So Anyway, About These Iraqis

So anyway, in the wake of the letter-writing campaign, the Government has discovered its huge gratitude to the Iraqi civilians who have helped British forces in the quagmire, and now intends to give resettlement help to some of them. In order to be helped, Iraqis will have to prove that they have worked for British forces or diplomats for a continuous period of twelve months.

Unfortunately, while this is better than I had expected, and certainly better than what these people would have got had it not been for the response to Dan Hardie's campaign, it does not begin to be good enough. To start with, as even the British Government admits, Iraq is a war zone. War zones are chaotic. In situations of chaos, the requisite paperwork is sometimes hard to come by. One is reminded of the old Protect and Survive manuals, designed to reassure the British people that nuclear war was really jolly survivable if you had a few doors about the place, which used to exhort potential survivors to preserve their birth certificates along with all those tinned goods so as not to make Armageddon an unduly bothersome process for anyone concerned.

Secondly, not all those Iraqis who are under threat of death will have put in twelve months' continuous service. Some will have done less than twelve months and then left their jobs because they had been targeted. Some will have done more than twelve months, but not over a continuous period. Some will have been transferred to the Americans. Some will not have received proper documentation, or will have used different names because of the danger, or will have had their names transcribed differently by different clerks.

Thirdly, the Foreign Office statement made no mention of the families of Iraqi collaborators. Since family members will be murdered faute de mieux, any resettlement measures must apply to them as well as to the collaborators themselves. This will mean a few hundred people, not the fifteen thousand quoted by the Home Office as a frightener for the Daily Mail crowd.

Fourthly, we should not be judging these people's entitlement to shelter on the basis of their length of service. If one is trying to rescue a man who is being chased by a shark, one's first question should not be "How long has he been in the water?" Whether a particular person has been targeted by the local death squads is the only acceptable criterion; and it is also something that the British army should be able to assess on the ground and refer to London.

Fifthly, this is not the way a civilised people treats those who help its soldiers.

Please write to your MP. That's what got things this far; it may yet push things further. Ask them to support the following Early Day Motion (No. 2057), which has been tabled by the Liberal Democrat Lynne Featherstone:

That this House recognises the courage of Iraqis who have worked alongside British troops and diplomats in Southern Iraq, often saving British lives; notes that many such Iraqis have been targeted for murder by Iraqi militias in Basra, and that an unknown number have already been killed, whilst many others are in hiding; further recognises that many Iraqis who have worked for fewer than 12 months for the UK are threatened by death squads; and therefore calls upon the Prime Minister to meet the UK's moral obligations by offering resettlement to all Iraqis who are threatened with death for the "crime" of helping British troops and diplomats.

As always, please use your own words rather than copying and pasting; and please be polite. The good ones deserve it, and the bad ones should not be given the excuse.