Tweed weaves a way from Scottish islands to catwalk
 

Pauline FROISSART
Wed, December 1, 2021, 5:29 AM·4 min read

In the cluttered workshop of his home off the coast of northwest Scotland, Ian Mackay patiently weaves a bright green wool, surrounded by bags of fabric, spools and tools.

He makes a steady clatter as he pedals his machine in the shed of his croft on the village of South Shawbost on the Isle of Lewis, watching closely for any defects.

"It's handwoven... or rather foot-woven," the 51-year-old weaver jokes in his sing-song accent typical of the Outer Hebrides.

Mackay spins wool for 10 hours a day, resting only on Sundays, when most shops and services are shut on the religiously conservative islands.

Once complete, his handiwork -- authentic Harris Tweed -- could be shipped to the other side of the world, as the rough woollen fabric becomes more popular than ever.

Long associated with the windswept Scottish islands, the textile's ecological and sustainable properties have inspired designers to be more environmentally friendly.

"It doesn't really matter how bad the weather is outside if you are weaving," Mackay told AFP as an icy November wind whipped across the ochre-coloured moor where sheep were grazing.

"There's no point in being really fast, doing mistakes. You are better doing slow, quality work."

Such is its status, Harris Tweed, traditionally made from 100 percent pure virgin -- unrecycled -- sheep's wool, is the only fabric protected by an act of parliament.

The Harris Tweed Act 1993 stipulates that it "has been handwoven by the islanders at their homes in the Outer Hebrides, finished in the Outer Hebrides, and made from pure virgin wool dyed and spun in the Outer Hebrides".

A distinctive Orb stamp globe with a cross on top certifies the fabric's origin and authenticity.

- High fashion export -

Harris Tweed, mostly woven with a plain weave, twill or herringbone structure, was originally associated with Britain's aristocracy and gentlemen farmers.

Jackets and plus-fours made from the durable fabric that can withstand harsh climates were a must for traditionally outdoor upper-class pursuits such as hunting and fishing.

But British designer Vivienne Westwood turned that image on its head by integrating it into her punk wardrobe in a subversion of culture and tradition.

Now other major brands, including Chanel, Dior, Yves Saint Laurent and Hermes, are making it a key element of their collections.

"Recently we have been working extensively with Polo Ralph Lauren in the USA," said Margaret Ann Macleod, sales director for Harris Tweed Hebrides.

Seventy people work at the company's lakeside factory, where the wool is dyed and spun, then sent to some 120 home weavers, where skills have been passed down for generations.

Once woven, it is returned to the factory 18 miles (29 kilometres) from Lewis' main town of Stornoway to be washed, dried and finished in Shawbost Mill.

A third of the Shawbost factory's output goes to the UK, while two-thirds is exported to all corners of the world.

"We export extensively to France, Germany, Italy and a lot of other countries in Europe," Macleod said.

"We also have a big export business in South Korea, Japan and the USA, and increasingly China has become a new export market for us as well."

- Colour and culture -

In total, some 160 home weavers live in the Outer Hebrides, working hand in hand with three factories that produce a total of 1.5 million metres of the fabric every year.

Tweed, immortalised by Mr Toad, one of the main characters in Kenneth Grahame's 1908 classic novel "The Wind in the Willows", is used to make jackets, trousers, coats, but also shoes, handbags, armchairs and even teddy bears.

Fifteen years ago, the sportswear brand Nike chose Harris Tweed for a collection of trainers -- a huge publicity coup for the Hebridean craftsmen.

But more recently the public has rediscovered the fabric in its dozens of different patterns and shades through popular television series.

From the aristocrats of "Downton Abbey" to the gangsters of "Peaky Blinders" and the royal family in "The Crown", virtually everyone wears tweed.

"We start with about 60 colours and we blend each of these colours to create over 180 different yarn shades and they would reflect the landscape and the seascape of the Outer Hebrides -- the rich browns are the tones of the moorland, the blue of the Atlantic Ocean," Macleod said.

