Refugees

West London Politicians & Genocide in Gaza

~ Urban Dandy London ~ 1 Comment

In the parliamentary constituencies of West London, politicians have responded to the renewed war in the Middle East. Most have failed to oppose Israel’s genocide; some have encouraged the killing, and others have tried to position themselves on the side of peace: a mix of cowardice, complicity and clarity.

Israel & Free Speech

Speaking truth about Israel-Palestine is now almost forbidden, such is the level of hysteria it triggers. The hysteria deters free-thinking, deters open recognition of Palestinian rights under international law and the impact on Western political discourse is chilling. The reasons for the chronic pro-Israel bias include:

  • The constant threat of being smeared as an antisemite by supporters of Israel for dissenting against Western governments’ support for Israel’s dominance of Palestinian life.
  • Israel is seen as representative of Western values, an oasis of white European democracy amid backward Arab states. This racist concept means Israel’s crimes are routinely ignored; Palestinians’ peaceful resistance is ignored, and Palestinians’ violent resistance is always denounced as terrorism. Mainstream discourse either omits context altogether or obfuscates it with misleading cliches like “religious conflict” “disputed land” and “another round of violence.” Western states accept Israeli crimes as a price worth paying for the division of the Arab world.
  • Fanatical and powerful Christians who believe that Christ will return and that the existence of Israel is a prerequisite for this. This pathology is particularly prevalent among American leaders.
  • The Israel lobby wields significant power across Western capitals. Those speaking out against Israel’s crimes, or even speaking up for Palestinian rights, are smeared and harassed.

Palestinians have sacrificed so much since Britain gifted their land to the Zionist movement. Palestinian steadfastness has remained constant while the essence of the conflict has not changed in 75 years: a colonial regime that seeks to remove the indigenous people from the land and replace them with an exclusively Jewish population. The occupation and its violence are illegal under international law. The right of millions of Palestinian refugees to return home is also uncontroversial under international law. The same goes for their right to resist oppression. Seven decades have added much detail to the story but it remains a case of illegitimate occupier versus legitimate resistance. Are our local politicians acting on this truth?

Westminster North

Labour MP Karen Buck, who is a veteran of the Palestine solidarity movement and visited Gaza in the aftermath of Israel’s 2008-9 massacre, has shown little appetite for fighting for the people she knows to be the victims of a brutal siege. Buck toes the party line, focusing on humanitarian assistance rather than addressing the cause of the humanitarian crisis.

The Conservative party have not yet named their candidate to challenge Buck.

Hampstead and Kilburn

Tulip Siddiq is Labour’s Shadow City Minister and has issued boilerplate statements on the war that serve to support Israel’s ongoing genocide. Siddiq claims she “can’t bear watching it” and says Israel must act in line with international law but does not condemn Netanyahu’s government as it breaches international law daily.

In an email to constituents, the MP’s focus, like most Labour politicians, was humanitarian aid. Like almost every British politician, Siddiq ignores the Palestinians’ right to resist and blames the resistance movements in Gaza, rather than Israel, for the situation.

The Tories and Liberal Democrats are yet to announce candidates in Hampstead and Kilburn.

Hammersmith

Andy Slaughter is Labour’s Shadow Solicitor General and a long-time supporter of the Palestinians who visited Gaza with Buck in 2009. To maintain a just-about-plausible pro-Palestine stance, Slaughter has broken ranks somewhat from the zealous pro-Israel line of Keir Starmer and Shadow Foreign Secretary David Lammy, retweeting Palestine’s Ambassador to the UK and Sadiq Khan’s call for a ceasefire.

Unfortunately, Slaughter also retweeted a very telling post by Labour Campaign for Human Rights: “We are horrified by recent atrocities in Israel and subsequent developments in Gaza” – note the profound racism of the language: Young Palestinians breaking out of their concentration camp for the first time and killing Israelis qualifies as “atrocities” while Israel’s systematic destruction of a whole people in the name of religious and ethnic supremacy is regarded as “developments”.

Slaughter also foolishly retweeted false claims about Hamas killing babies.

Once a marginal, but now a Labour stronghold, Hammersmith will be contested by Conservative Andrew Dinsmore in 2024. He does not seem to have commented on the war yet.

