http://972mag.com/africans-attacked-in-tel-aviv-protest-mks-infiltrators-are-cancer/46537/

The statement by Israel’s Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu last week regarding the ‘infiltration’ of African asylum seekers via the Israel-Egypt border, is indicative not only of Israeli state racism, but also of the West’s approach to asylum seekers in general.

If Israel does not stem the flow of African refugees and illegal immigrants, Netanyahu said in last week’s cabinet meeting, ‘the problem that currently stands at 60,000 could grow to 600,000’, threatening ‘our existence as a Jewish and democratic state, the social fabric of society, national security and national identity.’
With a population of 7.8 million, 20 per cent of whom are Palestinian Arabs, Israel is one of the few states without fully recognisable international borders. One exception is Israel’s border with Egypt, agreed in a peace treaty in 1979, separating between the Sinai Peninsula and pre-1967 Israel. Human rights organisations say more than 50,000 asylum seekers and migrants have entered Israel illegally since 2005. Yet though more than 13,500 people crossed this border to enter Israel illegally in 2010, mostly smuggled by Bedouins, two-thirds Eritrean and one-third Sudanese, only three were granted refugee status by Israel, rising to six last year – probably the world’s lowest recognition rate.

Netanyahu assured his cabinet that Israel is taking robust steps against the so-called ‘infiltrators’ – a term used in the 1950s in relation to Palestinians who were expelled or who escaped their homes during the 1948 Nakba (or catastrophe) – by constructing a 150 miles long steel fence through the Sinai desert as a deterrent to people-trafficking and drug and weapons smuggling. Israel is also constructing the world’s largest detention centre for asylum seekers and refugees, capable of holding 11,000 people. The £58m building, close to the border, will open by the end of the year.

In addition, Israel is committed to ‘the physical withdrawal’ of migrants, despite fears among human rights organisations about the dangers they could face in their home countries. Deportations are indeed seen as vital to maintaining Israel’s self perception as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ despite its poor human rights record in its treatment of Palestinians under occupation in the West Bank and the ongoing siege of Gaza. Danny Danon, the Chairman of the Israeli ‘absorption committee’ announced in the press and on his Facebook page that he will chair a new extra-Parliamentary movement, called ‘Deportations Now’, to campaign against ‘infiltration’, aimed at ‘getting these people out of Israel’.

As I said, the Israeli attitude is indicative of the Western approach to asylum seekers, who are demonised and accused of causing crime and other social problems. Most African migrants in Israel are not allowed to work, live in overcrowded and impoverished conditions in southern Tel Aviv and some turn to crime. Yohanan Danino, the Israeli police chief, said migrants should be permitted to work to discourage petty crime and need to be supported in order to prevent economic and social problems. The police also said that the crime rate among foreigners in Israel was 2.04% in 2010, compared with 4.99% among Israelis.

Israeli attitudes also denote Israeli state racism. In a country where anyone with a Jewish mother has automatic citizenship rights (denied to Palestinians born on the land), the migration of non-Jews, and particularly black Africans, is seen as threatening Israeli national identity, clearly regarded as fragile. Despite the long Jewish history of persecutions and deportations, the Minister for the Interior Eli Yishai last week called for all migrants to be jailed pending deportation and told the Army radio station: ‘The migrants are giving birth to hundreds of thousands, and the Zionist dream is dying’.

Martin: Oh, yes, I remember. I actually got a letter from an obstetrician about it…

I: But Micheal, how logical can this be?

Martin: No, really… He wrote to me that something had to be done about all these women coming to have babies in Ireland…

I: But…

Martin: Believe me, I can show you the letter

I raise my eyebrows, but Martin is not embarrased at all…

Bus driver (probably of Indian sub continent origin) speaks on his radio:
I want him to get off the bus…

Man continues to shout. Man gets up and goes to front of bus, shouting:

You want me to get off the bus, you f… black bastard… You f… black bastard.

I: Stop it, stop being racist!!

No passenger comments.

Man gets off the bus.

Elderly woman: Poor man, he was doing nothing, why did he have to get off the bus?

Young woman: Yeah, poor man, what did he do?

Man: He was stinking of drink.

Young woman: Ah.

I: why didn’t you say anything?

On getting off the bus I say to the driver: Sorry about what happened earlier.

Driver: It’s not the first time. It happened many times before. Thanks.

Contrary to the Reception and Integration Agency (RIA)’s own House Rules and Procedures Booklet, this group, residing in Eyre Powell Hotel in Co Kildare, has outlined the realities of their existence. Let me look at some of RIA’s regulations and some of the realities.