"Young designers are coming and are looking for the colours. They are looking for authenticity, the fact that we are hand-weaving (and) creating our own yarns is really important to them.

"They want to capture a little bit of the island, of the Outer Hebrides in their creations as well."

pau/gmo/phz/gd/pvh

Wool in the loom at The Carloway Mill near Garenin on the Isle Of Lewis 

(AFP/ANDY BUCHANAN)

Hydrogen: What's the big deal?

Hydrogen has been hyped as a key to a global energy transition. But so far its contribution has been marginal. Why the hold-up if hydrogen is so great?

Hydrogen is being touted as the fuel to clean up our most carbon-intensive industries

Hydrogen is the most abundant element in the universe, which is probably why it deserves pole position on the periodic table. It’s a colorless, odorless and non-toxic gas that consists of a single proton and a single electron. It's also highly combustible. Each kilogram of hydrogen or H2 contains about 2.4 times as much energy as natural gas. Impressive, right?

It is. Industry has long been in on the benefits and has been using hydrogen for decades in the petrochemicals sector — mainly for oil refining, producing ammonia for fertilizers, and in the production of methanol and steel.

But it has also been touted as a means of speeding up our transition to clean energy. Even the European Commission has described hydrogen as "the missing part of the puzzle to a fully decarbonized economy".

 

Hydrogen is crucial in the oil refining process

What's so good about it?

It's a clean, versatile fuel that doesn't produce any direct greenhouse gas emissions — all it takes to release the energy is oxygen, and the only byproduct is water.

It could potentially help some polluting sectors slash their CO2 emissions. Think heavy-duty transport or buildings, where hydrogen could be blended into existing natural gas networks for heating. But it could also be used to store renewable energy in the power sector and replace fossil fuels in chemicals and fuel production.

 
Sounds like a green dream

Let's not get carried away. Thing is, hydrogen doesn't exist on this planet in its pure form. It's great stuff once you can get your hands on it, but unlike fossil fuels, it's not just lying around waiting to be dragged from some ancient slumber. In fact, separating it from other substances so we can store and use it requires time and energy. Which also equates to money.

There's a catch then...

Yeah, afraid so. But isn't there always?

The hydrogen catch is how it's made. From an environmental perspective, the energy-intensive ways of extracting it become secondary if it's produced without CO2 emissions. But that is by no means always the case. Ranging from clean to dirty, the myriad H2 production methods are complicated. And what do we do when things get too complex?
Bury our heads in the sand?

Not advisable. No, we introduce a snazzy color scheme. So for the next couple of paragraphs, maybe try to forget that hydrogen is in fact a colorless gas.

The most common form of H2 used today (ca. 95%) has been labeled gray hydrogen. If that calls to mind emissions, that's about right. Every ton of the gray variety comes with a footprint of about 10 tons of CO2 emissions because the production process — also known as steam methane reforming or SMR — relies on gas or fossil fuels.

Blue hydrogen sounds a lot cleaner. But that's just color trickery because it is, in fact, also produced with methane. The only seemingly redeeming feature is that the CO2 emissions from the production process are captured and stored underground.

 

Extracting green hydrogen requires a lot of energy

Pink hydrogen, which has a 1980s ring to it, relies on nuclear power. So while it might work in some countries where nuclear is big, it's not a global solution. It's also not pink.

Other versions include brown, black, yellow, turquoise and green hydrogen. To cut to the chase, the only one that makes any real sense in terms of reducing our carbon footprint, is green. That's because green hydrogen is made via electrolysis (splitting water into oxygen and hydrogen) with the help of renewable energy. This means zero CO2 emissions and no mess to clear up. And it wouldn't harm global water supplies either.

That said, it currently makes up less than 1% of global hydrogen production.

 
What are we waiting for?

