Iraqi Interpreters Update

I’ve been somewhat busy sorting out work lately, so haven’t paid as much attention to the plight of the interpreters as I would have liked. I received the following from Dan Hardie so I’m publishing it verbatim:

Another excuse dies the death: the Americans, or at any rate their Congress, are doing what the British Government lacks the moral courage to do. (Hat tips to these two gentlemen.)

There will be a meeting at Parliament on Tuesday October 9th, to call for the British Government to recognise its responsibilities and give shelter to the Iraqis endangered by their work for this country’s troops and diplomats. You can invite your MP.  And if you care about these people, you should. 

The more MPs we get in the meeting, the better. They are not going to listen to Mark Brockway, who is getting desperate emails from the Iraqis he hired, and walk away indifferent; they are not going to listen to Richard Beeston of the Times and decide that they can ignore this. We are going to make it impossible for the Home Office to carry on with its delaying tactics.

This is how to invite your MP:

1) Find your MP: type your postcode into ‘They work for you’.

2) Copy-and-paste or better still, adapt this form invitation below (and make any changes you want, but we have to keep these letters courteous).  Also; make sure that your address and postcode are on the letters

3) You can then either email it to your MP (email addresses for MPs take the form [email protected]– thus Gordon Brown is  [email protected] ) or you can post it to ‘MP’s name,  The House of Commons, Westminster, London, SW1A 0AA.’ If you have the time, printed letters are better than emails: and it’s not that hard to write a letter, is it? If you get a bounceback from an MP’s email address, get in touch with me  ( [email protected] ) as I have a bunch of alternative contact details now, or -better still- write the print letter and post it.  Please make sure that your address and postcode are clearly written on either emails or print letters, so that the MP realises they are dealing with one of their own constituents.

4) If you are in London on the evening of Tuesday 9th October, please come along to the meeting in person. Go to St Stephen’s entrance, facing College Green (the police tend to be helpful here) and ask for admission. There will be at least one campaigning blogger at the entrance, ready to point you in the right direction: remember the meeting starts at 7pm.

Thank you- and, hopefully, see you there.

FORM INVITATION:

Iraqi Employees of British Forces – Parliamentary Speaker Meeting, Tuesday October 9th

Dear NAME

As your constituent, I am writing on behalf of ‘We can’t turn them away’, an online campaign for resettlement for those Iraqis threatened by death squads for their work with British forces. We would like to invite you to a meeting in Committee Room 14 of the Houses of Parliament on Tuesday October 9 ^th from 7 to 9pm .

As you may well have seen in The Times, Iraqi citizens who have worked as interpreters for British forces are being tortured and murdered by death squads for having worked with the occupying forces.

Speakers will include:

Mark Brockway (a former Warrant Officer in the Territorial Royal Engineers, who ran the

British Army’s Quick Impact Reconstruction Projects in 2003,  when he hired a great many

Iraqi staff in 2003. Mark has been in close contact with them since and knows of at least

one who has been recently murdered;

Richard Beeston, senior Foreign Correspondent for ‘The Times’ newspaper.

Ed Vaizey MP, Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport.

Lynne Featherstone MP, Liberal Democrat spokesperson for International Development.

A senior Labour MP.

A number of reporters from television, the national press and BBC Radio will attend the meeting.

This is a cross-party, moral issue, on which both opponents and supporters of the Iraq war can agree. Whilst the Government has said that it is reviewing the policy, no change has yet been made, and further delay is likely to leave Iraqi employees at the mercy of the local death squads. Attendance at this event certainly does not imply any agreement with the aims of our campaign: you are welcome to come and ask searching questions, or to send a Researcher to represent you.

If you cannot come to the meeting, I would also ask that you write to the Home Secretary, and to the Immigration Minister, Liam Byrne, asking for an explanation of why policy has not changed despite the announcement of an ‘urgent review’ of the matter on August 8th this year.  

Thank you very much for your time.