Chelsea and Fulham

Greg Hands MP is Conservative Party Chairman and Minister Without Portfolio in the Sunak government. Hands is prolific on social media and since the Palestinian resistance’s attack on October 7th, he has offered relentless support for Israel and no acknowledgement of the rights of Palestinians.

Hands’ month-long stream of propaganda has included smearing Labour MP Apsana Begum for her solidarity with the Palestinians; claiming without evidence that Israel is not an apartheid state; conflating resistance with antisemitism; celebrating the government’s awarding of £3 million to the fear-mongering Community Security Trust, and retweeting the false claim that the Palestinians bombed their own hospital. Hands supports genocide with total impunity and has shown no interest in calling for a ceasefire, let alone addressing the causes of the war.

Hands will face Labour’s Ben Coleman at the next election. Another prolific tweeter, Coleman appears to be an unthinking supporter of Israel and has retweeted a large number of pro-Israel statements from Starmer and Lammy as well as a photo of the Israel flag on 10th October when the genocide was well underway.

Brent Central

Labour MP and veteran of the Corbyn era, Dawn Butler has called for a ceasefire. She is supportive of peace, but like Andy Slaughter speaks only within the limits of debate set by the media and party leaders. Butler enjoys a huge majority with almost 75% of the vote last time out and is uncharacteristically quiet over Israel’s genocide. There has been no announcement of who her Tory opponent will be.

Kensington

Felicity Buchan, Tory MP in the marginal seat of Kensington, was an enthusiastic supporter of the “western values” of Ukraine’s resistance to Russia’s invasion but takes the opposite approach when it comes to Palestine. The Under Secretary of State for Housing and Homelessness in the Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities is fully supportive of Israel’s destruction of Palestinian housing, their creation of millions of homeless people, and their levelling of the Gaza Strip.

Like her colleagues, Buchan’s focus is Israel. Palestinian suffering receives barely a mention from Kensington’s MP despite her large Muslim constituency, aside from a reference to “the tragic loss of civilian lives” as if an earthquake has struck Gaza, rather than a campaign of ethnic cleansing by a military regime that has illegally occupied the territory since 1967, maintaining it as the world’s largest ever concentration camp. Buchan dismisses acts of resistance by inhabitants of the camp simply as “terrorism”.

To compound her anti-Palestinian approach, Buchan has shown more concern about the conduct of peaceful anti-war protests than she has for the genocide of mainly children and women, reassuring her Twitter following that there will be “a robust approach to policing these demonstrations”.

Complicity Felicity’s main challenger at the election will be Labour’s Joe Powell who has limited his response to retweeting and liking pro-war, pro-Israel voices like Barack Obama (“we stand squarely alongside our ally, Israel”) and David Lammy, who claimed during a pro-Israel rant on Sky News that Hamas has “raped babies” and who’s diplomacy has extended only as far as supporting “humanitarian pauses” in the genocide.

The phrase “humanitarian pauses” has been created to enable liberal politicians to imply that it is fine to commit genocide while still pretending to care. This focus on humanitarian aid is lipstick on the pig of Labour’s full commitment to Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine. The party’s vision for the Middle East is a region dominated by a militarised apartheid state; a colonial anachronism in the 21st century, with any challengers to that power imbalance brutalised and denigrated in an attempt to kill off any hopes they have for justice.

The other challenger to Buchan is independent candidate Emma Dent Coad, who resigned from the Labour Party earlier this year. Dent Coad has been far more outspoken than any other West London politician, without reticence about her affiliations to Stop the War Coalition and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and her support for Palestine solidarity. Dent Coad has retweeted fiercely independent anti-war journalists like Matt Kennard, helping the spread of important information about the war, its origins and its true intention: the destruction of the Palestinian people.

by Tom Charles @tomhcharles

Britain’s Palestine Problems

~ Urban Dandy London ~ Leave a comment

Palestinian culture emphasises Sumud ( صمود) or steadfastness in the face of hardship and injustice, a quality that has enabled Palestinians to survive an existential assault by Israel for 75 years. Throughout this period, Britain has matched the Palestinians’ Sumud with its own steadfastness in enabling Israel’s domination over the Palestinian people and land. These two Sumuds are at odds with each other, meaning Britain, across its political spectrum, has a serious Palestine problem, albeit one that is easy to solve, should the country ever decide to take up the cause of justice. 