Regulations: (1.9) commits to cater for ‘ethnic food preferences… tea and coffee making facilities… outside normal mealtimes’, and (1.10) ‘provide soap, shampoo and toothpaste… give new supplies when you need them’.
Reality: lack of basic provisions – no tissues, soap or shampoos, none of these issued after 5 pm, and no ethnic foods’ just a steady stream of chicken nuggets, white rice, chicken burgers, red sauce, steamed vegetables and chips daily. Lack of toddler appropriate foods; toddlers are forced to go hungry as they are unable to eat adult foods.

Regulations (1.7): the centre will provide varied and nutritional breakfast, lunch and dinner.
Reality: lack of breakfast (staff often say there are no eggs, sugar, coffee, cereal or milk and provide expired milk). We sometimes go hungry … no salads, few fruits…not enough cutlery and crockery… Halal food not provided, utensils to serve pork used to serve all foods…fake menus displayed and staff dismiss complaints…

Regulations (1.2): accommodation must be safe, hospitable and clean… (1.15) the centre will give you adequate beddings and bed linen… and replace bed linen and towels when needed…
Reality: dilapidated furniture in common areas, insects, cockroaches, mice infestation, poor hygiene, poor upkeep. No extra beddings apart from initial set on arrival. Requests ignored. The washing machines are regularly breaking down.

In addition, and most crucially, residents are met with harassment and intimidation by staff. Management has used foul language when addressing residents, threatening them with transfer to a distant location. Management treats people of white or Arabic origin differently from black Africans. The residents provided a photograph of racist language displayed in the reception area.

The realities of life in asylum hostels as outlined by this brave group of residents remind us, once again, of the precarious situation of asylum seekers, who are here legally to seek our protection, but who are incarcerated in these holding camps. Not allowed to work or study in third level institutions, they are a captive population, living on a ‘comfort allowance’ of €19.10 per adult per week (not raised since 2001), which they often have to spend on basic needs. The state, but also we, its citizens, places these humans fleeing persecution at the mercy of ruthless managers, whose sole aim is to make money from the misfortunes of their charges.

The only solution is to close all asylum hostels immediately and regularise the position of the small number of asylum seekers currently in the state (in December 2011 there were merely 5,423 asylum seekers in direct provision centres, about 0.02% of the Irish population), allow them to work and be productive and put an end to this travesty.

I have been there before; last time YouTube took a while to remove a similar video at the demand of the TCD lawyer; this time, the Minister’s people managed to get the nasty videos off the air within a couple of days.

I am telling you this not to elicit your sympathy, but rather to demonstrate that racism and antisemitism have not gone away (though it’s ironic that the Minister for Justice and I, a critic of the government’s immigration and particularly deportation policies, are tarred with the same brush). It was encouraging that the Irish Times dedicated its editorial on 22 March to the speech by the British human rights lawyer Imran Khan, who, amongst his other accolades, represented the family of the murdered black British youth Stephen Lawrence whose killers were only brought to justice 18 years after the killing. Speaking of state racism, Khan said he found it difficult to believe that a ‘seemingly modern reformed country such as Ireland was still apparently living in the dark ages when it comes to issues of race’. Indeed many racialised people, including Travellers and Irish Jewish people, attest that racism had always existed here, long before ‘these people – asylum seekers and migrants – came.’

I  won’t list racist incidents here simply because racism is not about ‘incidents’, though these of course do exist, but rather about the state, as I have often argued on these pages. Imran Khan noted the government’s refusal to recognise Travellers as an ethnic group, a status they enjoy in Britain and Northern Ireland, the plight of asylum seekers living in the dehumanising direct provision system, and migrants’ unequal entitlements to welfare, immigration, education, employment and housing services.

Racial inequalities and racist discrimination are not going away any day soon, and it’s not only about the Irish white supremacists who posted the videos about Minister Shatter and me. While, unlike many EU states, Ireland still does not have a fully fledged extreme right party, government policies – despite the Minister’s good intentions in relation to citizenship – continue to categorise and racialise. This leads to racial profiling, to the government’s failure to require that racist motivation be considered an aggravated factor in criminal sentencing, to the refusal by GNIB to renew residency permits to women who refuse to take off their head scarves (as reported in Metro two weeks ago), to the insignificant number of prosecutions under the weak 1989 Incitement of Hatred Act, and above all to the continued existence of the inhumane direct provision system.
The link between the government’s racialising and discriminatory policies and outbursts by Irish white supremacists, as in the YouTube videos, is complex. By attacking the Minister for Justice – as a Jew – for ‘destroying Ireland’, these racists suggest he is bending backwards in turning Ireland into a ‘multiracial dystopia’. I would of course vigorously defend Minister Shatter (and myself) against any form of racism and antisemitism, but I would also reserve a right to remain a critic of his government’s immigration and integration policies.

