cent of all initial applications. ⁹ The zero acceptance rates of Greece and Slovenia indicate an almost total failure to process claims for Iraqi asylum applicants during the same period. At the same time that flight from Iraq has continued, there has been a global push to ensure the return of Iraqis back to Iraq.

According to Amnesty International, the forcible returns of Iraqis started with the UK government:

Among European states, the UK has returned the most Iraqis, sending them to the Kurdish controlled north … Despite the worsening security situation within Iraq, the UK is known to have forcibly returned four groups of rejected Kurdish asylum-seekers to Erbil in northern Iraq in November 2005, September 2006, February 2007 and September 2007 following the conclusion of a MoU [Memorandum of Understanding] on 30 January 2005. ¹⁰

During 2010–2011, deportations continued and even increased, with greater use of charter flights. Return, even if there is civil war, is viewed as ‘solving’ the ‘refugee problem’ by taking it out of UK government hands. Refugee status itself is increasingly becoming a temporary protection measure, rather than leading to permanent resettlement and integration. ¹¹ A June 2011 UNHCR report shows that, after a drop in returns from 2008–2009, more Iraqis again started returning to the country from 2009 onwards. The UK and EU responded by increasing deportations of Iraqis back to Iraq, to the Kurdish region, from 2005 to around 2009, and most recently to Baghdad. Meanwhile, violence in neighbouring Syria pushed many more Iraqis back to Iraq for lack of security anywhere else. From February 2010 to January 2011, the UK deported around 540 Iraqis, compared with 1,140 deported from Sweden and thirty-six from Finland. Inconsistency is the order of the day for Iraqi returns internationally; during the same period, 10,600 Iraqis went back to Iraq from Syria, but just 150 from Lebanon. ¹² UK data on monthly deportations, broken down by country, are difficult to find. Even so, the UK remains a country of flight, accepting around 6,000 full refugees in 2010, which, surprisingly enough, compares favourably with most other Western European countries. Only a few, such as Malta, Belgium or the Netherlands, had higher proportional admission figures than the UK.

Experiences of Iraqis in the UK

For Iraqi failed asylum seekers in the UK, their daily experience represents an existence well below what could be defined as a decent living. Having failed in their asylum claims, they are not usually allowed to work. If they work without permission, they risk criminal charges, with the possibility that they will be both imprisoned and then also detained and deported. Failed asylum seekers’ lives are lived liminally, below the radar, yet they can always come to the attention of police and immigration authorities when something goes wrong. Very little official data are collected about their lives, their health, their homes or lack of them. Only a few support and advocacy organisations know much about their living conditions and can provide ample examples of the havoc wreaked upon them. Court cases and appeal hearings also bring such conditions to light from time to time. Some of the most important legal organisations dedicated to promoting the rights of asylum seekers and refugees have, however, gone into liquidation in the past two years or so, mainly because of delays in payment of legal aid bills by the government. Hospitals in England (though not in Wales or Scotland) will also no longer treat undocumented patients unless it is a clear-cut emergency (i.e. a matter of life or death). Failed asylum seekers are indeed aptly described as people who fall outside the law that others take for granted: ‘I’m like in prison, I can’t do anything, it’s a form of prison and, eh, it’s, it makes you stressed, it’s, it gives you stress.’ ¹³

Deportations are the worst fear for asylum seekers and failed asylum seekers alike. In the case of Iraqis, on one such occasion, it was claimed that violence was handed out to Kurdish deportees, both by the G4S guards who took them to Baghdad airport (on behalf of the UK Border Agency) and then also by the Iraqi police. In September 2010, as on other previous occasions, deportees claimed they were beaten, to the point of bleeding, and then simply handed over to Iraqi police in Baghdad airport. Some were detained straightaway at the airport; others were dumped without any possessions. Dashty Jamal, the hard-pressed UK secretary of the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees (IFIR), claimed that there were often ‘problems with their identification’ upon arrival. ¹⁴ The UK authorities have allegedly taken Iraqi Kurds to Baghdad, for instance, without first ensuring they have paperwork to get them through immigration; indeed, the very reason they are deported to Baghdad is because the Kurdistan regional government refuses any longer (since around 2009) to accept forcible deportations, following pressure from IFIR. However: ‘The Iraqi Government says it has to accept forcible deportation because of agreements it has made with European Governments.’ ¹⁵ All this takes place in a context where: ‘The UNHCR, Amnesty International, the UK Foreign Office all say Baghdad is unsafe to travel to.’ ¹⁶ A great deal of physical force has been used in deportations, including to Erbil and later to Baghdad. One mass deportation to Iraqi Kurdistan took place in 2008 and was described in the following terms:

