I’m a human. I know the fear

May 20, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg 2 Comments

The governor of Texas recently declared a state of legislative emergency. The emergency is sanctuary. Cities in Texas are declaring themselves `sanctuary cities’ or are acting as such, and that somehow threatens Texas.

The Texas House of Representatives leapt to action and dutifully passed a bill, HB 12, that would effectively outlaw sanctuary zones. The moment the bill passed, House Representative Ana Hernandez Luna requested to speak to the body, as a matter of personal privilege.

Representative Luna explained that she, her sister, and her parents had come to Texas from Mexico. The family overstayed their visa and lived in the shadows until the 1986 amnesty was signed, by Ronald Reagan. In the intervening twenty-five years, Ana Hernandez Luna attended and successfully completed grade school, college, law school, and was elected to the House of Representatives at the age of 27.

Representative Luna began her remarks by articulating the new version of W.E.B. DuBois’ color-line: “I’m not an alien. I’m not a problem that must be handled. I’m a human.”

She then described the new, and not so new, world order: the politics of fear: “I remember the constant fear my family lived with each day.”

And then Ana Hernandez Luna found it difficult, impossible, to simply speak the words. Tears began to flow, as she struggled to speak: “The fear my parents experienced each day as their two little girls went to school – not knowing the there would an immigration raid that day – and they wouldn’t be able to pick up their daughters from school – and not knowing who would take care of them if that were to occur . . . . The daily task of going to the grocery store to buy groceries might seem a simple task to you, but to us it was a death sentence, that one of my parents may be deported. . . . I know the fear.”

The Texas Senate managed to gut the bill, but the fear persists. Twenty-five years after receiving amnesty, after twenty-five years of steady work and accomplishment, Ana Hernandez Luna still lives, immediately and viscerally, with the knowledge of the fear and with the fear itself.

The politics, and the politicians, of fear dream of a world without sanctuary. Some say that when it comes to prison reform, to addressing mass incarceration, money trumps civil rights. When it comes to children, whose access to `civil rights’ is already tenuous, fear trumps sanctuary. It’s a war zone.

Seven years ago, Else Temesgen and her daughter Betty, who was seven at the time, fled to the United Kingdom. Else was fleeing, first, an abusive husband and, second, a situation of certain separation. Else is Eritrean-born, and her daughter is Ethiopian-born, and so, if the two had returned to Ethiopia, the mother would have been deported. They arrived in England and immediately applied for asylum.

The two were detained in a variety of centers before, finally, receiving asylum. Else describes Yarl’s Wood as “very horrible.” Asylum only came because of the intervention of a prominent local politician. Otherwise, they would still be in the shadowlands of immigrant detention … or worse. They know the fear.

The politics of fear sows only tears. Twenty-five years after coming out of the shadows, Ana Hernandez Luna lives with the knowledge of fear, a shared knowledge, a knowledge whose borders are expanding, and weeps. Twenty-five years from now, how will Betty tell the story of her sojourn in Yarl’s Wood?

What exactly is the nation-State that would be threatened by sanctuary? Sanctuary is not an emergency. If anything, sanctuary is holy. Sanctuary is a time and space in which the human can be recognized and sustained. “I’m a human.”

Sanctuary haunts the State of fear.

(Video Credit: YouTube / Texas Impact)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Ana Hernandez Luna, asylum, color-line, Dan Moshenberg, Else Temesgen, Eritrea, Ethiopia, fear, Haunts, holy, human, immigrant, immigrant detention, prison, sanctuary, Texas, United Kingdom, United States, WEB DuBois, Yarl's Wood

Let them eat pesticide

May 11, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg 4 Comments

There are hunger strikes and there are hunger strikes.

For the past 37 days, six pro-democracy Iranian asylum seekers have been on a hunger strike outside the central headquarters of the United Kingdom Border Agency, in Croydon, in the south of London. Some had sewn their lips shut. Sewing one’s lips is minor compared to the torture all six had suffered in Iranian prisons. They had the medical evidence to prove the torture, and yet were initially denied asylum. Finally, today, after 37 days on hunger strike, the six refugees – Ahmad Sadeghi Pour, Morteza Bayat, Keyvan Bahari, Kiarash Bahari, Mahyrar Meyari and Mehran Meyari – were assured their cases would be reopened and they would at least be able to apply once again. They ended the hunger strikes, and proclaimed the struggle continues.

Sometimes, hunger strikes save lives and secure at least the glimmering hope of something like justice.

Then there are the hunger strikes that are fatal and ferocious drone strikes, assaults on the body, community, and land. Globally, over 900 million people go hungry every day. That’s down from one billion the year before, but the prospects for the next year are gloomy. Food prices are on the rise everywhere. In fact, food prices are at a twenty-year high. In Asia and among Pacific island nations, food prices are skyrocketing and food `shortages’ loom large. For example, in the Philippines, thanks in large part to marketization and speculation, rice is suddenly both scarce and overly expensive. Egypt is running out of food, as is the entire Middle East and North Africa.

