Illegal compassion

Friday, 08. 21. 2009  –  By Terkel  –  Comments Off

2009 © all photos by my talented and courageous friend Andreas Bro

Eight days ago, Denmark – my once dearly beloved motherland – lost its last sense of decency and humanity. In the cover of night, riot police entered the Brorsons Church in central Copenhagen and arrested 17 Iraqi men who had been denied asylum in order to forcibly repatriate them to their war-torn homeland. The 17 men, who were against their will separated from wives and children in the process, had sought refuge with their families in the church since May in order to stop their own deportation to Iraq – a expatriation the UN has publicly advised against since they might face torture and prosecution. In the course of the eviction, the Danish police clubbed and bludgeoned scores of Danish protesters who had come to voice their disapproval with the anticipated expulsion. Last night, news surfaced that the expelled Iraqis had been denied legal representation when they are to meet with the Iraqi delegation that will escort them back to the Middle East – a place they have not been for the past 6-13 years where they have been living in various Danish asylum centers. The degradation of their already shattered dignity is complete.

How did it come this far, you might ask? Since 2001, the Liberal government in Denmark has been courting the xenophobic and nationalistic Danish People’s Party (DPP) in order to execute party bloc politics in a country once famous for its parliamentary diversity. Amongst the accolades of this opportunistic political pact is the design of one the world’s toughest immigration laws – the implementation of which greatly helped foster the toxic and anxious political climate that helped spark the notorious Muhammad cartoons crisis in 2006. The DPP provides blind parliamentary support for the government in return for their malevolent immigration policies that are basically designed to “protect” Denmark against the wicked outsiders that will destroy our Little Mermaid fairytale country, whether they are Poles, Romanians, Latvians, Iraqis, Afghanis, or Iranians. All these appalling technicalities that make up these laws were the very legal spider web that caught the 17 Iraqis – and the 200-some of the countrymen with the same awaiting destiny – the human prey that the DPP and their ignorant followers feasts upon.

408 years after William Shakespeare wrote the famous proverb “there’s something rotten in the State of Denmark” – a line that has, frankly, always annoyed me – I concur. The inhumane immigration directives that gave birth to the undignified scenes at Brorsons Church are our own creation. The social democrats and the rest of us humanists should have fought tooth and nail to stop this from happening. But we did not. We just stood by and watched as our values of social justice decay to a point beyond return. Now it is the law.

In his remarkable Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. – citing St. Augustine – gracefully penned: “an unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law.” and continued to conclude that “an unjust law is no law at all”. Dr. King’s struggle was in an entirely different context and time, but the problem is the same: can we as civilized human beings stomach that disenfranchised minorities in our society gets stomped upon in the name of the unjust laws our institutions have created? And where do we draw the line and say that we have had enough?

I surely have had enough. Sure, the police was enforcing the law when they forcibly pulled the Iraqis out of Brorsons Church but they were complying with an unjust and inhumane law that is a disgrace on Denmark. To only think in legal terms about this problem is to subscribe to the kind of xenophobic deadpan reasoning that breeds the alarming power structures, which allows DPP to exercise its anti-social spell on Denmark.

Something inside the Danish soul was lost on August 13. The humanitarian pride of my home country, which I once cherished and marveled, perished in the night as the police wielded their batons to enforce an unjust law. Eight nights ago, I became ashamed to call myself a Dane. It is about time to assert that, in a democracy, compassion should never be illegal.

Have our leaders recently taken a look at "The Man In The Mirror"?

Monday, 07. 13. 2009  –  By Terkel  –  28 Comments

Karys Rhea's attention-grabbing post about the media’s unquenchable appetite for Michael Jackson stories at the cost of the continuing tragedy in Iran got me thinking. I too am fascinated by the explosion of support for the democratic movement in Iran and especially how new media and social platforms are for once being used for something other than pestering applications and mind-numbing status updates. That little trace of a globally conscious online democracy is encouraging in its own right.

However, the death of MJ and the predictable retreat of the media’s attention demonstrate more than just the obvious superficiality of our pop culture. To better understand the true nature of the loud Western outcry over the Iranian electoral fraud and clampdown of protesters, let us take a look at another country in the Middle East: Egypt.

Apart from both being the scene of ancient cultures that spurred modern civilization, Egypt and Iran share noticeable similarities in their dysfunctional and paranoid political systems. For 28 years Egypt has been ruled by its own vicious strongman, Hosni Mubarak, who has fostered a reign that takes pride in administrative detentions, a disgustingly unfair justice system, widespread violence against women, non-existing freedom of expression and extensive use of torture and executions.

In March 2008, draconian constitutional amendments cemented a development that – in the words of Amnesty International – gave “sweeping arrest powers of the police, gave broad authority for state agents to eavesdrop on private communications, authorized the President to bypass ordinary courts and paved the way for new anti-terrorism legislation expected to further erode human rights protection”. Yet our Western leaders, who have not been shy to shame Iranian tyrants, remained entirely silent.

If human rights are something worth fighting for, should someone have stepped up and voiced dissatisfaction? Should the State Department not have threatened to withhold U.S. foreign assistance to Mubarak, which amounts to a whopping $2 billion annually, to protect the human rights of the Egyptian version of Neda?

Fact of the matter is, Egypt and Iran have one key dissimilarity that undoubtedly spurred the inaction of the West to use its extensive leverage in Cairo. While the Egyptian regime, like Iran's, is corrupt and tyrannical, it is submissive to the West and has firmly served Western and Israeli interests for decades. That kinship apparently justifies turning a blind eye to all atrocities committed by the Mubarak regime.

(Unlike Ahmadinejad, Mubarak does not earn a splashy headline on the front page of the New York Post, which reads “Evil Has Landed” when he goes to warm visits in the White House. Iran has been thoroughly out of Western reach since the Revolution and after the US neutered its natural enemy Iraq in its disastrous invasion, Tehran has grown megalomaniac ambitions of nuclear arms and geopolitical power in the Middle East that the West cannot swallow.)

I really want to believe that our Western leaders are criticizing the autocrats in Iran because of the despicable human rights suppression and our willingness to revamp a totalitarian regime which – in part – emerged as our own creation after the 1953 Iranian coup d'état when the West overthrew Mosaddeq and re-installed the Shah, but I remain unconvinced.

Do not get me wrong. I am not defending Iran by any means but it does piss me off when politics self-servingly hijacks human rights – in this case to shame the Iranian regime that is an understandable growing concern to Washington and Brussels. Our job as human rights activists is to be smart enough to navigate this politicization and use it to promote the universal values we believe in – both in Tehran and Cairo. To do that, we need to make our leaders take a deeper look at the “Man in the Mirror” and refrain from distorting the universality of human rights to meet narrow political ends.

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