Administrative detention is detention without charge or trial, authorised by administrative order rather than by judicial decree. Inherited from the pre 1948 British Mandate emergency regulations, administrative detention is deemed illegal by international law, which says it can be used only in the most exceptional cases, as the last means available for preventing danger that cannot be thwarted by less harmful means. Israel has extended the use of administrative detention since it occupied the West Bank and Gaza in 1967, enabling the state to hold prisoners indefinitely without charging them or bringing them to trial.

Khader Adnan’s story is emblematic of many other detainees. Like  them, he was taken in a night raid from his home; he claims he was beaten and humiliated by Israeli soldiers and began his hunger strike in protest. Evidence and allegations were not made available to Mr Adnan or his lawyers; the only allegation made was that he is a ‘high risk’ to Israeli security.

According to the Israeli human rights organisation B’Tselem, there are currently 307 administrative detainees not charged with any crime. During the second Intifada the number of detainees rose to the thousands, including children, some of whom are held in solitary confinement without access to their parents or lawyers, for several weeks.

According to Israeli bloggist Joseph Dana, despite criticism of administrative detention by the USA in facilities such as Guantanamo Bay, such criticism has only recently surfaced in Israeli society, even though Mr Adnan’s hunger strike raised widespread protest from international Palestine solidarity campaigns and local Palestinian and Israeli activists.

Like others, I was happy to hear of the end of Mr Adnan’s hunger strike and hope it has not damaged his internal organs beyond repair. His release is a definite victory of the Palestine solidarity movement. However, I agree with Amnesty International that the deal made with Mr Adnan is insufficient and that Khader Adnan can no longer constitute a danger to Israel’s security and should be released immediately. ‘A deal which will see Khader Adnan released on 17 April unless significant new evidence emerges is insufficient when he needs urgent medical treatment to save his life now,’ said Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s Interim Director for the Middle East and North Africa. I fully endorse Amnesty International’s call on Israel to end the practice of administrative detention now, because it violates the internationally recognised right to a fair trial which must be upheld for all detainees, even during states of emergency.

In July 2004 a badly decomposed body, described by the media as that of ‘a black non-national woman’ was discovered in a black plastic bag on a river bank in Co Kilkenny. Because she arrived as an asylum seeker in 2000, and, like all asylum seekers, had been fingerprinted, Gardai identified her through the finger printing data base at the Garda National Immigration Bureau as that of the 25 year old married mother of two Paiche Onyemaechi. She turned out to be the daughter of the Malawian chief justice and a lap dancer and prostitute. Because her body was found without a head by a local Kilkenny woman walking her dog, it did not take long for media representations to describe Paiche Onyemaechi as a ‘headless hooker’.

Writing in 2006, I described the story of Onyemaechi’s murder and representation as a typical story of 21^st century Ireland, standing at the crossroad between Ireland’s then globalised economy and its migratory realities. As the daughter of an elite Malawi family, she escaped a state whose president has built a 300-room palace worth 100 million dollars while, as one of the world’s poorer countries, 11 million Malawians live on less than 1 dollar a day. Secondly, as the mother of children born in Ireland before the Citizenship Referendum, Paiche had leave to remain as the mother of Irish citizens. Thirdly, working in Ireland thriving sex industry, she was most probably living in a twilight zone of exploitation and danger. Garda sources tell me that a lot of energy was spent on investigating her murder, though not much was reported in the press. Ultimately, her murderer could not be brought to justice, because he left Ireland.

I was thinking of Paiche two weeks ago when the body of another Malawian woman, Rudo Mawere, was found in a suitcase on a Dublin city street – quickly to be described by the gutter press as a ‘body in a bag’. Like Paiche she was denuded of any humanity, becoming an object, a thing.

Mawere came to Ireland as a student; she studied human resources, worked as a care assistant in St Luke’s hospital and was looking for a job as an au pair. She apparently loaned money to Zimbabwean Jasper Taruvinga and when she went to his city centre apartment to talk about the money he owed her, he strangled her and dumped her body in a suitcase in a residential street; again, the body was identified through her fingerprints.