But it’s not all bad news. Glencore, for example, is “a leading commodities producer and marketer.” Glencore is doing fine. Along with tons of mineral, literally, Glencore controls 10 percent of the world’s wheat, and 25% of the world’s barley, sunflower, and rape seed. Glencore takes, the world slakes. And then dies … again, literally.

Across the United States, two million men, women and children work on farms, picking by hand fresh fruits and vegetables. The US government estimates that every year 10,000 to 20,000 of those workers suffer acute pesticide poisoning.

In India, over the last sixteen years, 250,000 farmers have committed suicide. That’s one farmer every 30 minutes. And this number only includes the farmers who are acknowledged as such by the national government. Those who can’t hold title, they’re not included. Women farmers, Dalit farmers, Adivasi farmers: they don’t count in life, they don’t count in death. What killed these farmers? Indebtedness. Market liberalization. The invisible hand of the market, that hand which polished shining India, provided farmers with loans they could never pay but had to assume, with dwindling access to water, with impossible competitive demands. And so the farmers die.

And they leave behind notes, addressed to the Prime Minister, to the President, to all the lofty people who are nestled in the invisible hand that killed them.

And they leave loved ones behind. Widows. Children. Women like Nanda Bhandare, a farmer, a widow since 2008. When her husband killed himself, she had to pull her two young children out of school to work the farm. The money, if there was any, has gone to pay off the predators. The land, a small parcel, no longer provides sufficient harvest in the current economies to feed even a family of three. Who will be next to drink the pesticide in that household?

There are hunger strikes and there are hunger strikes. For every hunger strike that saves a life, even temporarily, such as that of the six Iranians in England, there are literally 900 million deadly hunger strikes. The planet is aflame with hunger strikes. Farmers are poisoned and are dying, women and children in particular are starving, and the response of the global market, and of the nation-States it supports and controls, is as it has always been. Let them eat pesticide.

(Photo Credit: http://indiatoday.intoday.in)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: agriculture, asylum, Dan Moshenberg, Egypt, farmers, food, food prices, Haunts, hunger, hunger strikes, India, Iran, Nanda Bhandare, pesticide, Philippines, prison, suicide, United Kingdom, United States, women farmers

Migrants: We are all children of migrants

March 30, 2011 by Gabriella Alberti Leave a Comment

Saturday, 5^th of March 2011.

Yarl’s Wood continues.

The women behind the fences are saying something about their children, but it is difficult to hear what exactly. They seem to be shouting something about their right to stay with their children. Perhaps they are referring to the effects of recent policy changes.

In October, a case was brought forth on behalf of two single mothers and their children who were detained at Yarl’s Wood by UK Border Agency (UKBA) officers after dawn raids on their homes earlier in the year. In December 2010, in response, the government `signaled’ its intention to bring to an end children’s detention. This included closure of the ‘family unit’ at Yarl’s Wood Immigration Removal Centre and the suspension of children’s detention in any immigration facility over the Christmas period.

In January 2011, a court decision established that the detention of some families, including children in Yarl’s Wood, was unlawful. This decision required the government to bring to an immediate end the detention of children in immigration removal centers. The immediate response from the Home Office was that the detention of families ‘would be kept to a minimum’, while officials drew up ‘alternative arrangements’ to ‘protect the welfare of children without undermining immigration law’.

We demonstrated outside Yarl’s Wood partly to denounce the government’s ‘skillful’ use of publicity about ‘ending the detention of children’ as a way of avoiding talking about the brutal and inhumane detention regime in general. But even among some of the civil society groups that have specifically supported the end of children detention, suspicions remain concerning the government’s version of “alternatives” to child detention. While the plan does not include any concrete improvement in terms of early access to legal aid for refugee applicants, it does mention the establishment of ‘new family conferences’. These would ‘draw in lawyers, social workers and others’, with the aim of providing ‘realistic advice to people who had been refused refugee status on what their options were’. For those who would not accept voluntary repatriation “it would be necessary to detain them in ‘secure accommodation’ for periods of around 72 hours to ensure that their departure could be enforced’.

Migrant Rights Network argues that the ideas of ‘family conferences’ and a new ‘independent family review panel’ is dangerous. It is quite easy to imagine that the large-scale detention of families with young children will be simply reproduced in a new form. Furthermore, these family conferences risk turning exactly those social workers and other experts who should support migrants’ children and vulnerable adults’ welfare in their communities, into immigration control functions. Those who used to work for migrants in our communities will be absorbed into the machine of control and detention, ultimately ‘advocating’ ‘voluntary’ return and deportation.

The rhetoric of the UK government around the economic recession legitimizes increasingly restrictive policies against migrants. This then naturalizes chauvinistic and militaristic approaches towards the ‘management’ of immigration as part of the ‘big society’ discourse about having to ‘share’ the consequences of the economic downturn. Of course, `they’ must pay more than `us’. The politics of racism and gender discrimination are fully at play in this era of mobility restrictions and economic austerity.