In a nutshell, for prices to fall. At the moment, production of green hydrogen costs more than twice as much as its mucky grey counterpart. But things are changing.

The more renewables we have — and global expansion is predicted to rise to 45% by 2040 — the more affordable green hydrogen will become. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), a surge in clean energy infrastructure could see the cost of production fall 30% by 2030.

So once the prices have come down, we're sorted?

Full disclosure, there's another catch. Hydrogen is much harder to store than fossil fuels because it has a very low density. It is the lightest gas in the universe, followed by helium. It's also highly explosive. All these special features mean the gas has to be trapped under vast pressure in special containers. Or stored as a liquid at a frigid minus 253 degrees Celsius. So, it's not exactly something that can be picked up at the local DIY store and kept in the garage for when gas supplies run low.

What's really sobering though is the sheer amount of electricity we would need to produce green hydrogen on a larger scale. Right now, about 70 million tons of hydrogen are produced globally each year — spewing some 830 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere in the process. Which even more soberingly is roughly equivalent to the carbon emissions of the United Kingdom and Indonesia combined.

And get this: replacing those 70 million tons with green hydrogen would require about 3,600 TWh, more than the annual electricity amount generated by the entire European Union. We would need A LOT more to decarbonize heating or heavy-duty transport.

Renewable energy makes up about 25% of global power generation

Where does that leave us?

Good question. Green hydrogen certainly isn't the answer to our medium-term energy needs, but it can play a crucial role in decarbonizing sectors that are tricky to electrify by 2050 — such as heating, heavy-duty transport and industry. In other words, the last 20% that are difficult to wean off fossil fuels.

But it won't be cheap. According to the Energy Transitions Commission (ETC), to build a hydrogen economy that accounts for 15-20% of energy consumption we would need to fork out $15 trillion (€12.6 trillion) between now and 2050.

And yes, that is more than a bit of loose change, but compared to predictions from leading economists who reckon failure to tackle climate change could cost us more than $50 trillion over the same period, green hydrogen actually sound like a steal.
So it's ultimately cash talking?

Cash certainly has its say, but the bottom line is that the case for green hydrogen is strongest when the supply of renewable energy outstrips demand. Might sound like science fiction, but it's where we supposed to be heading.

Edited by: Tamsin Walker/Kathleen Schuster

UNRWA COMMISSIONER-GENERAL CALLS FOR SUPPORT TO PREVENT COLLAPSE OF THE AGENCY AT ADVISORY COMMISSION MEETING IN JORDAN

01 December 2021

UNRWA Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini addresses the Advisory Commission on UNRWA in Amman, Jordan on 30 November 2021. © 2021 UNRWA Photo


The Advisory Commission (AdCom) on the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA) met on 29-30 November in Amman amidst immense concern over the financial shortfall that the Agency is facing. The Commissioner-General of UNRWA, Mr. Philippe Lazzarini, engaged participants on the risks associated with the financial crisis that the Agency faces and its impact on its ability to maintain services to Palestine refugees. He urgently called on the Agency’s governing body to help him ensure that basic services to Palestine refugees continue in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza, Syria, Jordan and Lebanon.

“Imagine the immense feeling of abandonment that can come with the disruption of what is probably the only stable lifeline for Palestine refugees,” said the Commissioner-General. “If UNRWA health services are compromised in the middle of a global pandemic, COVID-19 vaccination rollout will come to a halt. Maternal and childcare will stop. Half a million girls and boys will not know if they can continue learning.”

This meeting of the Advisory Commission comes on the heels of the International Conference on UNRWA that took place last month in Brussels and was chaired by Jordan and Sweden. The conference sought to raise urgent funds to bridge the gap in 2021and to establish a predictable longer term planning scheme for the Agency.

The UNRWA Commissioner-General warned against the impact of chronic underfunding on the quality of critical services such as health, education and social safety net to the most destitute. “Decades of investment in excellent services now risk being reversed. Together, we should not allow a reversal of one of the best investments of the international community in the region.”