I was distressed to learn that Rudo was my neighbour, living a few houses down from me, in a busy street where many of the houses are divided into flats, a young woman like other young women, studying, working and looking for work, apparently decent and honest and fun to be with. In this case too there will be no trial, as only five days after the murder, Jasper Taruvinga fled to England and hang himself.

I find it hard to forget Paiche Onyemaechi and Rudo Mawere . Onyemaechi, however, has been long forgotten as yet another shadowy figure, whose life, as former Irish Times editor Conor Brady wrote at the time, was removed from the experience of contemporary Irish life: ‘living in the darkened world that touches on illegality, whatever happened to her had nothing to do with us’. I fear Rudo too will be forgotten as are other victims of our patchy but strict immigration regime, which often abandons migrant women to their dreaded fate.

]]> http://www.ronitlentin.net/2012/02/15/headless-hookers-and-suitcase-bodies/feed/ http://www.ronitlentin.net/2012/01/26/residency-rights-and-deportations-good-news-for-some/ http://www.ronitlentin.net/2012/01/26/residency-rights-and-deportations-good-news-for-some/#comments Wed, 25 Jan 2012 23:08:43 +0000 Ronit Lentin http://www.ronitlentin.net/?p=491 Having given the Minister for Justice a qualified welcome at the start of his term, the time has come to begin scrutinising the work of his Department on immigration and integration. Having abolished the office of the Minister for Integration and replaced it with an understaffed section called the office for the promotion of migrant integration, Minister Shatter has vowed to speed up citizenship applications – very good news, and introduce citizenship tests and citizenship ceremonies, less good news, but for some migrants a positive step all the same. And, last week his department granted residency to 850 non-EU parents of Irish citizen children, though only after the European Court of Justice ruled last March that the non-EU parents of EU citizens must be allowed to live and work in that EU state. 

Seems reasonable enough though not considering the length of time it took Ireland to extend this right to migrant parents of Irish citizens whose status was changed after the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, which, I maintain, was a major turning point in contemporary Irish state racism. If you remember, that referendum and the legislation that followed, changed the 83-years old jus solis citizenship entitlement according to which all people born on the island of Ireland had a right to Irish citizenship. And their parents, according to the 1990 Fajujonu Supreme Court ruling, had a right of residency. Changing this to jus sanguinis citizenship, according to which people born in Ireland had the right to become Irish citizens only if they had least one parent with citizenship entitlement, creating a two tier citizenship right. Citizen children born before 2005 were not entitled to have their parents in Ireland (although a large percentage were granted that right, albeit temporarily, after the state won the Citizenship Referendum). Moreover, in 2005 at least 20 Irish citizens were deported together with their non-citizen parents.

Minister Shatter’s move to implement the European Court of Justice ruling is to be commended. Not so his insistence on continuing to deport people deemed ‘failed asylum seekers’. I am totally against deportations because the threat of deportation causes fear and trauma to asylum seekers in direct provision holding camps (some 5,400 as we speak). People live in limbo, many for several years, with deportation orders pending yet not carried out. Deportations are also costly. As the Minister said in the Dail, it cost the state just under €1 million to deport 280 people. Deportations require close collaboration with other EU member states and are managed by Frontex, the commercial Warsaw-based EU agency which operationalises cooperation between EU states on border security and immigration control. This came to public knowledge last July as 12 Congolese and eight Nigerians on board a deportation flight costing €337,800 remained in Ireland as Algeria did not give permission for the flight intending to deport them. According to the Minister, “€22,000 was incurred by the Department in ancillary costs relating to this flight, such as securing documentation for the returnees and sending advance parties of Garda National Immigration Bureau members to Lagos and Kinshasa to ensure that landing permits and all other requirements were obtained in advance”.

So, if deportations are traumatic (particularly for children for whom Ireland has become home) and costly – why deport? Just as asylum seekers, despite the declining number in asylum applications, assist states in redrawing racial and national boundaries, deportations reaffirm nationhood.

According migrant parents of Irish citizen children residency rights is definitely good news. Another piece of good news is that a group of antiracism activists, mostly asylum seekers and former asylum seekers and their supporters, is getting together to plan an anti-deportation campaign. I’ll keep you posted.