Walking back from the fences we discuss the contradiction of today’s migration politics and how grassroots groups should respond to it in practice. Yes, we will probably have to support migrant’s individual demands for regularization but cannot afford to support the whole policy/ing logic based on the continuous differentiation of migrants, the production of multiple divisions, between the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’, the more and the ‘less vulnerable’, those who ‘deserve’ integration and those who do not, or simply the right to access that which seems to become an ever increasingly ‘precious good’, conceded by national governments in Europe, that is, the status of ‘legality’.

Many women currently detained in Yarl’s Wood have worked and toiled in this county already for many years. They are fluent in English. They have kids here. Here they have built their lives. This makes us particularly angry and astonished in front of the injustice of their detention, but it does not change the unconditionality of our claim: freedom of movement for all. Everyone, independent off period of stay and status, whether escaping poverty or war, environmental disaster or political persecution, gender or racial oppression, has the right to freedom of movement, and freedom to stay and search for a new life. After all, as we would remind the small group of police engaged in their performance of ‘protecting’ the prison from us, we are all the children of migrants.

(Photo Credit: womenagainstrape.net)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: asylum, asylum seekers, children, detention, Gabriella Alberti, migrant children, Migrant Rights Network, Migrants, United Kingdom, women asylum seekers, women migrants, Yarl's Wood

We can’t talk to the imprisoned women, but we can chant with them

March 21, 2011 by Gabriella Alberti 2 Comments

Saturday, 5^th of March 2011

It is wet and foggy in the fields of Bedfordshire and our shoes fill with mud as we walk away from the group of policemen that have followed us in a circle along the fences of Yarl’s Wood migrants’ detention centre. This Saturday, the 5th March, as women demonstrate in London at the start of International Women’s Week, a group of migrant rights, no border and feminist activists travel to Bedford to bring our solidarity to the migrant women (and men) detained in Yarl’s Wood. We manage to reach the women locked in one of the units. At a distance, we can’t talk to the imprisoned women, but we can chant with them. We cannot hear exactly what they say but one message arising across the barbed wires is simple, loud and clear: ‘freedom, we want freedom’.

Yarl’s Wood is one of the seven privately run ‘Immigration Removal Centres’ in the UK, detaining ‘irregular migrants’ on behalf of the UK Border Agency. Initially the building accommodated 900 people in two blocks, making it the largest immigration prison in Europe. In February 2002 the capacity of the centre was reduced after one of the buildings was burnt down during a protest organized by detainees against staff harassment. At present the centre is composed of 4 units ‘hosting’ about 400 people.

In February of last year, the situation in the removal centre again exploded. The horrible conditions of detention were denounced by migrant detainees as some women decided to start a hunger strike demanding an end to indefinite and abusive imprisonment. In an attempt to end their protest, the management subjected many of the women to violent attacks and various forms of punishment. At that time six women detainees, accused of being ‘ring-leaders’, were moved into isolation and prisons.

On the 25^th January, after almost a year in Holloway prison, Denise McNeil, one of the `leaders’, was granted bail at an immigration court. Two women still remain in jail without charge: Aminata Camara and Sheree Wilson. Activists from the campaign to Free the Yarl’s Wood 3, including members of No One is Illegal, No Borders, Crossroads Women’s Centre, Communities of Resistance, Stop Deportation Network and members of the RMT, filled the court for Denise’s bail hearing. They provided an important support and will keep campaigning ‘for Sheree and Aminata and all the people in Yarl’s Wood until the centre will be closed’. (For updates, see Free the Yarl’s Wood 3 campaign Facebook page http://www.facebook.com/pages/Free-Denise-Now/174533002581566 and Twitter feed: @freedenisenow. Also see the NCADC site: http://www.ncadc.org.uk/campaigns/DeniseMcNeil.html).

The reasons for the detention of people in centers like Yarl’s Wood are multiple, and sometimes quite different. One of the activists involved in the campaign to support the hunger strikers explained to me that many of the women who end up in detention have already served a prison sentence, often for a minor offence, such as using fake documents to travel or work. Rather than being released, these women are transferred back to detention as a ‘second punishment’ where they wait for their immigration case to be cleared and eventually granted status or deported. They are trapped in an indefinite space of juridical and existential limbo, from one prison to the other, on the grounds that their migration case is still ‘pending’: they cannot be returned to their country of origin (on complex juridical or humanitarian grounds), and yet their status as asylum seekers is not recognized either.

Denise has just been released on bail, and her status, as well as her future stay in the UK, remains uncertain. However, her case shows how important the external support of migrants’ rights activists to sustain legal individual cases can be by helping access legal advice and to build publicity around their otherwise invisible stories. While it may appear only a small achievement, these forms of solidarity provide the migrant women with encouragement and help instill confidence as they engage in the hard battles for freedom of movement and the right to stay in a country where they have worked and toiled for many years. In many cases the women are ‘caught’ by the UK Border Agency after many years of residence in the country, where they have probably built a family, found work and made a home. This is a typical story for the women detained in Yarl’s Wood.

