Resisting Blair's Corporate-run Gulag

In June 2005, Amnesty International famously described Guantanamo Bay as “the Gulag of our times.” They were dead wrong. Guantanamo is a disgusting example of a broader phenomenon. The gulag of our time is not tucked away on Cuba, nor is it one single facility that – should we somehow exert enough pressure on the powers that be – will just go away. The gulag is international. Everywhere there are people seen as disruptive, alien, criminal, institutions are multiplying that provide “detainment solutions” for the public sector. Migrants, petty criminals, would-be terrorists, dissidents and deviants all belong to the same category. They are all being imprisoned, and a very profitable business it is too.

One of the nodes of the global gulag is located near Heathrow, just outside London. The twin detainment centers at Harmondsworth and Colnbrook combined can house around eight-hundred asylum seekers, but many more are cycled through them from other facilities across the U.K. or back to their country of origin and an uncertain fate.

Once upon a time, places like Harmondsworth and Colnbrook would have had a name, readily understandable and horrific to the people at large. Concentration camps. That is what they are. At Harmondsworth, five-hundred men await deportation at any one time, with their cases being heard within the walls. It is designed to “fast-track” unsightly detainees away from Tony Blair’s dynamic Britain, and one way or another, that is what it does. As the House of Commons journal Hansard records from May 2004, there are seven such “facilities” dotted around the U.K. – all run by private contractors.

They are all feeding off the government commitment to radically reduce the number of “asylum applications” and to re-establish “controlled and managed migration,” regardless of the actual human need for safe haven. Pandering to the British right, Blair has accelerated deportations, down 68 percent since 2002, and opened up the immigration system to investment – to promote “efficiency.” While turning away Africans and those from the Middle East, New Labour have welcomed low wage Eastern Europeans to fill the “600,000 vacances on the U.K. job market that still remain,” at least according to their 2005 election manifesto.

Along with fast-track efficiency has come human misery and tragedy. In January 2006, a young Eritrean detainee, Bereket Yohannes was found hanging in the prison shower at Harmondsworth. He had, according to fellow detainees, been pleading with officials for a stay of deportation, and telling them of his desire to commit suicide rather than return. They didn’t listen. To compound the tragedy, detainees said that Yohannes was not scheduled for return to Eritrea, nor Italy – where he had spent time – but to Sudan.

In response, prisoners protested and embarked upon hunger strikes – many of them in a similar situation to that of Yohannes. With solidarity work constantly bringing as much information from their struggle to the outside world, they compiled a joint statement, signed by sixty-one detainees, that makes their living conditions plain. “Freedom of movement” the statement reads “is totally ruled out and every outlet leading to various association areas like gymnasium, education and worship centers are permanently locked against easy access to the user of the facilities they are in.” The windows of the center are sealed, meaning that “Communicable diseases are therefore likely to be transferred from one detainee to another.” The danger of Tuberculosis is particularly high. Air conditioning simply does not work, and the detainees say that prison officials effectively repress religion by “debarring or discouraging detainees from freely walking into their worship centers without booking 24 hours before the service.”

On arrival, detainees are asked whether they have experienced torture, a fact that you might think would impact on their medical care. But activists say that questions like that are merely formal, and that the answers of detainees are often left unrecorded. There are also frequent cases of detainees requesting external medical care but having their hospital appointments postponed “for security reasons.” In one case a man suffering from Tuberculosis had six appointments cancelled. His case turned out to be non-contagious, but detainment officials did not know this until he saw a specialist. In another situation, he could have infected both fellow detainees and prison officers (who are incidentally very poorly paid).

Legally, the centers have functioned so as to reduce the already slim chances of a successful appeal against deportation. “We are,” the prisoners say in their statement, “most [of the time] denied access to the high court, which is an independent body from the immigration tribunal.” This is the tribunal system has been recently reformed so as to refuse legal aid to asylum seekers who wish to appeal against its’ judgments unless they can convince the tribunal itself that their claim has a significant chance of success.

Their right of appeal quashed, detainees wait for deportation in conditions where the food they are given is, according to their statement “predictably rice and potatoes, with some horrible sauce, day in day out,” where “most detainees are almost starving themselves to death as we are all tired of eating the same food every single day without any alternative,” and where “the sanitary conditions are very poor, making the whole environment…smell.”

The response to their reasonable requests? Protesting detainees were locked away in solitary confinement before being split up and dispersed to other detainment facilities across the country. The message was out, however. No prison can last forever.

On April 8th, a demonstration was organized in solidarity with detainees at Colnbrook and Harmondsworth. Around three hundred protestors met thousands of police who, presumably, feared a repetition of “riots” experienced at Yarlswood in February 2002, or at Harmondsworth itself in July 2004. Nothing of the sort happened, but detainees were made aware of the presence of demonstrations and, in response, a group of 150 detained in Colnbrook embarked upon a hunger strike to achieve better conditions and resist deportation. The situation in Harmondsworth is unclear.

The Guardian reports that, according to the Home Office, two detainees are officially on hunger strike (meaning that they have rejected four consecutive meals). Activists who regularly visit and talk to detainees maintain that nearly 100 in Colnbrook remained on hunger strike as of April 15th and that the Home Office are trying to contain opposition to detention centers by playing down the scale of resistance.

Profiting from prisons

Who then, is behind the concentration camps at Colnbrook and Harmondsworth? In the first instance, the government of Tony Blair is responsible. The swift removal of asylum seekers with or without due process to wherever they can be removed, is government policy. It is also warmly approved of by much of the mainstream press, who consistently fail to see the human cost of deportation and are blind to the development of the Great British gulag.

