Ding-dong the witch is dead!

Blunkett finally resigned.

Too bad it wasn’t for his blatant disregard for the rule of law and civil rights, but at least we know now that smary hypocritical Labour weasels can be brought down just as well as their Tory counterparts could in the eighties and nineties.

David Blunkett looking like a dickhead

For those who don’t know why Blunkett resigned, it all started when his affair with a married woman was revealed; soon after it turned out that he may have …helped his lover, Kimberly Quinn (publisher of the rightwing Spectator) in various ways, including fast tracking visa applications for her nanny. It then turned out she was pregnant with her second child, which may or may not be Blunkett’s,which did not stop him from starting a lawsuit against Mrs Quinn to obtain access rights to her two year old son, which he apparantely believes is his and with whom he has been parading as his own son when he went on holidays with Mrs Quinn…

Apart from the legalities of it all, the hypocrisy of it all is quite astounding. The sheer cheek of somebody who sees no bone in sueing his pregnant ex-lover, a married woman over visiting rights to her son which may or not be fathered by him, lecturing others on morals. Incredible.

It certainly makes me Proud of Britain to see him gone.
Now for the rest of the cabinet…

Now the question is who will be the new Home Secretary: Peter “incompetent” Hain perhaps or Alan “who he?” Milburn. The other question is what will happen to Blunkett’s pet projects, like the national ID card he wanted to introduce.

Proud of Britain

Aren’t we all proud of Britain? Apparantely not so the Labour Party (sic) who threatened the patriot who put up the Proud of Britain website, just because they have a much inferior initiative of their own, to which I will not link.

Meanwhile, could it be that the Labour Party has a scandal on his hands, now that a certain Home Secretary has been accused of all sorts of not so ethical behaviour? Who would have thought that such a moral crusader could be so hypocritical? Certainly not me…

Meanwhile, some other news that perhaps might make you less proud of Britain, or at least its current government. It turns out the Blair administration may have known all about naughty Mark Thatcher and co’s plans to …ummm…. “spread democracy” to Equatorial Guinea. Remember, only a loon or a conspiracy theorist” (oooh!) would think this had anything to do with oil.

Mind, with Iraq not being the surefire property it once seemed to be, who can blame mr. Blair for trying to diversivy his investments?

Disgusting, immoral and sick

Officials are preparing a fresh set of guidelines for GPs, which would stipulate that people whose asylum cases have been rejected, or who have not yet submitted an application to the Home Office, must not be given ‘routine’ care, including drugs therapy. Refugees are allowed emergency treatment only if they fall ill with Aids symptoms and are sent to casualty departments.

The Observer has learnt that there have been several cases in the past three months of clinicians
having to persuade hospital managers to allow them to treat pregnant women asylum seekers who have HIV.

Under the April guidelines, hospitals can refuse to give women the treatment if the Home Office has refused them leave to remain in Britain. But a decision not to give them the drugs would leave their unborn children with a 30 per cent chance of developing the disease.

Fury at ban on HIV help for refugees, The observer, 08 August 2004

This is just sickening. The sheer depravity of witholding medical treatments from people, of sending
them to their death just because of their legal status. There is no way anyone could excuse this
monstrous policy. Sure, the usual suspects will try and rationalise it by presenting it as a cost saving
measure, preventing those evil refugees from “sponging off the NHS”, or as a measure to make the UK less popular as a destination for refugees, but in reality it will just cause more human suffering without
achieving anything.

What I’m worried about is, since my own government seems honourbound to copy the worst aspects of UK and US policies, they will try and introduce this here as well…

The sordid history behind Diego Garcia

Diego Garcia is an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean, part of the Chagos Archipelago, home to one of the most important US military overseas bases, from which e.g. B-52 bombing missions were launched against Afghanistan and Iraq. Diego Garcia is not an US possession though, but is leased from the United Kingdom, starting from 1971. The US needed a secure base in the Indian Ocean, both to counter Soviet moves as well as to establish a secure intelligence post there.

At the time when the US first started showing interest into establishing a base in the Indian Ocean in the early 1960ties, the Chagos Archipelago was part of the British colony of Mauritius, which was on the brink of independence. The UK offered Mauritius their freedom, as well as 3 million UK pounds if they gave up their claim to the Chagos islands. Having done so, the UK then incorperated them as well as some other islands into the British Indian Ocean Territory, or BIOT. This was then quietly, without debate in Parliament, leased out to the Americans for fifty years, in order for them to built their base. In return, the US offered a $11 million subsidiy on the Polaris nuclear missile system the UK was then buying from them.

So far, so what. Letting your ally establish a military base on your territory is hardly sordid, now is it? In this case, it is. Because at the time the US started building its base there, it wasn’t uninhabited. Nor where the other islands of the Chagos Archipelago. Before the US started building, the island group was home to the Ilois, which had been there for at least two hundred years.

So what happened to them, that they don’t live there anymore ? They got forcibly removed to Mauritius, forbidden to return to their homes and indeed kept away from it by force, all without any form of compensation, because the US wanted their base to be “secure”. All of which was blatantly illegal, both under international law and under British law, as established by the judgement in a lawsuit against the British Foreign Office undertaken by several of the Archipelago’s inhabitants:

“Section 4 of the Ordinance effectively exiles the Ilois from the territory where they are belongers and forbids their return. But the ‘peace, order, and good government’ of any territory means nothing, surely, save by reference to the territory’s population. They are to be governed: not removed. … I cannot see how the wholesale removal of a people from the land where they belong can be said to conduce to the territory’s peace, order and good government. … In short, there is no principled basis upon which section 4 of the Ordinance can be justified as having been empowered by section 11 of the BIOT Order. And it has no other conceivable source of lawful authority.”

Source: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/jksonc/queen_v_fco-bancoult.html

Now originally, the US wanted to establish a base on a different island elsewhere in the Indian Ocean, the island of Aldabra, north of Madagascar. But this was home to a rare species of giant turtle and if a base where to be established there it would undergo much opposition from ecologists and nature lovers. Whereas nobody would bat an eyelid if a few hundred or so islanders would be robbed from their homes, as long as it could be plausibly denied that they were permanent residents.

Which is exactly what Britain did, starting from 1965 onwards. They consistently talked about the people living in the Chagos Archipelago as if they were only migrant workers for the copra plantations, and were “reall” Mauritanians. The British Foreign Office knew perfectly well this was untrue, but it was a convenient figleaf to justify the expulsion of the Ilois people. For the next thirty years, this would continue to be the official line of the UK government, until the island people finally won recognition through their court case against the Foreign Office. Not that this meant their troubles were over; the US still refuses to let them back into their homes.

I came across this case while reading Body of Secrets, a history of the US National Security Agency, written by James Bamford, which intrigued me enough to do some more online research about it. It just one example of why I don’t trust either the UK or US very much when it comes to the War on Terror and the invasion of Iraq, regardless of whether I trust Bush or Blair personally. Both are far too willing to chose realpolitik over humanitarian concerns and plain decency.

Sources:
Body of Secrets, James Bamford, ISBN: 0-09-942774-5 (UK edition), pages 163-166
The Chagos Islands: A sordid tale, BBC News online, 3 November 2000.
Thirty years of lies, deceit and trickery that robbed a people of their island home, Ewen MacAskill and Rob Evans, The Guardian, November 4 2000
Diego Garcia: The ‘criminal question’ doctrine, Charles Judson Harwood Jr.