(Photo Credit: Open Democracy / IndyMedia.UK)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Aminata Camara, asylum, asylum seekers, Communities of Resistance, Crossroads Women's Centre, Denise McNeil, Free the Yarl's Wood 3, Gabriella Alberti, Guinea, immigrant detention, Jamaica, migrant women, Migrants, NCADC, No Borders, No One Is Illegal, RMT, Sheree Wilson, Stop Deportation Network, United Kingdom, women asylum seekers, women prisoners, Yarl's Wood

Black women prisoners haunt International Women’s Day

March 8, 2011 by Dan Moshenberg 2 Comments

BobbyLee Worm

Stacey Lannert grew up in the middle of the United States, in Missouri. Her father sexually abused her, starting when she was eight years old. On July 5, 1990, at the age of 18, Lannert walked into her father’s bedroom and shot him, twice, killing him. The `final straw’ was her father raping her younger sister. Two years later, in December 1992, Lannert was sentenced to life in prison without parole. In January 2009, at the age of 36, Stacey Lannert was released, thanks to the outgoing Missouri governor, Matt Blunt, who commuted her sentence: “After eighteen years, I was allowed to be Stacey Ann Lannert instead of Offender #85704. I’ll never completely shed the number, but I did start over.”

Wilbertine Berkley would like to start over as well, but the State of Florida has other plans.

In the United States, over five million people cannot vote because of past criminal offenses. One million of those people live in Florida. In one state alone, a million people who have served their time are disenfranchised. Of that million, almost 300,000 are African American.

Wilbertine Berkley is a Black woman in Florida who struggled with drug abuse, spent time in jail, turned her life around, joined a program, got clean, went to college, and gave back to the community in volunteer work. She was awarded the Presidential Volunteer Award. She did everything she was supposed to do and more, and the State response has been to `alienate’ her, to identify her as frozen in the past. Her good work counts for nothing.

Tomorrow, Wednesday, March 9, 2011, the Florida Board of Executive Clemency will vote on whether to make it even more difficult for former prisoners to be re-instated. The proposed change would include a five-year mandatory waiting period before being able to apply for `clemency’. Florida’s Attorney General sees this as a fight against entitlements: “I believe that every convicted felon must actively apply for the restoration of his or her civil rights and that there should be a mandatory waiting period before applying. The restoration of civil rights for any felon must be earned, it is not an entitlement…The burden of restoring civil rights should not fall on the shoulders of government, but rather it should rest on the individual whose actions resulted in those rights being taken in the first place.”

Wilbertine Berkley wants and deserves respect for who she is today, for who she has become, for what she has made of herself and of her world. She made a mistake. She worked hard. She paid her debt.

But for Black women, the debt of incarceration is the gift that keeps on giving.

Ask BobbyLee Worm. BobbyLee Worm is a 24 year old aboriginal woman prisoner in the Fraser Valley Institution, a Canadian federal prison that describes itself as “a multi-level facility for women…. Programs focus on the particular needs of women offenders, including Aboriginal inmates and those with psychological problems or learning disabilities.”

One of these particular programs is called Management Protocol.

Management Protocol is “a special program for handling women prisoners who have been involved in a major violent incident or threat of incident while in the system.” Established in 2005, seven women prisoners have been on Management Protocol. All seven have been aboriginal women.

Management Protocol is open ended, unrestricted solitary confinement. Twenty- three hours a day for as long as the prison deems `adequate’ and `necessary.’ How does one leave Management Protocol? One earns one’s way out. How does one earn? What are the wages? No one knows.

BobbyLee Worm entered prison June 7, 2006. She is a first time offender, sentenced to six years, four months. She has spent the majority of her time in segregation, paying off the debt of years of physical, emotional and sexual abuse and trauma. For Black women, the debt of incarceration is the gift that keeps on giving.

These stories are typical of the conditions of women, and girl, prisoners around the world. Girls whose only `crime’ is being the daughters of asylum seekers, or of being born into oppressive communities, are stuck into detention centers, such as the Inverbrackie Detention Center in Australia. Once there, they suffer nightmares, turn violent, and refuse to eat. What is their crime, what is the debt to society that must be paid? They were born in Iran, they sailed to Australia.

Around the world, women of color, Black women, and their daughters, sit in prisons. Their debt grows incrementally by the second. Their numbers grow incrementally by the day. Today is March 8, 2011, International Women’s Day. These women prisoners haunt International Women’s Day.

(Photo Credit: British Columbia Civil Liberties Association)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: asylum, asylum seekers, Australia, Black women prisoners, BobbyLee Worm, Canada, child prisoners, Dan Moshenberg, debt, disenfranchisement, Florida, Fraser Valley Institution, Haunts, International Women's Day, Inverbrackie Detention Center, Iran, Management Protocol, prison, segregation, sexual violence, solitary confinement, Stacey Lannert, United States, vote, Wilbertine Berkley, women prisoners

Their mothers haunt more than the future

October 29, 2010 by Dan Moshenberg 4 Comments

Peace Musabi

Asylum seeker Jimmy Mubenga is dead, killed by G4S `escorts’ on a plane taking him from the UK to Angola. His wife, his widow, Makenda Kambana, weeps. Their five children weep. The State announces, a bit later, that the contract with G4S has not been renewed. The reason given? Cost efficiencies: “G4S is understood to have been paid tens of millions of pounds a year under the current deal, which expires in April. Removals between 2005 and April 2010 cost the Home Office almost £110m.” Apparently the rent is too damn high.