However, it is corporate capital and management that is delivering the “detainment solutions” which save money on meals and air conditioning, and cycle detainees efficiently through their facilities. It is a facet of the modern marriage between profit and prisons, between government repression and the interests of capital.

In the case of Harmondsworth, the jailer-in-chief is a massive multinational corporation called Sodexho. Sodexho was originally French, but operates pretty much anywhere it can, specializing in the provision of – naturally for a company responsible for the treatment of asylum seekers – school meals and corporate hospitality. You might well have eaten a meal provided by them if you have attended college in the U.S. Amongst other places, Sodexho caters for students at Pittsburgh State, Western State and Cornell as well as many schools across the country.

If you are unlucky, you may even have enjoyed their hospitality as a guest of Corrections Corporation of America. Sodexho once owned eight percent of the corporation, the largest private prison company in the world, yet pulled out in May 2001, in response to student boycotts and protests against Sodexho catering facilities in their colleges, who they saw as associated with the prison-industrial complex. Sodexho – suffering lost contracts and negative publicity, chose to reinvest in the prisons of Britain.

According to a recent report compiled by City University in London, Sodexho is a highly profitable operation. Its market capitalization is $6 billion, with sales of $14 billion. As the study points out, the budget of the World Health Organization is $742 million, by whose standards the catering company is performing “pathetically” in providing healthy diets for its customers. Its public sector customers, that is. For the “Three out of every four FTSE 100 companies” that “rely on [Sodexho] for cost-effective solutions to their employee or hospitality catering, or to deliver support services including cleaning, reception, switchboard and help desks, mailroom, reprographics and grounds maintenance,” a better service is undoubtedly available.

You may even have read a piece of their research and nodded your head in agreement without knowing its original source. A wing of the company, the “Sodexho Research Institute,” regularly feeds information to mainstream news outlets on topics of interest to Sodexho customers. As they say, the mission of the institute is to “improve the quality of daily life,” generally involving changed consumption habits and focused marketing. For example, one of their puff pieces found its way onto the BBC News site in 2001. The report, entitled “Girls eating less but more getting fat,”
argued startlingly that “the concern [of Sodexho] is that girls are reporting an exceptionally low calorie intake” while “girls should be encouraged to raise their calorie intake at the same time as leading a more active lifestyle.” This must have been welcome news for providers of school meals in the U.K. who it turns out, included Sodexho among them.

In the U.S., after rising pressure from parents and consumer groups to improve the quality of school meals, Sodexho has recently introduced an ingenious (and patronizing) scheme to ‘encourage’ children to eat more fruit and vegetables. The “School Stars programme” say the company, will “[encourage] children to take on the challenge of a healthy lifestyle… [through] activity sheets, games, crossword puzzles and a visit from a costumed [charcter named] Lift-Off.” Meanwhile, in Plainfield, N.J. the company are trialling a bizarre concept snack called “fizzy fruit” – fresh fruit that has been carbonated to ‘fizz’ in the mouth. All of this will bring handsome profits from the pockets of flabby children.

There is no evidence that their concern stretches to the nutritional needs and daily quality of life of detainees in their care, however. What young American people will fail to grasp, is that the food they eat at school is also subsidized by the hunger and misery of detainees at detainment facilities in England.

When asked about their detention operations in the U.K., Sodexho didn’t repond to a request for comment.

Solidarity

Activist organizations are planning demonstrations and campaigns to end the inhuman detention of asylum seekers in the U.K. The vast majority of those detained have no control over their future, have no security, no knowledge of how soon they will be dealt with. They are not criminals, but sans papiers and members of a growing global precariat. The British government and their corporate cronies who continue to lock away the innocent are the real criminals and would it is they who deserve a cell at Harmondsworth.

Greg, an activist from activist group NoBorders who declined to give his last name, told me that “[a] huge machine has been created,” referring to the U.K. asylum-prison-industrial complex, one that “even the Home Office refer to [as] the detention estate.” The New Labour government has created a Kafka-esque bureaucracy that, far from filtering deserving claims for asylum from so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ actually functions as a “huge machine for disappearing people into it.” Capable of containing 2,500 people at any one time, the UK system of detention centers processed 75,000 people last year. Many of them have disappeared into countries that they, and the U.K. government knew were unsafe for them to return to.

It is also a system that is rapidly growing. As the NoBorders activist made clear, ‘reporting centers’ have also been expanded – places to which asylum seekers are forced to attend without lawyers, at regular intervals, to be told whether they are to be detained (and probably deported) or receive temporary reprieve. Britain has been effectively been turned into a corporate run gulag system for arriving migrants. This is a far cry from the liberal, beacon of democracy that state funded propaganda beams across the world via British Satellite News.

Resistance can be effective however. The current hunger strikes began in synchrony with external demonstrations. Detainees struck when they heard the drumbeats of protestors and received information via text message from the outside. The problem now is communicating the case against detainment centers, and generating solidarity with those detained amongst a wider audience.

As NoBorders say, this is not a problem purely confined to asylum seekers. “It’s a problem for everyone really. If we let the system expand, who knows who we’d be detaining next year?”

A press release from the NoBorders group who are organizing solidarity events is available here.

[The company currently running the Colnbrook facility for the British government is Serco – also a multinational with many interests, including defense contracts for the U.K. and Australia, as well as 54 air traffic control towers in USA.]

Posted by Szamko
Just tries to tell the truth.

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