Problem one – Refugees

The Palestinian refugee crisis is so extreme and so integral to current events in the Middle East that it requires a certain level of genius to miss it. Judging by their proclamations over recent weeks, the whole British media and political class possess this type of genius. They have managed to avoid the obvious fact that the refugee issue is the key to resolving the Middle East conflict.

It is useful to consider the refugee crisis in the context of the broader demographics of Palestine and Israel. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics (PCBS) estimated the worldwide Palestinian population to be just over 14 million in 2021. 

The PCBS estimates that at least 5.3 million Palestinians live in the Occupied Territories (West Bank and Gaza Strip) constituting 38% of all Palestinians worldwide. Inside Israel, 1.7 million Palestinians reside, 12% of the global Palestinian population.

Over 50% of Palestinians, at least seven million people (possibly as high as nine million according to the PCBS), live in the Diaspora as refugees. Of these, Jordan hosts the largest number with 4.5 million, while 1.8 million are in other Arab countries, including Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, and the Gulf states. Around 750,000 are estimated to live in non-Arab countries, with a particularly large number in Chile.

The total global Palestinian population is notoriously difficult to calculate, but 14 million is a good conservative estimate. If translated into a state population, it would make Palestine the 75th biggest country in the world, and drop Israel one place to 99th in that list, with its population of 9.5 million (that figure includes the 1.7 million Palestinians living inside Israel who would probably claim their Palestinian citizenship given the option).

All Palestinian refugees have an inalienable right to return to their land, guaranteed under international law in UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of December 1948. Yet, with the help of Britain and other powerful allies, Israel continues to block the fulfilment of the refugees’ right of return and seeks to further diminish their presence in their homeland. As a result, many Palestinians live in appalling conditions with few rights. If the refugee crisis had started in 2023, rather than in 1948, it would shock the world and feature heavily in the news. Instead, it is largely unknown to Western news consumers.

In the Gaza Strip, most of the 2.2 million population are refugees and descendants of refugees (descendants have the same status and guaranteed right to return) from Israel’s initial ethnic cleansing of 1947-48 when Jewish terrorist gangs forced Palestinians into exile. Many in Gaza have been made refugees multiple times over by Israel’s wars against the Strip.

In the occupied West Bank, Palestinian refugees live in camps under strict military occupation, suffering daily humiliations. In Lebanon, conditions at some Palestinian camps are not fit for human habitation, and in every nearby country in which they have sought refuge, Palestinians have suffered further displacement, war, and oppression. This includes Jordan, Syria, Libya, and Iraq. Upheavals in countries across the region have frequently seen persecution of the Palestinian refugees with no state yet established to protect them.

Burj al-Barajneh Palestinian refugee camp in Beirut. Graffiti of the iconic Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, where these refugees are unable to visit
Nahr al-Bared Palestinian refugee camp, near Tripoli, Lenanon, 2011. The camp was destroyed by the Lebanese army, displacing tens of thousands of refugees. The international community was not forthcoming with funds to reconstruct the camp

To resolve the Middle East conflict, Britain could support the fulfilment of the refugees’ right of return. This would provide justice, regional stability, and reduce the chances of regional conflict or nuclear war. With the return of the refugees, Israel’s Zionist project, which seeks to form an exclusively Jewish state in the holy land, would be defeated, and Israel would be forced to live in peace with its neighbours as a normal country instead of the garrison state it currently is. Resolving the refugee crisis would also go a long way to allaying the crisis faced by Muslims and Christians as their institutions and holy places would no longer be threatened by a colonial project that violates the sanctity of mosques and churches and abuses worshipers. Sunni Islam’s third and fourth holiest sites are in Palestine (Jerusalem and Hebron) as is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre (Jerusalem.) This barely scratches the surface of the religious significance of Palestine.

As an aside (!), it is another remarkable fact of the conflict that Britain, a Christian country with a large Muslim population, does nothing to defend the holy sites. Analysis, even passing mention, of Israel’s targeting of sacred religious places is largely absent from media and political commentary of the conflict. The day after Israel bombed a Christian hospital in Gaza, killing an estimated 500 peole, the leader of a Christian nation, US President Joe Biden, hugged Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and claimed the Palestinians had bombed themselves. Within two days, the leader of another Christian state, our own prime minister, did likewise, telling Netanyahu and the World, “We want you to win.”

