far he intends to go is spelled out for the first time in an ‘action plan’, delivered by Downing Street last week to senior ministers and civil servants – and leaked to me – aimed at bringing about a ‘radical reduction’ in the number of ‘unfounded asylum applications’.
The document bears all the hallmarks of official panic, with civil servants pulling every conceivable policy lever in an effort to respond to pressure from the top: from proposals to park British immigration officials at Paris and Amsterdam airports, and the tightening of visa requirements for countries such as Zimbabwe, to cutting the length of time refugees from war zones are given exceptional leave to remain. There are plans for bulk removals by the RAF, a new ‘white list’ of ‘safe’ countries such as Pakistan, and entitlement cards for asylum seekers. And so the list goes on.
In an accompanying letter circulated around the upper reaches of Whitehall, the No. 10 policy adviser Olivia McLeod singled out two ideas in particular for ministers to discuss at a meeting with Tony Blair last Wednesday. Would it be possible, she asked, for the Ministry of Defence and security services to help catch ‘people traffickers’ bringing asylum seekers to Britain? The Royal Navy warships in the eastern Mediterranean, she proposed, should be given the job.
This would be a new departure for Britain indeed – though already a staple of Australian political theatre – and gives a literal twist to Blair’s war on asylum. But Downing Street’s other main demand last week is likely to cause even more internal trouble for the government. No. 10, it transpires, now wants direct British aid to ‘source countries’ for asylum claimants (such as Turkey) to be made conditional on cooperating with repatriation. Having just steered an international development act through parliament outlawing any such conditions, Clare Short is said to be fighting a rearguard action against the linkage.
The aid penalty plan encapsulates the dislocated absurdity at the heart of Britain’s asylum and immigration policy. Migration into western Europe is the inevitable product of pauperisation and conflict at its periphery, in an arc stretching across the former Soviet Union and eastern Europe through the Middle East and North Africa. The free-market globalisation policies promoted by Britain and other EU governments have decimated jobs and living standards throughout those regions, while conflicts for which Britain and its allies share responsibility have become a veritable engine of refugees. Afghanistan, Iraq, Turkey and, until recently, the former Yugoslavia have long headed the list of countries of origin for asylum seekers coming to Britain – and the British government has either directly or indirectly intervened with bombs, sanctions or support for large-scale internal repression in every one. Deliberately to impoverish these states still further would be utterly perverse.
Many of those most closely involved in managing asylum, including in government, believe this to be a confected crisis. The 130 asylum seekers the authorities are said to lose track of every day roughly equal the number of mostly antipodean ‘working holidaymakers’ daily flying into Heathrow. Almost 50 per cent of asylum seekers are either eventually granted refugee status or given exceptional leave to remain. And there was no correlation whatever in this month’s local elections between BNP votes and the presence of asylum seekers. But by talking and acting as though there is a growing crisis and appeasing a racist agenda, the government risks destabilising and poisoning community relations for years to come.7
(23/5/02)
Zimbabwe: Colonialism and the New World Order
Tony Blair is not a man renowned for his humility. But after failing to get his way over Zimbabwe at the Commonwealth summit last weekend, his arrogance could hardly be contained. Fulminating at African heads of government for refusing to back Britain’s demand for Zimbabwe’s immediate suspension, the prime minister declared that ‘there can be no question of Mugabe being allowed to stay in power’ unless this weekend’s watershed presidential election was free and fair. Since he had already made clear he regarded it as rigged, his meaning could not be plainer: the British government is determined to see Robert Mugabe ousted.
It must be galling for a man who last autumn offered himself as Africa’s saviour to be so publicly rebuffed by Africa’s leaders. Isolated with Australia and New Zealand in a gang of three mainly white states, the prime minister insisted: ‘This type of behaviour has got to stop.’ What entitles Zimbabwe’s former colonial master to insist on a change of government in Harare was not explained. But since Blair’s ministers began openly to champion the cause of the white farmers who made up the backbone of the former Rhodesian regime – while denouncing the black leadership which defeated it as ‘uncivilised’ – British interference in Zimbabwe has been ceaseless.
Perhaps taking its cue from the government, most mainstream British media coverage of the Zimbabwean crisis has now abandoned even a veneer of even-handedness, as reporters and presenters have become cheerleaders for the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. In a BBC television interview on Sunday with Foreign Office Minister Baroness Amos, David Frost talked blithely of ‘100,000 people being killed by Mugabe supporters over the last two years’. In fact, human rights groups estimate the total number killed on both sides during that period at around 160. Frost and the shadow foreign secretary, Michael Ancram, went on to denounce Mugabe as a ‘fascist dictator’ and ‘black racist’, both urging more decisive British action. The same day an unrelentingly hostile BBC ‘Correspondent’ programme passed without a single balancing interview.
There is little sense in any of this of Britain’s responsibility for the rapacious colonisation of Zimbabwe and the continuing grotesque inequality of land ownership two decades after independence, which has left 6,000 white farmers in control of half the country’s 81 million acres of arable land, while around 850,000 black farmers are crammed into the rest. It was after all a British Labour government which refused to put down Ian Smith’s white racist rebellion in 1965 because of fears that the army would balk at acting against their ‘kith and kin’, provoking a war which cost 40,000 lives. It was a British Tory government which imposed white parliamentary quotas and a ten-year moratorium on land reform at independence. Now the British government (through the Westminster Foundation for Democracy) and the Tories (through the Zimbabwe Democracy Trust) – along with white farmers and corporations – are all funding the MDC, committed as it is to free-market policies and the restoration of white farms to their owners.
It is impossible to sustain the case that Zimbabwe has been singled out for international denunciation by the British government because of political violence, intimidation or restrictions on democratic freedoms, alarming as these are. Such factors are common to other African states supported by Britain, such as Kenya and Zambia (where an election was rigged earlier this year). And Blair is bosom buddies with dictators such as General Musharraf of Pakistan and the Saudi royal family. In Zimbabwe, the liberation war leader Mugabe is at least holding an election of sorts; there are anti-government newspapers and a parliamentary opposition.
There are only two possible explanations for Britain’s role. One is a racist concern for the privileged white minority. The other is that, unlike Zambia and Kenya, Mugabe is no longer playing ball with the West’s neoliberal agenda and is talking, credibly or not, of taking over private businesses and a return to socialism. That cannot be tolerated and, in the New World Order, the US now appears to have subcontracted supervision of Africa largely to the former colonial powers, Britain and France.
The struggle over power and land has brought Zimbabwe to a virtual state of civil war. Unemployment and inflation are rampant; living standards have plunged, while Aids is taking a horrific toll (and Mugabe promotes a grim homophobia). Zimbabwe needs to find its own way to a peaceful political evolution and a return to the progressive reforms of Mugabe’s early years in power. But these are issues for Zimbabweans to settle. Outside interference can only make that process more difficult – and Britain is the very last country to dictate to its once-captive subjects.8
(7/3/02)
Catastroika