Catherine Cosgrave of the Immigrant Council of Ireland commented on this post:

Of course the granting of residence to 850 parents of Irish children post-Zambrano case is positive but also important to note that this is far from end of the saga. The entitlement is being extremely narrowly applied and parents of Irish children, where there are no compelling reasons for refusal, are still being refused permission to live and work in Ireland. For example, you qualify if, as a single parent, you are a non-EEA national or if both parents are non-EEA nationals and don’t have a right of residence in the EU already, whatever about Ireland. However, if you are also a non-EEA national, perhaps in an Irish partner and you had previously established residence in another EU country… An application for permission to live and work in Ireland with your Irish partner and Irish child will be refused. The apparent logic being that there is no risk that your child will have to leave the EU.  I could go on and on…

The accusation of institutional racism may have led to changes in policing practices beyond just ‘lessons learned’ as the Met insists. There are more police officers of colour in Britain (in Ireland, by comparison, there are only 46 Gardai from migrant background), and the Met insists things are different now. But crucially, the murder happened in a society which sees itself as white and sees people of colour, British born or new immigrants, as racialised others. This leads to racial profiling – black and Asian people are stopped and searched much more often than white people, particularly since 9/11, and to increasingly restrictive immigration regulations – both in Britain and here. It also leads to the demonisation of migrants and asylum seekers as ‘bogus’,  ‘scroungers’ and as ‘taking our jobs’ as British and Irish societies assume whiteness to be the hegemonic norm.

Remember that the recent London riots were sparked off after the met refused to explain the shooting to death of an unarmed black man, Mark Duggan, even though they became uncontrollable later. And remember too, that despite the achievements of black and migrant Britons in the arts, football and other sports, there are not enough black people in leadership positions.

And  what about Ireland,  where immigrants constitute just ten per cent of the population and where black and ethnic minority people are not at all represented in the arts, media, sports and politics?

On Good Friday 2010 a fifteen years old Nigerian boy, Toyosi Shitta-Bey, was murdered by two Dublin brothers. It took the Gardai quite some time to pronounce it as a racist murder – in fact immediately after the killing, everyone, from the local Tyrrelstown community, to religious leaders and politicians, claimed it was not racially motivated. It took the Gardai even longer to bring Toyosi’s killers to justice. Had it not taken that long, justice might have been done and Toyosi’s family might have had its closure. But last November, just before the trial was to begin, one of the killers, 40 years old Frank Barry, was found dead and the trial was cancelled.

The Lawrence family had their closure, but institutional and state racism continues. It does not mean of course that all British or Irish people are racist. Far from it. But the assumption of whiteness means that these two multicultural societies keep refusing to truly recognise their racial diversity, preferring to project societal problems – such as unemployment – onto immigrants and people of colour.

This murder puts further flames onto recent racist fires. In Naas we had mayor Darren Scully who made the decision to refuse representation to black Africans based on what he described as their “aggressive” attitude when making representations to him, but who insensitively argues that he ‘abhors racism in all its forms’, adding that he had many African friends (not realising this is one of the most common ‘I am not a racist’ but ploys). And in Athlone, a 16 year old black girl was raped by a group of white boys, including one white girl, in an attacked described by the Evening Herald a ‘race rape of girl (16)’ – at least they used the R word, but one wondered whether the reason is sensationalism or accurate reporting.

It’s been only two years since Toyosi Shitta-Bey was murdered in Tirrelstown – his murderers only just brought to justice (at least it didn’t take the Gardai as long as it took the London Metropolitan Police to try black teenager Stephen Lawrence’s white murderers, murdered in 1993 and tried in 2011).

It’s necessary to point out yet again how difficult it is to speak about racism in post-race Ireland. And it’s not only because of the recession – the difficulty to mention the R word has been on the increase ever since the twilight of Celtic capitalism. Note for instance President Higgins’ inaugural speech which made not one mention to immigrants, immigration, interculturalism or integration – and that from one of Ireland’s strongest supporters of human rights causes.

At the same time Minister Alan Shatter – despite his strong support for the integration of immigrants while in opposition – is keeping away from events organised by migrants and ethnic minorities. Interestingly, despite opposing the 1989 Incitement to Hatred Act, Shatter has done nothing to review this ineffectual piece of legislation. This murder should give him a reason to do so.

And importantly, on the morning of Moses Ayanwole’s death there was yet another deportation of what the government deems ‘failed’ asylum seekers, this time to Pakistan. The issue of asylum seekers and direct provision hostels has indeed gone well under the radar – it seems no one in austerity Ireland – including Irish human rights, antiracism and immigrant support NGOs – wants to know.

I was delighted, however, by the initiative of a group of African leaders who got together to speak up against the increase of racism. While rightly demanding that the government acts against racism, it is ultimately up to them to express their seething anger and protest against racist Ireland. And they have my full support.