On March 12, the European Parliament called on member states to repatriate children currently stuck in indefinite detention with their European mothers in the prison camps of Northeastern Syria.  

The women entered Syria to join ISIS and either brought their children with them or conceived them while in Syria. For that reason the European Parliament’s call largely fell on deaf ears since the children from a legal standpoint cannot be repatriated without their mothers. This seals the children’s fate as most European governments have refused to bring their mothers home.

‘We will not help parents that have turned their backs on Denmark,’ Mette Frederiksen, the Danish Prime Minister, has repeatedly stated.

Her sentiment is shared by other Europeans and their governments, as throughout the EU the detained mothers are labeled as terrorists and traitors.

However, beside a moral-political position of not wanting to repatriate European citizens that joined ISIS, the anti-repatriation camp is increasingly coming under fire as human rights groups and intelligence services, who are voicing concerns that the costs of doing nothing will increasingly outweigh the cost of repatriation.

Threats to Europe

‘We cannot bring back terrorists,’ said Rasmus Stoklund, spokesperson for the Danish government, referring to the Danish women who travelled to Syria and joined ISIS.

He further argued that while their children might not constitute a threat to Danish national security, the women eventually will.

It is therefore not only immoral to repatriate them, it is also dangerous, he said.

However, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) has warned against the dangers posed by leaving the children and their mothers in the camps in Syria.

According to the intelligence service, leaving them can lead to radicalization of the children and further radicalization of the mothers. In time, this can end with ISIS using the children to conduct terror attacks in their European country of origin.

Therefore, the assessment from PET is the opposite of Rasmus Stoklund’s view: The children are the threat, and the threat draws closer with every passing day the children are left to stay in the camps.

However, this warning was dismissed by Danish Minister for Justice Nick Hækkerup, who stated that the intelligence service had merely provided an evaluation, and that it did not fit with the policy of the Danish government.

Another way

Pressured by the threats posed, the Finnish government has chosen a different approach. The Finnish foreign ministry has arranged for about half of the Finnish women and their children to be repatriated while plans are in the making for the remaining ones to be repatriated as well.

The emissary from the Finnish foreign ministry who has been charged with handling the repatriation recognizes the threat that the repatriated might pose to Finnish society once they are back in Finland.

‘I am not saying that there is no risk involved [with repatriation]. It is just that the threat posed by bringing them home is less than doing nothing,’ says Jussi Tanner, Finnish diplomat who will negotiate the homecoming of children located in the Syrian camps.

A European Guantanamo

The British human rights organisation Rights and Security International released an updated report in February about the intolerable conditions that the detainees in the Syrian camps are exposed to. In the report the organisation accuses European countries of having created a Guantanamo of their own by allowing their citizens to remain there.

Children shot by guards. Mothers and their children locked away in solitary confinement for months. Children burned alive in tents.

These are some of the horrific incidents that have occurred in the al-Hol and Roj camps where most of the European mothers and their children are located.

On top of this, the detained are facing malnutrition, kidnappings, dehydration, child labour, lack of medical care and psychological distress, all of these adding to make life for the detained a living hell and creating the perfect conditions for radicalisation.

The American detention camp in Guantanamo was established after the terror attacks on 9/11 and the conditions there have been criticised for breaching the human rights of the detainees due to the indefinite detention without trial and the torture that they have been subjected to.

The post Pressure mounts on Europe’s Guantanamo first appeared on The Postcolonial.

‘A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid’

This scathing statement is the title of a paper on the human rights organization B’Tselem’s website. Throughout the paper, the organization argues why this dark designation is applicable to the state of Israel.

The Free Dictionary defines Apartheid  as ‘an official policy of racial segregation formerly practiced in the Republic of South Africa, involving political, legal and economic discrimination against nonwhites.’

Through a series of laws, it became an integral part of South African society and a guiding principle for keeping white and nonwhite South Africans segregated.

It resulted in nonwhites being deprived of citizen rights and being forced to live on reserves and in so-called townships some of which grew to become huge, chaotic and destitute suburbs to major South African cities within which only whites were allowed to live.

In the paper, B’Tselem draws parallels between the conditions of nonwhites in the South Africa system of Apartheid and the conditions of Palestinians in the Palestinian Territories today.

Israeli Apartheid   

Not unlike people of colour in South Africa, Palestinians today live in disjointed enclaves and do not hold sovereignty of the borders surrounding them. This means that the comings and goings of people, goods and services is out of the hands of the Palestinians.

Freedom of movement for Palestinians is not a guaranteed right since it is the Israeli authorities who de facto control checkpoints and crossings where denied access, arbitrary arrests and detentions are common.

The integrity of the enclaves are not self-assured as unilateral Israeli confiscations of Palestinian land regularly results in the occupation of increasingly more territory in the West Bank. This has forced a growing number of Palestinians into increasingly smaller and crowded enclaves surrounded by walls and fences.

Palestinians do have the right to vote and form political bodies and representations.

However, these representatives only maintain authority of a small range of internal matters in the enclaves while freedom of movement, the occupation of land and territorial security is decided by Israeli authorities representing only Israeli citizens.

These Israeli citizens sometimes only live a few kilometers away on the other side of the walls and the fences.

B’Tselem’s designation of Israel as an Apartheid state drew sharp condemnation from the Israeli authorities with the Israeli education minister going as far as to forbid any organization that calls Israel an Apartheid state from lecturing at schools.

The segregated reality of the corona vaccine rollout

Whether or not Apartheid is an accurate term to describe the Israeli domination of Israel, Gaza and the West Bank, the vaccine drive in Israel has nonetheless shown the chasmic difference between an Israeli and a Palestinian life in the region.

It brought the Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International Saleh Higazi to state that ‘Israel’s COVID-19 vaccine program highlights the institutionalized discrimination that defines the Israeli government’s policy towards Palestinians.’

More than 30 percent of the Israeli population of around nine million people had received at least one jab by the middle of February. This is a staggering feat and places Israel far ahead of most other countries. In Europe, most countries have yet to reach five percent of their population.

While Israelis can look forward to having most citizens vaccinated within the coming month, the story is a completely different one in the Palestinian Territories. Here the vaccine drive has barely begun.

Furthermore, the first 2000 vaccines set to enter the Gaze Strip were detained by the Israeli authorities pending review on February 15.

‘There could hardly be a better illustration of how Israeli lives are valued above Palestinian ones’

Saleh Higazi

Deputy Regional Director for the Middle East and North Africa at Amnesty International

On the same day, Israeli lawmakers debated whether vaccines for the Gaza Strip should be withheld and only released in return for concessions by Hamas, the leading authority in the Gaza Strip.

In the West Bank, the vaccine drive did not kick into gear before international pressure led the Israeli authorities to transfer 5000 Moderna vaccine doses to the West Bank for use on medical workers.

‘While Israel celebrates a record-setting vaccination drive, millions of Palestinians living under Israeli control in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip will receive no vaccine or have to wait much longer – there could hardly be a better illustration of how Israeli lives are valued above Palestinian ones,’ said Saleh Higazi.

Apartheid or no Apartheid the inequality that exists between an Israeli and a Palestinian life is certainly comparable to the inequality between whites and nonwhites in Apartheid South Africa.

The post An Apartheid COVID-19 Vaccine Drive first appeared on The Postcolonial.