If this “win” is even possible, can it be achieved without the destruction of both Islam and Christianity in Palestine? It certainly cannot be achieved without the continuation of an epic injustice against a stateless people.

Problem two – Democracy

The consensus across the political-media spectrum in Britain is that Palestine has no right to be a democracy. Like with the refugee issue, we see impressive discipline from politicians and journalists as they avoid mentioning the last Palestinian general election. Commentators incessantly tell the British people that the winner of that election, Hamas, is a terrorist group, plain and simple.

Ignorance and cowardice pervade parliament over the issue of Palestinian democracy. In 2006, Hamas won the right to form a government in the Occupied Territories. Realising that they would be sabotaged by the US and EU, Hamas formed a coalition with the defeated Fatah party. The US and EU, with Britain prominent, plotted to cancel Palestinian democracy, backing a Fatah-affiliated group to overthrow Hamas in a violent coup. Hamas, based in Gaza, but having won a higher percentage of the vote in the West Bank, got wind of the plot, pre-empted it and took control of Gaza’s institutions. This move sealed the current division of the Palestinians into two separated geographical areas. The Gaza Strip is de facto ruled by Hamas but maintained as a concentration camp by Israel. The West Bank has a Fatah government headed by Mahmoud Abbas, recognised as representative of the Palestinians by Western governments, but operating as an arm of the Israeli security forces in suppressing Palestinian dissent.

Britain, under a Labour government at the time of the election, simply pretended that Hamas hadn’t won, and continued to support Israel wholeheartedly as it repeatedly massacred Gazans and tightened its oppression and theft of land in the West Bank. Hamas generally maintained ceasefires and kept Gaza quiet, signing multiple reconciliation agreements with Fatah, but the geographical division combined with Fatah’s aversion to resistance made true unity impossible. In 2018, when Palestinian refugees marched bravely and peacefully in the spirit of Mahatma Gandhi to the Israeli border, they were massacred. Hundreds were killed and thousands injured. Britain’s support for Israel continued.

Britain and others’ refusal to deal with Hamas consigned the Palestinians to political impotence. By retaining two governments in two small, besieged territories, influential states that could potentially advocate for peace and justice are unable to do so with confidence. The result is Palestinian presence in the so-called Axis of Resistance to US domination (Iran, Syria, Hezbollah, Hamas, and perhaps Turkey and Qatar) and 17 years of political drift for the Palestinians.

The Left

Elite commentary in Britain during Israel’s current intensified ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip is revealing. As expected, the right generally backs Netanyahu’s violence. Parliament’s official opposition has done likewise, and the Labour Party now lacks backbenchers able to speak with conscience and clarity about Israel’s war crimes.

The British left more generally, needing to speak but with little to say about ending the conflict and providing justice to the Palestinians, has largely limited its response to calling for humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza and calling out racist sentiment in the media. Part of Israel’s calculation in causing mass destruction is that Westerners will quickly fall into two chattering camps: Zionists and those appalled by the violence. Both camps are kept busy as, day after day, Israel – from a safe distance – pummels the refugees of Gaza.

Many on the left lack a real grasp of the issues and history outlined above – refugees and democracy – so they perpetuate a stale old routine. There’s no mention of the refugees, or the fact that the conflict could be quickly resolved based entirely on international law and UN resolutions that Britain is a signatory to. And no mention of democracy, because that risks validating Hamas, its political wing now proscribed by the Conservative government without protest from Labour. This also means silence over the Palestinians’ right to self-defence, including by violent means.

It is as if the conflict started on October 7th and is being fought between two equal sides. Both right and left advocate a return to the pre-October status quo, a living nightmare for the Palestinians. The British left seems to only support the Palestinians on condition that they remain victims, recipients of aid and pity.

This lack of political impetus risks leaving the Palestinians no further forward than they were before they briefly broke out of their prison. It risks condemning another generation of refugees to misery and dispossession. It leaves Israel as an anachronism, unable to move towards peace while the West encourages it to covet the destruction of the Palestinians, Islam, and Christianity in the holy land. And it leaves Britain adrift, a weakening state with a political-media class that lies relentlessly to sell us a Middle East policy that is devoid of hope, mere cover for ethnic cleansing, racism and dictatorships, alongside increasingly repressive domestic policies.  

by Tom Charles @tomhcharles

photos by the writer

Complicity Felicity’s Simplicity

~ Urban Dandy London ~ 4 Comments

On Friday, Kensington MP Felicity Buchan attended a series of events locally to commemorate the anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Dressed in the colours of the Ukrainian flag, Buchan smiled like a friend to refugee children and their parents, but the words she spoke revealed a simplistic view of the conflict and no appetite for doing anything to stop the death and destruction.

