Abu Graib conditions in the Netherlands

I received this today from an internet friend who is closely involved with refugees and asylum seekers in the Netherlands. That many of these people are treated badly in detention and during their deportation is not new...but the fact that it is to this extent is simply shocking. Some practices are unthinkably familiar to the stories and pictures floating from the US debacle of Abu Graib...

What followes is a a number of first-person accounts from within deportation centres in the country (From: Zwartboek van het Vluchtelingenkordon Fryslan 2004):

(The acronymn IND stands for Immigration and Naturalisation Service, which is in charge of processing and executing the status and deportation of asylym seekers in the Netherlands):

Deportation centres

In the Netherlands there are two concentration centres for people to be deported.

One at Rotterdam airport and one at Amsterdam airport. The one at Rotterdam airport is the biggest, the most used one and most horrible one.

After finishing the asylum procedure, people officially can be kept here by force under custody for 8 weeks. The centres are known by refugee-workers as ‘intimidation centres’ because of the methods that are being used to manipulate people to cooperate with deportation. The centre is also used for illegal people, no matter if they were on asylum before or not. If the judge estimates the chance on possible deporta­tion after 8 weeks on more then 50 %, people can be held for another 9 months in one of the numerous detention centres for illegal people all over the Netherlands.

Deportation centre Rotterdam can not be visited by refugee workers. Only a few people ever saw the inside of this centre. After a visit from the departmental investigation committee for health care, the centre health care system was rejected strongly. A television crew from Dutch public broadcasting was denied any future entry after showing a negative impressi­on. Later crew members from a concurrent TV-station were shown windows by staff of the deportation centre but these appeared to be existing of non transparent material covered with curtains.

During 2004, we received the following stories which were confirmed by more witnes­ses. Dutch broadcast stations also spent several television programs recently on this issue. The reaction from the department of foreign affairs was one of anger and denial.

Under custody 1

I was held inside a hall with blind walls for 8 weeks in a cell from 2x2 meter including toilet. There was no window in the cell, so no daylight and there was no fresh air. I was not allowed to use a toothbrush, there was nothing to rub my body with. One visitor smuggled a needle and dread inside the prison which was used to prepare some material to clean our bodies. Every day we were put in a cage for one hour so that we could see the air. I was feeling like an animal. In one other cage, people made noises like if they already became animals.

Under custody 2

Me and my little child were arrested without any reason while stamping our stamping cards. We were brought to Rotterdam and put inside a room with prison personnel. We were forced to undress, kneel down and stand up several times. After some days we were released without any explanation.

Under custody 3

We had to eat white rice with beans for a couple of weeks, day in day out. Till I started to vomit. During my stay one woman was objecting very politely having to enter her cell after 40 instead of 60 minutes.

After that, she didn't get any food for the rest of the day. When she knocked on the door for explanation, some military personnel dragged her out of the cell, pushed her on the floor, bound her wrists together on the back, taped her mouth with wide isolation tape and pulled some kind of cotton bag or sheet around her head. They were dragging her along the hall to some place. Everybody saw this, included children. People started shouting and screaming like hell, we all thought that she was going to be killed because we experienced this before in our own country.

Under custody 4

My lawyer said there was no chance that they were going to deport me because of my health condition. But they still came to get me out of my cell. I was struggling for my life because I knew I was going to be killed in my own country or die without medical treatment. Five armed men came and used a lot of force on my body for a longer period. After 8 hours in isolation, they released me, accidentally having taken the wrong person. Some weeks later they took me again to a separation department for people waiting for the airplane. The prison doctor took my blood-pressure. I was crying all night, thinking about my killed family-members and begging God to take my life that very night. One hour before departure I was taken away to a normal prison thanks to my lawyer and released later because of my health without explanation or means of transport.

Under custody 5

They always came unexpected in the middle of the night to take the people out of there cells. You never knew on which doors they were going to knock. On these nights it was like you could smell death passing along. Afterwards I always experienced a penetrating smell of piss.

Under custody 6

My lawyer sent a medical statement to the IND to get me out of prison because of an apparently life threatening disease. But the IND said that they never received the statement and tried to deport me during many weeks.