The cost is born by many, the dead and their intimate survivors first and perhaps last. Makenda Kambana is now a single mother of five children, alone, and still a political target. If children, as we are told so often, are our future, what are mothers?

Ask Irma Medrano, a 44 year old Salvadoran woman. In 1995, she fled an abusive husband. She was twenty nine years old at the time. She left her two children behind with relatives. In the subsequent fifteen years in the United States, Irma Medrano has given birth to two children. She is the mother of a twelve year old daughter, a nine year old son, both of whom are United States citizens.

Medrano’s family reports that her Salvadoran husband has heard that she is to be deported and has begun coming around, looking for her. The court decided to ignore this. Her US-born children are heartsick at their mother’s imminent disappearance. The court has decided that her children would not suffer extraordinary hardship if she were to be deported.

Finally, the court decided that Irma Medrano, despite her husband’s clear threats, faces no harm if returned to El Salvador. The court has decided that El Salvador is now safe for women, because there are more women in the legislature and judiciary, and the police are better trained. The court chose to ignore a US State Department report, in March 2010, “found rape remained widespread in El Salvador, rape laws were not effectively enforced, and domestic violence `was considered socially acceptable by a large portion of the population.’”

If Irma Medrano’s children are the future, what is Irma Medrano? In her flight to the United States, and if it happens, in her forced return to El Salvador, Irma Medrano will share a story with other asylum seeker mothers forced to leave their children behind in order to protect themselves and their children.

Women like Rahma Abukar Mohamed, Peace Musabi, Jeto Flaviah, Reetha Suppiah, Sakinat Bello.

Rahma Abukar Mohamed lived in Somalia, where she had been shot, threatened with rape, threatened with death, and injured. She fled, leaving behind her husband and child. She sought asylum in the United Kingdom, where she was summarily and `wrongly’ imprisoned, for having false papers. The reasons for her flight, the conditions of her life in Somalia, her desperate situation were all folded into her mistake of having had false papers, a mistake intensified by poor legal representation. She entered the United Kingdom on 9 August 2007. Last week, on 19 October 2010, her conviction was nullified, on procedural grounds. Rahma Abukar Mohamed was persecuted in Somalia for being a member of the wrong ethnic group. What was she persecuted, and prosecuted, for in England?

In 2003 Peace Musabi left Burundi, and left her three children, Samuel, Diana and Daniel, with a trusted friend. Musabi had to leave Burundi. Her husband had been kidnapped, her brother was beheaded in front of her, she was imprisoned, tortured, raped. She fled, pregnant from the rapes. Peace Musabi arrived in England in 2003, and, in 2007, was finally given exceptional leave to stay. She immediately began searching for her children. In 208, she was informed they had survived, amazingly, and were living in Uganda. She applied to have them come to England … and was denied, ironically enough, by the Home Office. Because of earlier procedural mistakes on the part of the Home Office and of her legal representation, Musabi was not officially a refugee but rather `exceptional’. And so she and her children had no right of family reunion. In the end, such as it is, “the immigration and asylum tribunal overturned the Home Office’s cruel refusal.” But that refusal, in the consciousness of the Home Office, was a home affirmation. What is Peace Musabi in that home?

Jeto Flaviah has a similar story. She fled Rwanda, after soldiers killed her husband, and raped and tortured her. She fled to the United Kingdom, seeking asylum. She won asylum but not the right to family reunion. Like Peace Musabi, she was `exceptional’. She still waits for her children, she still struggles and organizes everyday for reunion, she still mourns the time lost, the life together lost. What is Jeto Flaviah in the Home Office? What is asylum if she is denied forever the touch, the presence, the intimacies of living with her children?

Reetha Suppiah is from Malaysia, and Sakinat Bello is from Nigeria. They each fled to the United Kingdom, seeking asylum. The fled with their children. They were denied asylum, and immediately sent, with their children, to Yarl’s Wood, where, with their children, Reetha Suppiah spent 12 days, and Sakinat Bello 17 days. The children quickly became sick. Suppiah and Bello are suing the Home Office for the harm done to their children. That case was launched this week, Tuesday, October 26.

Children are the future. The daughters and sons of Makenda Kembana, Irma Medrano, Rahma Abukar Mohamed, Peace Musabi, Jeto Flaviah, Reetha Suppiah, and Sakinat Bello, they are the future. That future is born in asylum. That future is wrapped in death and violence and harm, all in the name and service of `asylum’. The children are the future . . . and their mothers? Their mothers haunt more than the future.

(Photo Credit: Camden New Journal)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: asylum, asylum seekers, Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, Irma Medrano, Jeto Flaviah, Jimmy Mubenga, Makenda Kambana, Peace Musabi, Rahma Abukar Mohamed, Reetha Suppiah, Sakinat Bello, women asylum seekers

And Jimmy Mubenga is dead

October 17, 2010 by Dan Moshenberg 17 Comments

Jimmy Mubenga came to England seeking asylum, seeking life. According to his wife, Makenda Kambana, he was on a government hit list, “They killed my father and they threatened to kill Jimmy. They were looking for him. We had no choice but to leave.” Earlier this week, on Tuesday, October 12, Mubenga boarded a plane for Angola, having lost his last battle for asylum in the UK. Within 50 minutes on the plane, he was dead.

