‘WE ARE not animals!’ women incarcerated in the notorious Yarl’s Wood immigration detention centre have scrawled across their T-shirts. More than 120 women have been on hunger strike since last Wednesday, against being detained indefinitely.
Yarl’s Wood is run by the private company Serco. When the facility was first opened in 2001, it was the largest immigration detention centre in Europe holding over 400 detainees. The UK has 11 immigration removal centres across the country, holding up to 3,500 people at any one time.
Unlike other European countries, refugees and asylum seekers can be held indefinitely, worse than a prison sentence, as detention is open-ended. There is no time limit on the amount of years they can be locked up. In a handwritten document, the women on hunger strike accuse the Home Office of ‘violating habeas corpus,’ as the majority of detainees are not detained by a judge.
Many of the women have run for their lives from countries like Iraq, Afghanistan or Libya, where imperialist wars, led by the US and the UK, have smashed up their countries, destroying the infrastructure while encouraging, and in some cases training and arming terrorist groups and militias who run wild killing innocent men, women and children.
Refugees and asylum seekers travel hundreds of miles in the most arduous of conditions, facing barbed wire fences, freezing rain, sleet and snow, herded into camps, attacked by tear gas, border guards and dogs. Some have survived crossing the Mediterranean sea in flimsy rubber dinghies, hundreds others have drowned.
On reaching the UK, rather than being met with open arms, welcomed, given shelter, jobs, education and health care, they are imprisoned in detention centres for indefinite periods of time, sometimes years, then physically forced onto planes, and sent back to the very country from which they have fled.
Yarl’s Wood was initially managed by Group 4. Then it was sold off to private equity firms Englefield Capital and Electra Partners Europe. In 2007, Yarl’s Wood was signed over to Serco. These private companies make vast profits out of the incarceration of refugees and asylum seekers. In November 2014, Serco’s contract was renewed, an eight-year contract worth £70m!
In early February 2002, the building was burnt down following a protest by the detainees. This was triggered by someone being physically restrained by staff. The current hunger strike is not the first. In December 2001, just after opening, the first hunger strike began with twenty-five Roma detainees refusing to eat. There have been multiple hunger strikes since.
In 2010, the Children’s Commissioner for England Albert Aynsley-Green reported that children detained at Yarl’s Wood faced ‘extremely distressing’ conditions and treatment. On 11 January 2011, the High Court ruled that the continued detention of the children of asylum seekers at Yarl’s Wood was unlawful.
In September 2005, Manuel Bravo, an asylum seeker from Angola, hung himself while in detention at Yarl’s Wood. In March 2014, 40-year-old Christine Case from Jamaica died at Yarl’s Wood from a massive pulmonary thrombo-embolism. Her family said that she was denied the urgent medical attention she required.
Next month, on March 24th, a demonstration is taking place called to surround Yarl’s Wood and shut it down. The demonstration calls to ‘Shut Down Yarl’s Wood & ALL Detention Centres!’ Doctors’ union the BMA agrees: ‘All immigration centres should be shut down because they are extremely damaging to the health of the refugee and asylum seekers who are incarcerated in them,’ states a report entitled ‘Locked up, locked out’ by the BMA medical ethics committee.
For the working class the maxim of the hour is that of Karl Marx – ‘Workers of the world, unite! You have a world to win and nothing to lose but your chains.’ Workers and their trade unions must insist that just as the rich are able to travel the planet from one end to the other in search of profits, the working class has the right to go to any country they please.
The working class must unite with asylum seekers and refugees in a general strike to bring down this government and put an end to the capitalist system by bringing in a socialist planned economy.