The asylum seekers arrived at Erbil airport at 3am … When they landed they were confused, tired and did not know where they had landed. When they refused to leave the plane the Home Office guards called the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) guards. Approximately twenty five KRG guards with guns boarded the plane. The KRG Guards pushed and threatened the asylum seekers off the plane on to two waiting coaches. From the airport they were transported to Ain Kawa Bridge. (Ain Kawa is a small place near Erbil.) They were left under the Ain Kawa Bridge, many of them injured and all having lost their luggage (including their mobile phones). ¹⁷

In 2010, Robert Fisk reported in the Independent on honour killings and documented cases from Iraq, including one where a 17-year-old girl, Rand Abdel-Qader, was beaten to death by her father in 2008 for apparently being infatuated with a British soldier. ¹⁸ Despite plenty of evidence, including in Home Office country information, women from Iraq seeking asylum face disbelief from immigration officials in having their stories of threat and violence taken seriously. Dependent Iraqi children are often deeply disturbed by the experiences they have had, both in Iraq and then also in the UK, for example in detention. Problems that they have faced have often included religious and social persecution, torture, sexual violence, intercommunal violence and threats against their close relatives. Following their flight, they are damaged further by experiences inside the UK (and EU) asylum regime.

Unsurprisingly, recorded cases of self-harm and death from ‘deterrence’ increased after 2003, with the massive increase in Iraqis fleeing to Europe. In 2004, for instance, one unidentified Iraqi man set fire to himself in London, fearing deportation, and died. Another Iraqi, Akop Mahmood Ahmed, committed suicide in Coventry shortly afterwards, and a third Iraqi man, Hemen Mahmood Faqia, drowned himself in the Tyne in Newcastle after agreeing to ‘voluntary repatriation’. In December 2004, a fourth Iraqi, Razgar Hassool Hamad, died of hypothermia after being forced to live rough. ¹⁹ A few months later, Ramazan Kumluca, aged just 19, was found hanged at Campsfield detention centre, having committed suicide after his third asylum claim was refused. ²⁰ Almost every Iraqi who ever sought asylum in the UK fears being sent back to Iraq. In the view of Dashty Jamal of IFIR, ‘sending people back to a place where there is a war going on and people are dying of cholera’ is not only risky, but against basic human rights principles that nobody should be deported at the risk of torture, disappearance or death. Jamal further commented that, of one group of Iraqis deported in 2007: ‘One of those … from Britain has committed suicide since returning and another was killed in a car bomb in Kirkuk.’ ²¹ ‘Campaigners … named the man killed by the car bomb as Solyman Rashed who accepted voluntary repatriation last month after spending 15 months in detention’ in the UK. ²² In an article exploring the vulnerability of asylum seekers, Emma Stewart explains how many (especially single) men prefer to remain invisible, opting for ‘a kind of “informal asylum”, outside the purview of the state, because they do not trust state officials to make fair or accurate decisions on refugee status’. ²³

To avoid detection, detention and deportation, Iraqi failed asylum seekers live lives that are precarious and often very painful. A few voluntary organisations, like churches, community groups, human rights and humanitarian NGOs, support them, as well as their own Iraqi support organisations. Some legal and medical professionals do work to help failed asylum seekers, including Iraqis. The Iraqi anti-deportation campaign has benefited from support from those who, as well as having a political concern with the war, also got to know Iraqis themselves through schools, neighbourhoods, churches, mosques and other means. ²⁴

The end of asylum in Europe?

The message to keep away has ‘worked’ to a large extent, in that many fewer Iraqis come to the UK to apply for asylum. But, interestingly, not only are Muslims vulnerable, but also Christian Iraqis. Two Early Day Motions submitted to Parliament in the UK, on Sabian Mandaeans and other minority religious groups in Iraq (EDM 1166) and on Christians in Iraq (EDM 1117), ²⁵ both pointed to serious human rights violations of the Sabian Mandaeans, the killings of Catholics during Mass and the mistreatment of minority women and children, tortured and raped because of their religious background. Most Iraqi Christians are either dead or have fled, with Iraq’s Assyrian-Chaldean community, who were more than 95 per cent of Iraq’s Christians, in exodus. Yet, what was proposed by EDM 1166? That humanitarian leave to remain be extended to Assyrian-Chaldean Christians? No; instead, its proposer:

urges the UK and Iraqi governments to … assist the Assyrian-Chaldeans in reclaiming their land and villages in the Dohuk and Erbil provinces, and to financially support internally displaced Assyrian-Chaldeans and the return and settlement of Assyrian-Chaldean refugees. (emphasis added)

