There were many strange things said, in the media and elsewhere, about the 41 Afghan asylum seekers who went on hunger and thirst strike recently in St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin to highlight their plight as refugees in Ireland.
Outside the cathedral, anti-immigrant agitators carried placards that said ‘Let Them Die’. The Evening Herald claimed that “sinister Taliban rebels” directed the protest from Afghanistan. Bertie Ahern said the government couldn’t “concede to any demands from the protestors.” Minister for Justice Michael McDowell, meanwhile, claimed that Afghanistan is generally a safe country and only affected by a few “disturbances”.
The strike eventually ended with the arrest of everyone, apart from the minors, who had participated in the occupation. Since then, the men – who are now living in fear of the courts, as well as racist attacks and deportation – are, understandably, reluctant to speak to the media for fear of prejudicing their cases. Under guarantee of anonymity one hunger striker related history to Hot Press. He spoke about torture, being trafficked to Europe and living in ‘prison-like’ conditions in Ireland.
Ahmed Ben Bella (not his real name) says that he suffered violence and torture at the hands of the Taliban regime before the American invasion in 2001. Things didn’t improve when the US-backed Northern Alliance came to power: again, the methods of the Government were despotic. There is nothing fanciful in this. A recent Amnesty International report on Afghanistan stated that “Since 2001, thousands of Afghans have been arbitrarily detained, held incommunicado and subjected to torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment by US forces and by armed groups acting under US control.” Ahmed Ben Bella fears persecution if deported to Afghanistan. He says that the other asylum seekers are in the same situation. The Department of Foreign Affairs encourages Irish citizens not to travel to Afghanistan. Why? Because violence flares there. It is far from being a safe place...
Ahmed didn’t leave Afghanistan lightly or easily. He went because life there was intolerable for him. With no idea where he might end up, he fled across the border to Pakistan. Human traffickers there provide passports and get you to Europe for a fee of anything up to 10,000 US dollars. Refugees are put into lorries and brought across the border, often to Russia. They stay in hiding there, sometimes for months, before starting the arduous trek through mountains across the border into Turkey. That journey often lasts weeks. More often than not, the asylum seekers having nothing to live on. Then the traffickers put them in ships or lorries, often alongside consignments of drugs, to get to them to mainland Europe. The traffickers, according to Ahmed, have been known to kill and beat people. In an illegal netherworld, where the levels of stress are fierce and detection is a constant fear, it’s hardly surprising.
“You don’t know where you are or where you are going to,” says Ahmed. “When you get to Europe, you are loaded into lorries and ships and arrive somewhere like Ireland. If you listen to the personal stories of people dying, and losing their families trying to get here, your heart would bleed with the pain.”
Even a brief history of Afghanistan explains why refugees need to get out of a country that has been exploited and colonised in a game of tit for tat between competing power groups, with the US central to the last, turbulent, 30 years. In the 1980s the US pumped almost 3 billion dollars, as part of their cold-war against Russia, through the CIA and Pakistani Secret Service to Mujahadeen rebels in Afghanistan who were fighting the then Russian-backed Afghanistan government. Osama Bin Laden was sent to Afghanistan by the American CIA at that time to support the Mujahadeen. The Russians were finally forced to withdraw in 1989, and the triumphant Mujahadeen (later known as the Northern Alliance) seized the capital, Kabul, in April 1992.
“They stayed there until 1996,” says Ahmed. “40,000 innocent Kabul civilians were killed. The whole city was ruined. They looted, terrorised people, raped women, cut breasts off women still alive: evil stuff. Raping young girls. If two men like you and me were sitting talking in a cafe, they would come and take us away and drive nails into our heads until we died. They boiled people in oil and put air into people like a bicycle until they exploded.”
The Taliban emerged as a reaction against the Mujahadeen in 1994, winning considerable support from the people sickened by fighting and desperate for stability. The US supported the Taliban as a way, they hoped, of getting huge oil reserves from the Caspian Sea to Pakistan. A top US commentator wrote that the Taliban’s “most important function was to provide security for roads and, potentially, oil and gas pipelines that would link the massive reserves in the states of Central Asia and the Caspian sea to the international market through Pakistan rather than through Iran.” The Taliban got into power with US support in 1996, but then decided they didn’t want to play the oil game the US way.