The Commissioner-General reiterated his urgent call for all partners to continue their solidarity with Palestine refugees in a way that is sustainable, predictable and long-term, until there is a political solution that includes them. He and his team particularly focused on empowering young people and help them in their journey towards self-reliance.

The Advisory Commission is tasked with advising and assisting the Commissioner-General of UNRWA in carrying out the Agency’s mandate. It meets twice a year, usually in June and November, to discuss issues of importance to UNRWA, striving to reach consensus and provide advice and assistance to the Commissioner-General of UNRWA.

 
Background Information:

UNRWA is confronted with an increased demand for services resulting from a growth in the number of registered Palestine refugees, the extent of their vulnerability and their deepening poverty. UNRWA is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions and financial support has been outpaced by the growth in needs. As a result, the UNRWA programme budget, which supports the delivery of core essential services, operates with a large shortfall. UNRWA encourages all Member States to work collectively to exert all possible efforts to fully fund the Agency’s programme budget. UNRWA emergency programmes and key projects, also operating with large shortfalls, are funded through separate funding portals.

UNRWA is a United Nations agency established by the General Assembly in 1949 with a mandate to provide humanitarian assistance and protection to registered Palestine refugees in the Agency’s area of operations, namely the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, Gaza, Jordan, Lebanon and Syria, pending a just and lasting solution to their plight. Thousands of Palestine refugees who lost both their homes and livelihood because of the 1948 conflict have remained displaced and in need of significant support for over seventy years. UNRWA helps them achieve their full potential in human development through quality services it provides in education, health care, relief and social services, protection, camp infrastructure and improvement, microfinance and emergency assistance. UNRWA is funded almost entirely by voluntary contributions.

Canada’s nuclear legacy
Myth, reality, and radium at Great Bear Lake

Owen Schalk / November 14, 2021 

Entrance to the uranium mine at Port Radium in the Northwest Territories in 1947. The ore mined at Port Radium ended up in the United States for use in the Manhattan Project. 

Photo courtesy NWT Archives.

In 1930, Great Bear Lake in the Northwest Territories was the site of one of the most lucrative, controversial, and geopolitically significant mineral discoveries in world history. The mineral was radium, an ore that derives from the decay of the uranium atom and which, in the early twentieth century, was considered a panacea for a huge variety of ailments including cancer, depression, toothache, and more.

The extraction of Canadian radium by Eldorado Gold Mines Ltd. (later Eldorado Mining & Refining Ltd.) began with the exploitation of Dene land and labour on the coasts of Great Bear Lake and saw its calamitous fruition in the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a still misunderstood act of barbarism that was only made possible with massive supplies of Canadian resources.

The centrality of Canadian radium to the US nuclear weapons program is an important episode in the history of Canada’s domestic and foreign policy, but it remains little-known today—even though its adverse effects on the Dene peoples in the Northwest Territories persist into the present.

The colonization of the north

The official history of Eldorado, as described by company founders Charles and Gilbert Labine, is a tale of dauntless southern zeal in the face of northern hardship—a veritable Horatio Alger tale in the Canadian north. Before examining the myths that underly Eldorado, however, we must first establish the indisputable: Great Bear Lake is the fourth-largest inland lake in North America, measuring over 300 kilometres in length and, depending on the latitude, between 40 and 175 kilometres wide. It has a maximum depth of 413 metres. The area around the lake is primarily inhabited by the Sahtúot’ine, or Sahtu Dene, sometimes called the Bear Lake people, whose territory extends over much of what is today Canada’s Northwest Territories.

“According to oral tradition,” writes Morris Neyelle, son of Dene elder Johnny Neyelle, “the Dene have occupied this area since time immemorial, and archaeological accounts show evidence of Dene habitation as far back as two to three thousand years ago.” Today, the largest concentration of Sahtu Dene on the shores of Great Bear Lake is the town of Délı̨nę on the western coast.