Virtually all 650 MPs in parliament have been in lockstep to prolong the Ukrainians’ agony as they lose both territory and population in the war against their far stronger neighbour. As Ukraine is crushed, our politicians virtue signal from a safe distance. Diplomacy is a dirty word, and we’re repeatedly told that peace is impossible. Sir Keir Starmer has banned Labour MPs from questioning NATO’s provocation of the war and Boris Johnson intervened to prevent Presidents Zelensky and Putin from holding peace talks last April, as reported in Ukrainian media (the British press ignored it).

From 2014 to February 2022, over 14,000 were killed in Ukraine’s civil war following the US-backed coup that overthrew a president who favoured close ties to Russia. In the coup, the ensuing civil war and now the war with Russia, Ukrainian neo-Nazi groups and army battalions have played a prominent role.

The situation is intensely complex and dangerous, yet Buchan pledged Kensington’s and the UK’s unwavering support for the people of Ukraine. Her platitudes and clichés masked the ugly reality: Britain will support the Ukrainians on the condition that they keep fighting the Russians in an unwinnable war.

Slava

Buchan wrote about her experience of the anniversary: “I was honoured to attend the very moving remembrance service at the Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. Tragically, more than 450 children have died in the conflict. Paper angels were suspended from the ceiling in their honour. Ukraine will prevail. Slava Ukraini.”

Slava Ukraini – Glory to Ukraine. But where is the glory? And what right does a British politician have to declare glory to a country they are, knowingly or unknowingly, sacrificing?

Outside the Ukrainian embassy, Buchan declared “We will not tire, we will be there to the end.”

These words are almost unfathomably vacuous. But soundbites are all we hear from our leaders as they mindlessly provoke Russia and China, two countries that needn’t be enemies of Britain. 

“We will be there to the end” of what? Ukraine as a functioning state? Or are our rulers really set on decades of existential wars to impoverish and terrify us as they play brinkmanship over nuclear annihilation?

Outside the Association of Ukrainians in Great Britain on Holland Park Avenue, Buchan told the assembled refugee children that the war against Russia “isn’t just about Ukraine. It’s about western values, good values.”

We emailed Felicity Buchan asking her to clarify what she meant, given that Ukraine is an eastern country, but at the time of writing, she had not replied.

Complicity

Dubbed “Complicity Felicity” in North Kensington due to her part in voting down the fire safety recommendations of the Grenfell Inquiry, Buchan enjoyed her moment posing as a liberal humanitarian. But her words were loaded with the complacency, fanaticism and racism of the British political establishment. Ukrainian lives mean so little that Britain sends enough weapons to keep them hanging on in the war, guaranteeing humanitarian catastrophe. This is justified through profound Russophobia and the puerile demonisation of Putin as the epitome of evil. It’s a familiar tactic, most recently used against Bashar al-Assad in Syria, a country illegally occupied by both the United States and Israel – western values? Before Assad, it was Gaddafi, sodomised to death by our allies in Libya. “We came, we conquered, he died!” squealed Hillary Clinton in delight – western values.  

All this recent history, including Russia’s intervention in Syria to prevent its fall to ISIS and al Qaeda; the Ukrainian government’s role in persecuting ethnic Russians in the Donbas; the Ukrainians’ own values, traditions and their intrinsic value as humans, is all swept away with simplistic concepts like “Western values…good values.”

Like most MPs, Kensington’s “Complicity Felicity” frames the war in babyish terms, Good West v Bad East. By shunning diplomacy but acting as a friend of the Ukrainian people, Buchan is adding duplicity to her complicity and simplicity.

By Tom Charles

@tomhcharles

The Unknown Hell of Starmer’s Labour

~ Urban Dandy London ~ Leave a comment
photo from Twitter keir_starmer

Just over a decade ago, I was involved in producing an important political pamphlet you have never read. Its title was ‘Unknown Hell’ and it reported on a visit undertaken by several Labour politicians to Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon.