Under custody 7

My visitor forgot to take her wallet from the locker. He only got it back when I signed for it. Next day they told me that I signed for some nationali­ty-declaration so they could now bring me to some country. But I didn't come from there. My lawyer asked for a copy from the statement but he never got it.

Under custody 8

I was complaining about my health. The prison doctor said it was only relevant if I could be transported by plane or not. He added that how soon I would die was not important. In the hospital, despite begging, I had to walk with my arms bound on the back. I was very ashamed and it was very painful due to my health. The IND-chosen surgeon didn't want to examine me and decided there was no transportation-problem. After a second opinion I was turn into the streets again.

Under custody 9

People where imprisoned only with pyjama and slippers and also put on the airplane like that. It seemed that they wanted to deport everybody to Lagos/Nigeria, even French speaking people.

Under custody 10

After 8 weeks in a deportation centre, I was imprisoned in a detention centre for 6 months. I was released on a Friday. Sunday I have been thanking my God on the podium of our ministry.

Next day (Monday) I was visiting a friend staying under church asylum and doing her hair. Suddenly the police broke the door and took all of us out of the apartment and I stayed in prison again for a long time.

Under custody 11

People have been calling me to tell about their experiences in a deportati­on centre and I talked to people who visited a deportati­on centre. I have to express my deepest horror about what I have been hearing. I found out that heavily ill people were not assisted by a doctor because he didn’t want to help people simulating serious diseases to avoid deportation. I am deeply ashamed having to be a member of this so called Christian society lead by a government who is treating people less than animals because these people where so unlucky to be born on the wrong place without peace and food and are therefore condemned to life long expulsion from the so called civilised society.

Under Custody 12

I have been hearing about big amounts of people originally coming from the West-coast of Africa now being transported to Lagos, without any means of life and causing heavy problems in the area, trying by all means to get a way of life or get back home, often becoming the victim of rape and murder.

Hui free!!!

After three weeks of detention, 8 year old Hui and his mother were suddenly released last week. The Immigration and Naturalisation Service will not give comment as to why, just vaguely said that “new information” has come up in the case. The lawyer of mother and child said:

,,We have not heard of anything like this yet. Strange, but we are happy that Hui and his mother are out of prison. It is going well with Hui, but the detention has made a deep impression on him.’’

Here you can see Hui's festive return to school.

They’ve been in detention for three weeks, and before that put in ‘deportation camps’ for many, many months because, the government says, that Hui’s mother wouldn’t cooperate with the deportation procedures. Locking people who do not have a right to stay in the country is a way to ‘persuade’ them to cooperate. And now suddenly new information is available about their status. Does this not have something to do with the strong consternation in Parliament? Or the fact that thousands of people, including Hui's classmates and their parents, demonstrated on the streets of Amsterdam and outside the high security prison Camp Zeist?

Hui’s case is not isolated, and by no means an exception. Just how serious the effect of imprisonment can have on a child, Inge Bulters, director of a school for children of refugees elaborates

“[…] 6 year old A. from Iran […] was first locked up with his parents in Rotterdam, after that eight months behind lock and latch in Zeist [high security prison]. […] It was a drama for that child, that lock up. Every time the door closed. For him, the worst fear is that he is taken away from his parents. That [became clear] when he saw something on television about Hui. I hoped that he would let that go. [But he did not]. Immediately he got nightmares. He dreamt that the police at the [asylum seeker centre] drove up and came to pick up him and all the other children. Even his parents cannot take away that fear from him.

[…] The asylum law is simply not right. People are locked up due to a sort of desperation. As if people will go if you lock them up. But people don’t do that […] You don’t want to know how many of our pupils get sleeping tablets to get through the night. This child came here after the vacation and does nothing but study, study, and study. She loves to get homework. We give her that too. It is her strategy of survival.

[…] I believe the worst of our asylum policy in the Netherlands is the fact that children are send through the Netherlands like post packages. On average a child of a refugee sees in a short time five schools. The newest record is a child who [went to] nine school in the Netherlands in ten months. That is so bad. Such a child wouldn’t be able to adapt any more, because [it] knows that [it] can be dragged away at any moment. They do not adapt any more as a sort of self protection, but the result is terrible. Children withdraw completely, or [become aggressive], learning achievement declines, they get social emotional problems. Then you haven’t even thought about what happen to these children once they become older. You see these children are becoming mature far too young. Many pupils must, for [the sake of] their parents. They protect the parents. Recently a child here broke a finger from a fall. The first that it said was: ‘Don’t call my mother.’ While such a child must of course be comforted by its mother. But in this case the child knew that the mother wouldn’t be able to completely handle [the situation].”