There are few illusions now for an Iraqi fleeing to the UK that it is easy to be granted refugee status or humanitarian leave to remain. On top of being denied asylum, single Iraqis experience deliberate homelessness as a policy. The campaign, Still Human Still Here, sees a ‘situation [that] has come about partly because of policy decisions to set the bar for protection at the highest level permissible in law, and partly because of problems with a decision-making process that too often denies protection to individuals who are in need of it’. ²⁶ Vulnerability, feelings of humiliation and shame at being unable to work and avoid living on what appears like charity, have bedevilled the lives of asylum-seeking Iraqis in the UK, as elsewhere in Western Europe, and this has produced ‘success’ in terms of deterring many future applications for asylum by Iraqis, meaning that fewer now flee to the UK.

Security concerns come into the picture in a way that is more apparent than with other groups of asylum applicants. For instance, courts in the UK have had to censure the government, following evidence that an unlawful policy was being implemented between April 2006 and September 2008. During that time, foreign nationals, including Iraqis, were being detained in UK prisons so that they could be deported, regardless of whether they posed a risk to the public and regardless of their individual circumstances. The situation has been particularly serious for Iraqis because of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) first agreed with the Kurdish regional government in 2005, and later with the government in Baghdad. The dependent relationship between the Iraqi governments and the UK government meant that the MoU was generally accepted and human rights violations resulted. Following pressure from Iraqi exile organisations, the Kurdish government stopped allowing forced deportations, which resulted in Iraqi Kurds and others being deported via Baghdad. Along with Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands, the UK agreement with the Iraqi governments included clauses that sought to oblige the Iraqi authorities to accept failed asylum seekers through both voluntary and involuntary returns. ²⁷

As the Institute of Race Relations European Race Audit explains: ‘In 2009, there were sixty-four charter flights from the UK, some involving other EU member states including Denmark, Sweden and France, deporting nearly 2,000 people to countries including Afghanistan, Iraq, Cameroon, Nigeria and the DRC.’ ²⁸ An exact breakdown of the numbers of Iraqis deported suggests close co-operation between the UK and its Scandinavian and Dutch counterparts. ²⁹ Iraqis may not have been the largest group involved, but they have been one of the most vulnerable. UNHCR formal guidelines stated that Iraqis from Baghdad, Diyuala, Ninewa and Salah-al-Din and Kirkuk provinces, for instance, should not be returned to Iraq, since they continued to be vulnerable to high levels of violence and human rights violations on return. ³⁰ In spite of a UNHCR lobby in 2010–2011, forced removals to Iraq continue across Western Europe. Sybella Wilkes of UNHCR commented: ‘I would like them [EU member states] to consider that they have a minority of Iraqi asylum-seekers in their countries. And this is not a very positive example when Iraq’s neighbours have much greater numbers, and have been much more generous and welcoming.’ ³¹

Iraqi failed asylum seekers’ rights can apparently be violated with virtual impunity by the UK and other EU governments, including by some of the highest level elected public figures. The claim that British soldiers died in Iraq to make the country safer (see David Cameron’s statement at the head of this article) means that the call for deportations to cease is framed as unpatriotic, even disloyal. Instead of correcting flagrant abuses of power, violent handling of deportees and people dying from living in destitution, successive UK governments have reiterated the need to get tougher and, thus, prevent people from coming to the UK in the first place. What this rhetoric does is to delegitimise all asylum seekers on the grounds that they are a problem to be dispensed with through ever faster and more efficient systems of dispatch. Decision-making is to be improved, with an emphasis not on thorough consideration of cases and evidence, but on rapid rejection and removal. To prevent applicants from re-entering the UK, regulations have been introduced that make it illegal for some individuals to re-enter following forced deportation, for whatever reason. These restrictions can last for up to ten years, a blatant violation of the right to apply for asylum. ³²

In the light of this evidence on the Iraqi experience in the UK, it sometimes seems that the British (and European) tradition of offering a refuge to those fleeing from war and persecution is all but dead. The former Labour government’s ‘new asylum model’ (introduced in 2008), with, for example, its use of fast-tracking and more detention and ankle-tagging, and its curtailment of appeals processes, has so speeded up the asylum process that sometimes applicants have left the country without being legally represented at all. Longer-term asylum claimants in the UK, who may have waited eight or even ten years for an initial decision, now come mainly under the ‘legacy’ system, introduced to clear up the backlog of unresolved asylum claims in the UK. A few Iraqi families and individuals have been able to remain in the UK in this way, but many were deported before this scheme was introduced or did not qualify under it.