The pamphlet’s title was suggested by Sir Gerald Kaufman, the legendary phrase coiner who dubbed Labour’s 1983 manifesto “the longest suicide note in history.” Along with Kaufman and me, the contributors to the pamphlet were the MPs Jeremy Corbyn and Michael Connarty, reflecting a Labour party that was still a broad church. Kaufman was to the right, Connarty to the left, and Corbyn firmly on the left.

Kaufman’s ‘Unknown Hell’ title captured the fact that, despite them being the world’s largest refugee population, most people in the west are ignorant of the displaced Palestinians’ suffering. Ethnically cleansed in the 1940s and trapped in camps around the region ever since, Palestinian refugees have been re-victimised in every host country. Their legal right to return home under UN Resolution 194 has been reaffirmed by virtually the whole world every year since 1949, but the fulfilment of this right has been blocked by the United States and Israel.

The Unknown Hell pamphlet was to be circulated among Labour members to raise awareness about the world’s longest-running refugee crisis, and hopefully influence party policy. But it was blocked by people (none were Palestinian) inside the Labour party who were convinced that the Palestinian cause was better served by policies focused on supporting the corrupted Palestinian Authority. This thinking was in line with US-Israeli diktats to ignore the main problems facing the Palestinians and focus myopically on bureaucracy. A comfortable position for the faction within Labour that thinks efficient obeyance of power will produce a better world. Coincidently, the smooth advancement of their careers is also better served by taking this stance.

The MPs’ reflections on the hideous conditions in the Beirut and Tripoli camps, and their analysis of meetings with all the key players in Lebanon, were silenced. The Labour hostiles were led by Simon Danczuk, who feigned interest in justice and human rights to pick up Muslim votes in Rochdale before consuming himself with fanatical factional hatred of Corbyn.

Ten years on and politicians and officials with this belligerent mentality have full control of Labour under Keir Starmer. Their creed is the goodness of the British state, giving them much in common with security state officials who appear to be influential in deciding who should stand for the party at general elections, candidates who will ensure that Palestinians’ (and Yemenis’, Ukrainians’…) misery is perpetuated by constant war. In this setup, there is no room for those who talk the language of diplomacy and peace.

A purge of grassroots Labour members is in full effect, but, like the suffering of the Palestinians in Lebanon, it is unknown to most people thanks to the media’s determined silence. An assault on the democracy of the party that is likely to form the next government is taking place in plain sight, but you’d never know it.

Those thrown out by Labour suffer their own personal hell, gaslit with infantile explanations after giving years to grassroots causes. Criticism of NATO is proscribed by party whips, further subduing what remains of socialist resistance to war in parliament. In these perverted circumstances, members are being expelled for possessing the qualities that most people find admirable: loyalty, steadfastness, and a willingness to support the most vulnerable.

There is no hierarchy of suffering that prevents the pain of these ousted Labour members from being discussed alongside the suffering of the 9.5 million Palestinian refugees or Britain’s many other victims. These are not discrete issues, and Keir Starmer’s purge of campaigners for peace and justice means that the UK cannot elect a progressive government at the next election. This has echoes in the refugee camps of Lebanon, and the unknown hell will continue thanks to the pro-war right’s grip on Labour.

by Tom Charles @tomhcharles

Jeremy Corbyn at the entrance of Bourj al Barajneh refugee camp in Beirut

Breaking Water : MSF Exclusive

~ Angel Lewis ~ Leave a comment

The sea section

Within just a few short months, the world’s concerns have gone from refugee to presidential. Makes me question who’s doing the choosing inside the old noggin? I, in defiance of the directive, am watching a documentary on the plights of Medicines Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders) and I’m so moved by it that I feel as though I’m actually in the Mediterranean onboard the rescue boat – Bourbon Argos. 
 
So enlightened by the whole ordeal, I find myself wanting to join the team.  For me, the safe delivery of the worn-out refugees is better appreciated by comparing it with the area of obstetrics. The uncertainty, the anticipation and danger of the breaking water creates a contradicting consternation, followed by the sheer satisfaction of delivering those people.  People who had already decided to let their outright need overcome their utmost fear for the potential of entering into a new, safer, unfamiliar world; or not.
 