In the 1780s, European fur traders developed an interest in the lands around Great Bear Lake, but they did not establish much exploitative infrastructure in the region. This did not prevent them from assigning new names to each of the lake’s five bays: Smith Arm, Dease Arm, McTavish Arm, McVicar Arm, and Keith Arm. In the early nineteenth century, a number of interested parties, including the North West Company, began to establish outposts around the lake. In 1812, a North West Company agent wrote of the Dene lands that “I have no doubt that several kinds of ore might be found here.”

A number of subsequent encounters presaged growing European engagement with the people of Great Bear Lake. One of the region’s most decorated guests was Sir John Franklin, who led his Second Arctic Land Expedition in the region from 1825 to 1827 (today, Franklin is mainly remembered for captaining the disastrous expedition of the HMS Erebus and HMS Terror in search of the Northwest Passage). While at Great Bear Lake, he resided in a former trading post off the coast of Keith Arm that he renamed Fort Franklin, and his men mapped the shores and depths of the lake for the benefit of later European arrivals.

Several expeditions followed, most significantly that of geologists Macintosh Bell and Charles Camsell in 1900. While they were trapped by a storm at Echo Bay on the western shore, Bell noted: “In the greenstones east of McTavish Bay occur numerous interrupted stringers of calc-spar containing chalcopyrite, and the steep rocky shores which here present themselves to the lake are often stained with cobalt-bloom and copper-green.”

Up to the 1920s, the footprint of the Canadian government and business community in the region remained negligible. It was not until the advent of air travel significantly eased southern settlers’ ability to breach the north that prospecting and extractive investment began in earnest, many drawn by the promise of minerals such as those described by Bell in 1900.

Of the several mining concerns that sunk shafts around Great Bear Lake in the early twentieth century, the most significant was Eldorado Gold Mining Ltd. By 1930, Eldorado was failing—its gold mines in Manitoba had run dry—so founder Gilbert Labine decided to take advantage of the growing accessibility of the north and boarded a plane for Great Bear Lake. He claimed that his journey was inspired by Macintosh Bell’s vivid description of the area’s mineral wealth. However, he did not unearth copper or cobalt near Echo Bay. He discovered a copious supply of pitchblende, a uranium-rich ore that would take on great importance in the coming nuclear arms race. He also founded Port Radium on the lake’s eastern edge, which would serve as the refining centre of the area’s growing mining economy.

Pitchblende, long thought to be useless, was given value in 1902 when Marie Curie isolated radium, a radioactive decay product of uranium, from the ore. At the time, many considered radium to be a cure-all miracle mineral. It was one of the most expensive natural commodities on Earth, and the only other areas that produced it in great quantity were Saint Joachim’s Valley in modern-day Czechoslovakia and the Katanga region of the Belgian Congo.

Eldorado used local Dene labour to transport radium to the refinery, while the company’s leadership and the Canadian government expressed no concerns about the dangerous effects that exposure to the radioactive ore would have on the Indigenous peoples or the company’s miners. When uranium became central to nuclear testing by the United States during the Second World War, Eldorado was made into a crown company to better facilitate the production of the ore for use in the Manhattan Project.

Uranium from the Eldorado mines and the Belgian Congo provided 86 percent of the uranium for the Manhattan Project, and Canadian uranium was used in the bombs that levelled Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing around 200,000 innocent Japanese civilians—a complicity that was celebrated by the Canadian elite at the time, but has remained largely unacknowledged ever since.

The prophet of Great Bear Lake

In all official histories of the Eldorado mine, the ideological core remains unchanged: for centuries, the resources of this northern region were left to molder in the ground, tragically unused, until a southern man of grit and initiative made the daring journey upwards and hauled the region into the twentieth century. This is the story perpetuated by the mining community, endorsed by the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame, and reiterated again and again by the man at its centre: Gilbert Labine.