Witnesses report that the guards, G4S private deportation `escorts’, jumped on Mubenga and throttled him to death. Escort deportation has become big business. Most of the 11 immigration removal centers in the UK are run by private firms, in particular G4S, GEO Ltd or Serco.

MPs are calling for an investigation, the former chief inspector of prisons as well. Many informed will raise their voices and eyebrows and hands in surprise and dismay at the violence. Charges of `excessive force’ and `brutality’ are heard across the land.

But Jimmy Mubenga is dead. As are …

Kenyan asylum seeker Eliud Nyenze, who collapsed in April this year at Oakington detention center, run by G4S. Nyenze complained of intense pain, so bad he was reduced to crawling around on the floor, begged for painkillers, and was denied any sort of medical attention. He died in excruciating agony.

Manuel Bravo, an Angolan asylum seeker who in September 2005 was found dead, hanged, in Yarl’s Wood.

Joy Gardner, a Jamaican woman applying for compassionate leave to stay in Britain, killed in front of her five year old son and her mother, September 1993.

These are the prominent, the recorded, names that have come up in discussions of Jimmy Mubenga’s death. Their deaths, the manner of their deaths, the impunity of those who killed them, is said to haunt the story of Jimmy Mubenga. The passengers on that British Airways flight are described as “haunted by the last cries of a dying man.” Understandably. The nation is haunted.

But Jimmy Mubenga is dead, and will remain so. He is not haunted by the past, but his name, his death, is haunted by the future. He is haunted by those who continue to seek asylum.

On Wednesday, October 13, the day after Jimmy Mubenga was killed, Malawian Florence Mhango and her ten-year-old daughter Precious were again blocked from receiving asylum. Precious is seeking asylum because she and her mother fear that if returned to Malawi, by law her estranged father can force her into marriage.

On Thursday, October 14, it was announced that the four-year ban on repatriating Zimbabwean failed asylum applicants would be lifted. Why? Because the Unity Government of Zimbabwe has worked. That many, including the Zimbabwean diasporic and overseas communities, believe that the situation is worsening, that a bloodbath may very well be imminent, is of no matter. That Robert Mugabe, on Friday, called for national elections whether or not the constitution has been passed, is of no matter. That the violence continues is of no matter.

What is important is that the Zimbabweans be sent back, be sent out. Take EM, an MDC member raped and beaten by policemen in her own home, send her back, because she has failed the test of asylum. Take Pauline Enagbonma, an albino woman who fears for her safety as an albino in Zimbabwe, and send her and her three young children back, children who have spent the majority of their lives in the UK. Take Nokuthula Ngazana and her famous 18 year old daughter Gamu, and send them back. Nokuthula Ngazana came to the UK, with her daughter, to study. Home Office claims she filed for visa extension “out of time”, and since Gamu was listed as her dependent on the application, she too must leave. Send them all back, along with all those whose names go unrecorded.

Seize them and you shall seize the day.

Send them all back for they have failed the test of asylum. In the protection of the State, there is no excessive force, there is no brutality. Those notions, like Nokuthula Ngazana’s application, are out of time.

Precious Mhango haunts Jimmy Mubenga, Gamu Nhengu haunts Jimmy Mubenga. The tens of thousands of children, of women and men seeking asylum and those who in the future shall seek asylum in the United Kingdom, they haunt Jimmy Mubenga.

And Jimmy Mubenga is dead.

(Photo credit: irr.org.uk)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Angola, asylum, asylum seekers, Dan Moshenberg, Eliud Nyenze, EM, Florence Mhango, Gamu Ngazana, Haunts, Jimmy Mubenga, Joy Gardner, Manuel Bravo, Nokuthula Ngazana, Oakington, Pauline Enagbonma, Precious Mhango, United Kingdom, women asylum seekers, Yarl's Wood, Zimbabwe

The children of Afghanistan haunt the modern democratic nation-State

October 11, 2010 by Dan Moshenberg 1 Comment

Children of asylum seekers and children who are asylum seekers in prison. What is their crime? Seeking asylum. These are children fleeing violence, in their households, in their communities, in their countries of birth. And how do `we’ respond? Prison.

Australia is bracing for a serious uptick in children in detention mutilating themselves: “Self-mutilation in Australia’s detention centres is increasing with the number of recorded cases quadrupling in the past year and mental health experts bracing for worse to come as children begin cutting themselves.” Why are the children cutting themselves? The prisons are becoming more overcrowded, the time spent in prison is increasing, and government officials are `promising’ increased rates of deportation. Who are these scoundrel children? Afghans. Sri Lankans.

According to Harry Minas, director of the Centre for International Mental Health at the University of Melbourne, the conditions for imprisoned asylum seekers and immigrants is returning to the dark days of 2001 – 2003, “when children drank shampoo and detainees sewed their lips together.” All of this has happened before, and it is happening again. We are told the first time it was tragedy.