“The Taliban brought security,” says Ahmed. “In some ways, people were happy. But the harsh attitude toward religion and other things – saying we had to pray five times a day, women weren’t allowed to work – was oppressive. They dismantled all other political parties.”
Then came 9/11. Fifteen of the hijackers involved came from Saudi Arabia and the others came from Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon. None were from Afghanistan. The US targeted Afghanistan because intelligence reported that Bin Ladin was hiding out there. They backed the Northern Alliance and forced the Taliban to flee. “During that time,” explains Ahmed, “people like us who were caught up in it didn’t have a choice: 95% of Afghanistan was under Taliban control and many were civil servants working for them – which didn’t mean they supported their ideology or the government, but the Northern Alliance tortured anyone who had even just worked for the Taliban.”
So what about the claim that the Taliban put the hunger strikers up to it?
“That is ridiculous,” says Ahmed. “There are many different tribes in Afghanistan. One tribe the Hazara Shi’ites suffered genocide at the hands of the Taliban. 15,000 were murdered in one day. At least 15 hunger strikers in the church were from that tribe. Would they take orders from the Taliban?”
It is next to impossible for us to understand what Afghanis have been through. It is the extent of their suffering that underlies their willingness to go on hunger strike.
“If someone is tortured they become desperate,” Ahmed says. “We have been psychologically, mentally and physically tortured by the Taliban and the Mujahadeen. Added to that torture we are psychologically and mentally tortured here in Ireland by being left in limbo, living in agony, feeling hopeless, frustrated and angry. If a normal person had to endure what we have, they would have done the same.
“My friend here in Ireland rang me crying recently. For the last six months his mother had been asking him to come home and visit her because she was sick and he kept telling her he would come. He hadn’t seen her for 15 years because of the civil war in Afghanistan. He couldn’t visit her because of restrictions on our ability to travel and then she died. He said he came to Ireland to leave the civil war behind, to start a new beginning.
“We are just victims of war and thought someone would take pity on us. We can’t attend family funerals, we are kept in isolation, we can’t socialise: life is like a prison. We stood up as we couldn’t take it anymore. We tried to bring this to the authorities' attention before but nobody would listen to our voices and our cries. One day I watched a documentary about Irish illegals in the US and how they would wake up and pray to god each morning that they wouldn’t be arrested by the police and sent back home. Their story is my story.”
Abdul Haseeb is a member of the Muslim community in Ireland. He points out that while critics might say the Afghan hunger strikers held the nation to ransom, what about the poorest nation in the world – Afghanistan – being held to ransom by Western countries? The irony is that the occupation of Afghanistan is in the name of Western democracy and freedom.
“The Afghan asylum seekers stood accused of ‘sponging off the asylum system,” says Abdul. “While it is justified for the West to sponge oil and install puppet governments in Afghanistan and across the world where and when they wish.”
While the hunger strike was on-going, the Irish page of the far-right racist website Stormfront, which declares itself as standing for the ‘white nationalist community’ and for ‘white pride world wide’, was buzzing. “Send the police over to the cathedral,” one pleasant individual suggested, “grab each and every one of them, shuffle them onto a plane and launch ‘em off back to Afghanistan.”
Down at the Cathedral, racists held up posters reading: ‘no vacancys here’. Their spelling is as pathetic as their beliefs.
There was also a call on the website for racists in Ireland to start meeting publicly. It read: “Some time back, private meetings were held and public activities carried out in various locations. As far as I know private meetings are still continuing in different parts of the country…The missing ingredient for political progress in the Republic of Ireland is an individual prepared to take a public stand on the issue of race…A straightforward stand for a white Ireland…”
A group called Movement to save Ireland recently took part in the far-right Paris Mayday march. They describe their trip on their website: “Jean Marie Le Pen (the French facist) gave an excellent speech. There were nationalists from all over Europe and at last Ireland was represented. Hopefully more people will join us next year. There is enormous good will towards Ireland. Belgium and Germany were well represented. We made many interesting new contacts.”
It’s time for those who want a multicultural Ireland with equality and justice to stand up and be counted.