Charles and Gilbert Labine were born in 1890 in the Westmeath Township of Renfrew County, Ontario. They were educated there and eventually joined the prospecting rush to northern Ontario. Robert Bothwell, Eldorado’s corporate historian, gives the following description of the brothers: “Charlie was always the more rough and ready of the two, ‘a rough diamond.’ He had more than the usual drive and, judging from results, more than the usual charm…Gilbert, for his part, was independent, handsome, and like his brother, determined to succeed.”

Labine claimed that Bell’s description of minerals at Great Bear Lake inspired him to undertake the journey, and that while flying over the territory, he spied the pitchblende from the airplane and shouted for the pilot to land. He often contradicted this story, once saying that the pitchblende “could not be seen from the air and in fact could not even be seen where the first ore was found.” He once claimed it was not Bell’s writings that drew him to Great Bear Lake, but that after the collapse of his Manitoba operations he “overheard conversations among older men regarding interesting geological areas in that field,” and decided to head for the Northwest Territories. Another version of the story has Labine’s mail carrier from the Manitoba operation informing him of gossip he gleaned regarding rich veins at Great Bear Lake. The individual details, and their obvious unreliability, are trivial—what matters is the central colonial myth of white settler grit and Indigenous languor, which is the story that has persisted in the mining community to this day.

The Dene people of Délı̨nę, the community that developed around Fort Franklin after Sir John’s departure and the ones who have suffered the most due to the discovery of radium at the lake, have their own stories. Anthropologist Sarah M. Gordon collected many, and in her description, “virtually anytime Port Radium is discussed… the narrative is tied to some concept of death.”

One history describes an elder named Beyonnie presenting the visiting Labine with a chunk of pitchblende as a gift, which Labine brought south and used to stir up investment in Eldorado’s operations. Some allege that the story of Beyonnie and Labine was first conveyed by an extremely important Dene prophet named Louis Ayah, who died in 1940 but whose proclamations are studied to this day. Ayah’s prophecies often foretold the arrival of settler capitalism with an eschatological tinge that connected the deleterious effects of colonial extraction to a timeless, cosmic evil emanating from the site of Port Radium. Consider the following story of Ayah’s past, as told by two Sahtu Dene men in the Yellowknife-based News/North:

One day a group of Dene was passing through the area and they decided to camp near what would eventually become known as Port Radium. Among them was a powerful medicine man, the Prophet Ayha. During the night, the others awoke to the prophet singing… He said he saw boats and many houses with smoke coming out of them. There were people with white skin going into a great hole in the ground and coming back out with rocks. These people were carrying the rocks away and he decided to see where they were going. So in his dream state he followed them across Great Bear Lake and down along the river network to Fort McMurray and beyond there into the US. There the people made a long stick and put the rocks in it. They then loaded the big stick into a giant bird, which then took flight so he followed it as it flew over wide-open water. When it came back over the land, the bird dropped the stick and it burst into a giant ball of fire and many people who lived there were burnt. “Those people looked a lot like us,” said Prophet Ayha. “I was singing for them.”… Many years later, in September of 1940, the Prophet Ayha passed away. On August 6, 1945, the US dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Three days later another fell on Nagasaki.


An unidentified man stands by stacks of pitchblende concentrate awaiting shipment at Port Radium, Northwest Territories in 1939. Photo by Richard Finnie/NWT Archives.

Canada and the Manhattan Project

After Eldorado revealed its radium finds to the Canadian government, state institutions mobilized to provide as much help as the private company required. Most of this assistance came through the Department of Mines, an increasingly active government institution that had used public funds to help establish 37 mills between 1930 and 1933 alone.

During the worst period of the Great Depression, the Department of Mines—which existed “to assist, to investigate, [and] to publicize the resources of Canada”—received enough government funds to set up a radium plant on Great Bear Lake and build an electroscopic laboratory which Eldorado employees and their advisors used to identify radium at the mines.