Why are children cutting themselves? There is no school, there are no sustaining structures, there is no home life, there is no community, there is no future, and, increasingly, there is no past. There is only prison. From the State, there is only the promise that the rate of deportation to Afghanistan will increase. For the children, there is only threat and more threat.

The children are cutting themselves, they are poisoning themselves, because they are children, and self-harm is the only electoral process allowed them by the modern democratic nation-State. There are currently around 700 children in immigrant detention `facilities’ in Australia.

These children of asylum-seekers, these children asylum seekers are viewed as budget targets, as opportunities for greater efficiency. In Britain, it was announced today that “thousands of child asylum-seekers are to be removed … under savage budget cuts being drawn up by the Home Office ahead of this week’s comprehensive spending review. A briefing document sent to ministers sets out detailed proposals to remove child refugees before they reach 17 years old, and recommends bearing down on benefits given to asylum seekers…. Of greatest concern will be a policy of mass removal of unaccompanied children before they reach 17 and a half, the age when they are deemed to be adult asylum-seekers. Under current rules unaccompanied child asylum-seekers are usually granted leave to remain in the UK until they can make a fresh asylum application as an adult. There are more than 4,200 unaccompanied child asylum-seekers in Britain, with most being supported in local authority social services homes.”

The opportunity for economy here, for efficiency, is great. It is so great that the United Kingdom is willing to invest £4m in a `re-integration center’ in Afghanistan. The children of Afghanistan have traveled far, to seek asylum, to seek haven, to escape the violence of the Big War and the myriad forms of violence of the more intimate wars of the everyday. These children shall be returned to Afghanistan, after having been subjected to the democratic rule of law and of due process.

The planes are waiting, the ministers are promising swift, increasing, and ever more efficient returns. The children who have come asking for help will be returned to Afghanistan because Afghanistan is a better place … for them. It must be. It has been democratically decided. Those children who have not been allowed to kill themselves shall be sent `home’. The modern democratic nation-State is bracing itself for mass removals, for bearing down, for the mutilation of children. The children who seek asylum and the children of those who seek asylum have been targeted. The children of Afghanistan haunt the modern democratic nation-State.

(Photo Credit: Australian Human Rights Commission)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: asylum, asylum seekers, Australia, children, Dan Moshenberg, Democracy, Haunts, prison, UK

Asylum haunts the modern democratic nation-state

October 8, 2010 by Dan Moshenberg 1 Comment

Pagani detention center, Greece

Asylum haunts the modern democratic nation-state. Asylum haunts the principle of democracy by positing a citizenship of higher order than that of the national variety. This asylum citizenship is based not in identity, not in birthright, not in lineage or kin, not in relationship to the nation-state. Instead, asylum citizenship is based in the conditions of life, in need, in a will to survive, in a demand for dignity. The asylum citizenship is the unknown and unknowable stranger who demands recognition as a familiar. Asylum citizenship is of a higher order because it has given up on the structures of power and the logic of the nation-State. It is neither a superior citizenship nor a more powerful one nor a wealthier one. Nor is the asylum citizen more privileged. Asylum citizenship is of a higher order because it has always already been with us, and so precedes the noise of national sovereignty and of national due process, as it exceeds the furor and the hurly burly of the rule of law.

Asylum haunts the modern democratic nation-state because it puts the notion of demos in crisis. Asylum haunts the democratic nation-state because it preceded the nation-state. Asylum does not participate in the nation-state historical narratives of progress, those stories that make the invention and maintenance of the nation-state the pinnacle of civilization. For thousands of years women, men, children have sought, received or were denied asylum. They continue to do so today. This seeming eternal repetition of the same does not mean that those who seek asylum today are somehow `primitive’. Asylum as an aspect of the human condition is no more inevitable than torture or genocide, and no less historical or historically produced.

Women asylum seekers haunt the democratic nation-state because they demonstrate, forcefully, the violent patriarchy that reigns supreme. Children of asylum seekers haunt the democratic nation-state because they also demonstrate, forcefully, the violent patriarchy that reigns supreme. They step out of the shadows, ask for help, and they are punished. For women asylum seekers and for their children, the modern democratic nation-state is a tight knit and tighter fisted brotherhood, and women asylum seekers and their children are not brothers.

How does the contemporary democratic nation-state respond to the asylum citizen? Prison. Yarl’s Wood, in the UK. T. Don Hutto, in the US. Villawood, in Australia. Lindela, in South Africa. Pagani, in Greece. Via Corelli, in Italy. Opbouw, in the Netherlands. Vottem, in Belgium. Glasmoor, in Germany. The list goes on, the construction of new `reception centers’ continues, the cells continue to grow more intensely overcrowded. This is the way the modern democratic nation-state recognizes, understands, absorbs, responds to and resolves asylum. Sequestration. Intimidation. Torture, `if necessary’. Expulsion. The nation-state calls these reception centers, residential centers. And so, this must be the architecture of reception and residence in the modern democratic nation-state.