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The Bourbon Argos (the delivery room) intended as a medical supply ship. Photo: Lindis Hurum
 
Inspired by this, I contacted Lindis Hurum, one of the humanitarian workers featured in the documentary, directly who told me that she wasn’t actually a recruiter and advised me accordingly. As luck would have it, or maybe fate, this led to an incredibly beautiful conversation, ending with the following communication of rare insight.
Rare because there aren’t really many words that can explain the emotions exchanged between the deliverer and the delivered but if we must seek out words to elucidate this fervour, let us not try guessing and experience them first hand.    
 
Lindis  Hurum is the field coordinator for Medecins Sans Frontieres, an organisation founded four decades ago by a group of doctors.
The emergency medical aid organisation was set up to provide care for people facing natural and man-made disasters, epidemics and war, regardless of race religion or ideology. In the last forty years, an unfathomable amount of lives have been delivered through the safe hands of the organisation. 

Continue reading →

A BOAT COMES IN

~ Urban Dandy London ~ Leave a comment

A refugee boat lands on Lesvos

by Bradley Middleton    

It’s dawn in early January on the Greek island of Lesvos. A brisk breeze sweeps in off the wintry Aegean Sea. Small waves break on the dark carpet of water, flaring and dying like liquid stars all across the surface of those freezing depths, a sea that expands from my view all the way to the beaches and rocks of Anatolia just under twenty kilometres to the east. There lies Turkey. Another country. Another continent. Its hills and mountains backlit by the barely risen sun. Pink and burnt orange unspun clouds hang above it in the magnificent deep blue sky. My friend Pawel has already seen the boat. He leans forwards squinting, almost pressing the binoculars to the windscreen of our hired van. He hands me the binoculars and points out to the edge of the horizon. ‘A small black dot. Look. It’s flat, very flat, down in the water.’ I see nothing. Why can’t I see it? I open the door and step into the freezing wind. Pawel is already in the back of the van checking on our supplies; gloves, socks, children’s clothes, emergency blankets. He’s a relative veteran on the island and has been part of the emergency team many times before, spotting and greeting refugee boats in this inhospitable and rocky part of the coast. A tall blonde blue-eyed Polish guy who’s spent time in Nepal and the West Bank and as such speaks pretty good Arabic, a much sought after skill in the camps and landing points of Lesvos. I still can’t see the boat. The other members of our team, Iker and Andrea, can see it. The Spanish Bomberos, volunteer firefighters from Castile and Leon can see it and are now preparing their equipment for landing. Where is it? I start to doubt myself. What’s wrong with my eyes? I ask someone to point to the boat. I follow their direction and eventually see a tiny, almost invisible shape very low in the water, too low. I see the flat line of the dinghy and tiny little orange dots that are the life vests worn by the people sitting up high on the sides of the vessel.

IMG_0298
The port at Mytilene

The minutes pass. The sun brightens the sky. The boat comes slowly, battling the torrents in fits and starts, almost as if the motor is struggling to keep a straight course. I know that there’s anywhere between eighty to a hundred refugees crammed onto the tiny boat. A rickety barely sea-worthy dinghy. I look through the binoculars and see each wave crashing over the bow soaking the people on board with every hit. I also know that the refugees have organised themselves so the men are on the outside and the women are towards the middle huddled and cuddling the children and babies to protect them from the freezing water washing over the dinghy with every strike. I’m struck by an acute feeling of helplessness. I find myself talking out loud. ‘Come on…come on…slowly…easy…easy. Just keep it steady.’ The sea is too rough, and the boat looks so unstable under the weight of people. I know the pilot of the boat has never done this before. He’s a refugee who’s paid a little less than the thousand euros asking price to cross the sea, his reduced ‘ticket’ is reward for taking on the duty of driving. I do the sums quickly. A hundred people at a thousand euros each. That’s 100,000 euros per boat in the coffers of the Turkish people smugglers, no doubt cuts going to the mafia and the local government officials turning a blind eye to the operation. As I stand on the edge of the western world watching these people escaping the warring factions, the brutal regimes and the western bombs now littering their homeland, the helplessness ferments into anger. Anger at the unnecessary risks these people are forced to take. Anger at the inactive European Union. Anger at the dormant Greek and Turkish authorities. There is no reason why these people aren’t granted safe passage. No reason why they must make this perilous journey across these dangerous waters. The EU makes its rules. It grants asylum or not, but that’s not the point I’m making here. Safe passage should be a right granted to all refugees fleeing conflict in their own countries. Continue reading →