Once final appeals or procedures are refused, a family or individual becomes subject to detention at almost any time and can be subject to a forced removal order back to their country of origin. Only occasionally do protests and appeals for clemency for Iraqis facing deportation result in a reversal of the decision to deport. In most cases, representations make a difference only to individuals on charter flights, but the charter goes ahead. In 2007, Baza Ahmed Abdullah, aged 31, was in Colnbrook Immigration Removal Centre awaiting deportation. He explained to a Guardian journalist:

I come from the Iran/Iraq border. If I go back, the Islamic groups will kill me. My wife’s family were Muslims. We ran off together but the family found out and we were shot. She died. The immigration system here won’t listen. They just say we are a danger to the public. If I go back, someone will kill me. ³³

Iraqis represent a particularly vulnerable group in Western Europe during and since the war, targeted by the media as terrorists, or potential terrorists. What was happening in Iraq was seen as their fault rather than the chaos engendered by a civil war unleashed by the full-scale military invasion of 2003. A strange ‘dissonance’ developed between the horrors of UK foreign policy and the claims of the Home Office that Iraqis applying for asylum could go back to Iraq and be safe. Exclusionary control mechanisms, established to ensure that all those with asylum claims who were rejected would leave the country, also had an impact on Iraqis who were unable to go home without risking death. They had no housing, no permission to work, access only to emergency health care and, in some cases, no access to education. Surveillance of Iraqis as a suspect population did not extend to caring what happened to them. ³⁴

Defending the right not to return

Iraqis have been trapped in no-man’s land, squeezed between a war in Iraq initiated by the same government that is fighting to control immigration through deterrence. Right now, for Iraqis, it does seem there is nowhere to run.

However, whenever Iraqis have been subjected to the exclusionary and deterrence-orientated controls implemented by public and private authorities, they have also had some support in challenging the right of police, immigration officials and education authorities, for instance, to exclude them. Those seeking asylum and fleeing persecution are, in theory, protected by the Geneva Convention and do have rights that should be upheld through legal defence and representation. Although the ‘logic of exclusion’ operates at EU-wide level and among EU governments, including in the UK, lawyers and other bodies, including NGOs and advice organisations, also seek to challenge the violation of the rights of failed asylum seekers, and help them when they fall into destitution, detention or are faced with the threat of deportation back to danger. ³⁵

One key organisation that speaks up on behalf of Iraqis in flight, including those in detention or facing deportation, is the International Federation of Iraqi Refugees, which makes representations, for instance, to the UNHCR and was able, in its opinion, to influence the Kurdish government in Northern Iraq to stop accepting returned deportees through the main airport at Erbil. A sign of things to come may be that the UK government has now been successfully sued several times by those illegally detained by Her Majesty’s Government.

Yet, those who advocate for undocumented people and failed asylum seekers are finding themselves subject to a process of ‘creeping criminalisation’. In France, it is already illegal to assist undocumented migrants, and, across the EU, solidarity-based pro-asylum advocacy is being redefined as undesirable, suspect, even illegal. ³⁶ Pro-asylum advocates working with irregular migrants, or supporting destitute people and trying to keep them out of detention, get them out or prevent them from being deported, are in danger of being viewed as beyond the pale, in that their actions are interpreted not as defending human rights, but as ‘facilitating’ the illegal residence of people, whether in the UK or elsewhere in the EU. This scenario casts human rights and refugee rights advocates as akin to gang bosses! The change in mood is expressed in the creeping surveillance of solidarity networks, something formally justified with reference to a 2002 EU Directive and Framework Decision entitled, ‘Strengthening the penal framework to prevent the facilitation of unauthorised entry, transit and residence’. What Liz Fekete calls ‘unacceptable solidarity’ is being gradually criminalised, so that:

the threat of prosecution now hangs over those who take part in direct action in support of the refugee sanctuary movement or hunger strikers, those who provide housing for the undocumented or refuse to provide information to the authorities on their residence status, those who expose conditions within detention centres or simply defend the rights of detainees. ³⁷

If she is right in this assessment, then Iraqis involved in advocacy for the rights of other Iraqis, or non-Iraqis who seek to defend all those facing destitution, detention and the threat of deportation, may soon be viewed as criminals themselves, just like those they have sought to defend.