An extremely moving account, and at the same time underlines the consequences of an immigration/asylum policy that applies rules and regulations without regard to the human factor…

Well, in the media frenzy and attention that Hui and his mum have attracted, the Minister for Immigration and Integration gave a reaction, Verdonk. She said there will “soon [be] no child in prison any more”…and puts the blame on the parent for allowing the child to end up in prison.

“It is about illegal [immigrants] or people who, after a careful procedure the independent judge has determined that they have no future here. It is about people who we help to make that return a successful beginning in their country of origin.”

The problem with many of these immigrants with no right to stay is that they have no where to return to. Often, as in the case of Hui and his mother, the country of origin (China) does not want these people back, and does not even recognise that these people are in fact nationals of the country. Which effectively means that they are stateless, and have no country that will accept them. And circumstances in their home countries may be so chaotic and dangerous that it is almost like a death warrant for the parent and child to be sent back where they came from. For the Netherlands to deport them, regardless of their circumstance and status, is tantamount to saying we don’t care where wander off to or where they try to build up a life. The minister goes on to explain, and put the blame on the parents for the fact that children end up behind bars:

“But if the parents do not want to take their responsibility, then it becomes difficult. […] It is more difficult if single parents do not want to cooperate with the return [procedure] and per se want to keep their children with them. For them, there is nothing else than “foreigner confinement” [vreemdelingenbewaring ]. Because that is the alternative to an illegal existence. That is no life for parents with children and we do not tolerate that in the Netherlands.”

Funny…illegal existence, which may mean that the parent and child is at least free, is not tolerated but imprisonment is? The very point of departure dealing with single parents with children should be that detention is NOT an option of policy. There are still currently 12 other children in prison…an improvement perhaps from last year, when a staggering 235 children ended up behind bars, some for as long as six months!

UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), and fellow Dutchman, Jan Pronk has severely criticised Dutch policies with regard to (illegal) immigrants and asylum seekers in recent years. Earlier this week an MP, at a meeting discussing the fate of 26,000 immigrants who have been refused a right to stay in the Netherlands, bluntly said of the deportations:

“You’re awakened in the morning and the house is empty. That shock that you then get: people have been taken away. That shock, people have felt this earlier in situations in the Second World War […] I know in history of no other point with which I could compare that.

[…] Often between three and four am. Even if this is a very different situation, it sometimes reminds [one to think of] how the Germans came to arrest Jews before.”

Minister Verdonk said she was very hurt by the statement.

UPDATE 23 Oct 2006

A resolution adopted by the Council of Europe Parliamentary Assembly chastised the Netherlands for its plicy of returning some 26,000 asylum seekers deemed unable to stay in the country. Namely, in the application of rules and procedures, the human factor must be considered [emphasis below mine]:

• "[...] that special consideration, through a procedure laid down by law, should be given to those failed asylum seekers who have established strong family, community or other links with the Netherlands, such as children who were born or brought up there, or failed asylum seekers who have lived in the country for a long time and have integrated there."
  
  
• [...] the Netherlands [risks returning] certain people to a situation where they might be at risk of serious human rights violations or where their safety would be in danger because of the circumstances prevailing in the country or region of origin.
  
  
• [...] under the revised policy of the Netherlands, detention, of potentially unlimited duration, could be resorted to as a punitive measure to sanction those who do not co-operate, or who cannot prove that they are co-operating, towards facilitating their own return. It regrets that this policy does not foresee any clear exemptions from detention for specific categories of failed asylum seekers such as children, the elderly, people suffering from trauma or mental illness and people with disabilities.
  
  
• [...] policy of the Netherlands should be modified in so far as it allows, in some cases, for certain persons to be protected from expulsion where it is impossible to return them, whilst simultaneously depriving them of all access to housing, social benefits and health care. This is a particularly worrying development, especially regarding children in the light of the rights laid down in the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It represents one of a series of measures increasingly used in a number of Council of Europe member states as a means of exerting pressure on failed asylum seekers to return to their countries of origin.