Fifteen years ago, Jacques Derrida was asked to discuss the ways in which the French population was “taken by surprise” by immigration of the sans-papiers, the undocumented: “Immigration is no higher now than it was a half-century ago. Yet today it takes people by surprise. It seems to have surprised the social body and the political class, and it seems that the discourses of both right and left, by refusing illegal immigrants (immigrés clandestins), have degenerated into xenophobia in an unexpected way.”

Derrida replied, in part, “A politics that does not maintain a reference to the principle of unconditional hospitality is a politics that loses its reference to justice. It may retain its rights … but it loses justice. Along with the right to speak of justice in any credible way. …One would have to try to distinguish between a politics of immigration and the respect to the right of asylum. In principle the right of asylum … is paradoxically less political because it is not modeled in principle on the interests of the body proper of the nation-state that guarantees this right. But … it is almost impossible to delimit the properly political nature of the motivations for exile – those that … justify a request for asylum. After all, unemployment in a foreign country is a dysfunction of democracy and a kind of political persecution. Moreover, the market plays a part in this; the rich countries always share in the responsibility (if only through foreign debt and everything it symbolizes) for the politico-economic situations that push people into exile or emigration. And here we touch on the limits of the political and juridical:…a right of asylum can be null or infinite.”

From the perspective of asylum, in the modern democratic nation-state, there is no right, there is no left. These niceties are irrelevant. Instead there is only unconditional hospitality … or there is none. And where there is none, there is injustice. More precisely, there is the loss of justice and the loss of the `right’, the capacity, to speak of justice credibly. Xenophobia cannot credibly surprise anyone, it is the national democratic politics of false hospitality. The particular `indignities’ visited upon women asylum seekers cannot surprise anyone. They are manifestations of the patriarchy that reigns supreme in the violent and violating absence of unconditional hospitality.

(Photo Credit: UNHCR / EU Observer)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: asylum, citizenship, Dan Moshenberg, Democracy, Glasmoor, Haunts, hospitality, Jacques Derrida, Lindela, nation-state, Opbouw, Pagani, T. Don Hutto Residential Center, Via Corelli, Villawood, Vottem, women asylum seekers, Yarl's Wood

Azbaa’s anguish, Auden’s blues

August 21, 2010 by Dan Moshenberg 2 Comments

Azbaa Dar

Pakistani born Azbaa Dar is being held in Yarl’s Wood. On Monday of this week she reported, dutifully, to the Liverpool office of the UK Border Agency. She has been applying for asylum for nine years, and as part of the process, she has to `visit’ the UKBA offices regularly. At this visit, she was given a letter denying her asylum. She was then taken to Yarl’s Wood and told she was to be returned to Pakistan.

Azbaa’s family had been turned down for asylum on Easter 2006, after a five year asylum process. Her father, Arif, a local high school governor, her mother, her four younger sisters were sent to Yarl’s Wood, and then shipped back to Pakistan. Since their return, Arif has been detained and tortured on a number of occasions, her mother is ill, her sisters have been threatened if they pursue formal education. And then of course there are the floods.

Azbaa escaped capture and lived clandestinely around Liverpool for close to four years. Finally, a deal was struck that if she turned herself in and came regularly to the office, she’d be fast tracked. She was. To Yarl’s Wood.

She was supposed to fall under a `legacy’ agreement, that would take into account the roots of the applicant in her new community. Azbaa has won Good Citizenship awards, has logged in 800 hours of volunteer, unpaid service at a local hospital, and is generally viewed as a model. She was supposed to be treated with some modicum of decency, recognition, appreciation. She was supposed to receive due process of some sort.

Instead, she has been treated as a dangerous criminal, a threat to society.

Azbaa Dar’s story, and that of her family for that matter, is all too common in the so-called advanced democracies. Pregnant Tamil asylum seekers are kept as prisoners in Canada. An Australian candidate for Prime Minister of Australia bases his campaign on severely limiting the number of asylum seekers who reach the nation’s golden shores.

It’s a common story. Seventy one years ago, 1939, on the verge of World War II, W.H. Auden wrote “Refugee Blues”. Here are some stanzas:

Say this city has ten million souls,
Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:
Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us….

The consul banged the table and said,
“If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead”:
But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive.

Went to a committee; they offered me a chair;
Asked me politely to return next year:
But where shall we go to-day, my dear, but where shall we go to-day?

Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said;
“If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread”:
He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me….

Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay,
Saw the fish swimming as if they were free:
Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away.

Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees;
They had no politicians and sang at their ease:
They weren’t the human race, my dear, they weren’t the human race.

Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors,
A thousand windows and a thousand doors:
Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours.

Stood on a great plain in the falling snow;
Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro:
Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.”

I dreamed I saw Azbaa Dar and W.H. Auden, walking down the road, smiling. But that didn’t happen. Instead, we live with the anguish of the asylum seekers, in the UK, in Canada, in Australia, in the US, in the great democracies of the world. Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me.

(Photo Credit: http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: asylum, Australia, Azbaa Dar, Canada, Dan Moshenberg, Haunts, Pakistan, Tamil refugees, UK, UKBA, W.H. Auden, women, Yarl's Wood