North-South co-operation on racism

By Eamonn McCann

Nigerian student Jamiu Omikunle has been awarded £20,000 by the High Court in Belfast for having been unlawfully detained at Aldergrove airport and then held in a detention centre in Scotland for nine days under threat of deportation.

Jamiu had arrived at Aldergrove from London on June 2nd last to act as godfather to the infant daughter of friends living in Belfast . An immigration officer wouldn't believe he had come for a christening. He was photographed and fingerprinted and taken in handcuffs to a police cell in Antrim. Next morning, he was put on the ferry to Scotland with a group of other black people, all handcuffed. “There were lots of couples and families with children and all of them were looking at these black people in handcuffs...I have never felt as humiliated as I did on that journey,” recalls Jamiu.

On of the reasons for this treatment of black people is to stop them entering the Republic via the six counties. Irish immigration officials work alongside their British counterparts at ports and airports in the North.

The group which included Jamie was taken to Dungavel Detention Centre in Lanarkshire. Says Jamiu: “Detainees are locked up, their belongings taken from them. The centre is enclosed by barbed wire...It is massively overcrowded...There have been a number of suicides...”

The Scotsman newspaper has compared Dungaven with Guantanamo and called for its closure.

Jamiu says he was lucky. He was an English-speaking university graduate with friends in Belfast who were immediately on the case, arranging for representation by Barbara Muldoon, of immigration specialists P. Drinan, solicitors.

She quickly established that the reason given for Jamiu’s arrest had no basis in law. He was in the UK on a student visa. But he wasn’t attending the post-graduate course at Coventry University for which the visa had originally been issued. Having arrived a day late at Coventry , he had switched courses to Greenwich College in London . The immigration officials said this invalidated the visa.

However, in a scathing judgement in the High Court last July, Mr. Justice Weatherup pointed out that there was nothing whatever unlawful about what Jamiu had done. “It was not a condition of his student visa that he should become or remain a student at Coventry University.”

Anti-racism campaigners find it hard to believe that an immigration official could genuinely have been ignorant of such a basic aspect of visa regulations. They are concerned that there may have been many other unreported cases of black people being arrested, treated like criminals and deported even though they had fully complied with all the regulations. Jamiu’s case came to light only because he had friends to look out for him and a representative to fight for him.

Who were the other black people taken in chains from Belfast to Dungavel at the same time, and what became of them?

Says Barbara Muldoon: “I have received judgements in three almost identical cases in the last couple of months. The Home Office were alleging that people were illegal entrants and were arranging their expulsion. In all three cases, those involved were found not to be illegal entrants and were released...”

All three people involved were black.

The participation of Dublin officials in arrest operations in the North has caused no controversy at Stormont. Some Unionists might claim to be opposed on principle to Dublin involvement, but are even more opposed to allowing black people in. Some Nationalists might say they are against racist immigration policy, but won’t denounce the all-Ireland aspect of the way the policy is implemented.

Says Jamiu: “I am an honest person. I have never been in any trouble of any kind in my life. I have aways shown respect for authority. I have never knowingly harmed anyone...I did not deserve this to happen to me.”

Of course, none of it would have happened if he’d been white.

Socialists, North and South, should be campaigning for an end to this cross-border racism and for the Dublin officials involved in it tlo be kicked out of the North.

Love Music Hate Racism launched in Galway

By Liam O’Grady

Over 40 people attended the Love Music Hate Racism (LMHR) launch night in Fagan's Bar in Galway, run as a benefit night for the Galway Palestine Children's Fund.
Ticket sales and donations raised about €300 for Gaza on the night and a further €600 was raised for the fund in a street collection on January 31st.
As well as combatting racism based on skin colour, Galway LMHR wants to highlight Islamaphobia and anti-Traveller racism.
The event highlighted the racist attitudes of Israeli society towards Palestinians.
LMHR has a gig planned every 2 months in 2009.

Civil rights for asylum seekers

By Joe Moore

Over 80 people attended the launch meeting of the asylum seekers civil rights charter in Cork at the start of February.
Ronit Lentin, a TCD lecturer, detailed the racist nature of the Irish state and the difficulties facing those opposed to state racism. The majority of asylum seekers are forced to live in direct provision centres. These centres are often located in isolated areas where it is difficult for the residents to get to know their neighbours.
Pamela Izevbekhai described what life is like "it is like being in prison, except that the food in prison is better". Pamela should know as she was imprisoned for 15 days in Mountjoy. Her crime, attempting to save her daughters Naomi and Jemima from being forced to undergo female genital mutilation. In 1994, Pamela's first born daughter, Elizabeth bled to death after the brutal ritual.
Asylum seekers are denied the right to work and are denied access to 3rd level education. In the direct provision system they are paid €19.10 per week.
After years of enduring these conditions, many face internment without trial before being forceably deported.

The campaign has four demands,
1. The right to work.
2. The right to 3rd level education.
3. The closure of all direct provision centres.
4. An end to all deportations.

The campaign plans rallies around the country, culminating in Dublin, and is exploring the possibility of running asylum seeker candidates in the local elections.

Contact the Cork Anti Racism Network at 087-2994796.

Victims payment controversy: Amnesia no cure for sectarianism

By Eamonn McCann

The proposal to pay the families of victims of the Troubles £12,000 each has sparked angry controversy.

Most Unionists have denounced the idea because it doesn’t differentiate between the “innocent” and the “guilty”.

Many Nationalists have welcomed the move for the same reason---that it doesn’t create a “hierarchy” of victims.

But the division isn’t along neat lines. Some Unionists support the proposal in the interests of “putting the past behind us.” Some of the Bloody Sunday families have responded “Stuff your £12,000”, because they fear acceptance might be taken as settling their complaints.

The confused and contradictory response reflects the fact that the issues underlying the Troubles have not been faced up to. 

The contrast with, for example, South Africa, is stark. There, the settlement was based on acceptance that the problem was white minority rule, the solution black majority rule. So, however imperfectly it worked out, there was consensus as to what “truth” and “reconciliation” were about. Not so in the North.

The Belfast (“Good Friday”) Agreement doesn’t allocate blame. Its implication is that the violence arose from an irrational unwillingness or inability of “the two communities” to get along. The British State figures not as a participant but as a clumsy referee between the two sides.

So, the logic runs, everybody should now just accept their differences, stop fighting and live peacefully as separate, equal communities. This was the framework for the group chaired by Dennis Bradley and Archbishop Eames which recommended the £12,000 “recognition payment” to all bereaved families.

If Bradley and Eames were going to recommend payments in recognition of loss, it’s hard to see how they could have done any different. They had no basis on which to make a distinction between those who died planting bombs and the people they blew up.

The controversy exposes the contradictions which ensure that the institutions under the Agreement will remain unstable and riven by sectarianism. It underlines the inability of the Nationalist and Unionist parties to deliver a settlement which transcends sectarianism.

Socialists recognise both the malign history of British colonialism in Ireland and the anti-Catholic discrimination of the Northern State under Unionism, while recognising also the inevitably sectarian and futile nature of the IRA campaign.

Sectarian because it could be based on support from one community only, futile because a united Ireland was never achievable on that basis. Meanwhile, the British State was left off the hook.

Every move towards a future based on class rather that communal identity will make it easier for those who have borne the brunt of the Troubles to find comfort and fight on for a better future.