This robust subsidization paid off tremendously: in 1936, Eldorado produced its first full ounce of radium. In celebration, the company hosted a banquet in Ottawa that was attended by the Governor General Tweedsmuir and Prime Minister Mackenzie King. King recounts Tweedsmuir’s rather fulsome speech in his diaries, before adding some commentary of his own:

His Excellency… made a splendid address contrasting European development from the Fall of the Bastille, which began the French Revolution, with the discovery of the Mackenzie River by Mackenzie in the same year and subsequent movements in this country towards improving the well-being of mankind… I felt very proud of Canada, with what our scholars and men of science are doing.

Following a brief slump in radium prices due to Belgium’s brutal exploitation of the Congo deposits, Eldorado began 1942 with a bang. In March of that year, the US government placed an order for 60 tonnes of uranium to be used in the Manhattan Project. Uranium, previously considered a waste product, had been imbued with enormous value after the discovery of nuclear fission in 1939 and the subsequent application of the element to weapons research.

With both Czechoslovakia and Belgium occupied by Nazi Germany, Eldorado was well-positioned to supply the US government with the uranium it needed for the tests. While the US was able to use a considerable amount of Belgian uranium that the Anglo-Belgian mining company Union Minière du Haut-Katanga had abandoned in New York City, they needed a steady supply. Canadian production filled the gap.

As uranium sales increased and the nuclear arms race entered its nascent stages, Britain asked the Canadian government to nationalize Eldorado to ensure that uranium prices did not fluctuate. Britain was working on a nuclear weapons project of its own, stealthily titled “Tube Alloys,” and they wanted a stable flow of uranium to feed their research.

Minister of Trade and Commerce C.D. Howe needed little convincing. Ottawa was already coming around to this decision on its own, having resolved that Eldorado—whose rise had been so reliant on public sector funding—should be converted into a crown corporation owned by the Canadian government, but managed by Labine, at least for the duration of the war.

Despite revisionist history from the Canadian Mining Hall of Fame claiming that the government had “arbitrarily expropriated” the company, the nationalization was welcomed by Gilbert Labine. Labine was friends with Howe, and the two reached an amicable agreement that the Canadian government would quietly purchase shares of Eldorado until it was a majority shareholder, at which point a full nationalization would be undertaken.

The incremental approach was soon abandoned, and in January 1944 Howe announced in the House of Commons that Eldorado Mining and Refining Ltd. would become a crown corporation. While this was precisely what Britain had requested, they were doubtlessly chagrined when the Manhattan Project effectively monopolized work at Eldorado’s Port Hope refinery, tying Canada’s uranium industry to its continental neighbour at the expense of its colonial motherland.

The uranium core of “Little Boy,” the bomb that the US dropped on Hiroshima, was mined from Great Bear Lake. Dene labourers were involved in the extraction in various roles: providing food for the workers, clothing for the miners, and most importantly, transporting uranium without being informed of its adverse health effects. In the early 1960s, former Dene ore carriers began to die of cancer, deaths which they linked to the Eldorado mines.

The atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians. There is a wealth of critical historiography (particularly the work of Gar Alperovitz) that argues it was not a “tough but necessary decision,” as postwar US rationalization posits. This critical position argues that the bombings were actually a merciless show of force. They were dropped to both prevent a Soviet invasion of Japan, which would have deprived the capitalist West of a powerful satellite state directly beside the Soviet Union, and to dissuade the Soviets from challenging American dominance in the Pacific.

The atomic bombings were not the closing shot of the Second World War but the opening salvo of the Cold War, and the Canadian ruling class was thrilled to participate in the attack. When C.D. Howe received word of the nuclear bombings, he stated, “it is a particular pleasure for me to announce that Canadian scientists have played an intimate part, and have been associated in an effective way with this great scientific development.”

Eldorado came out of the Second World War a crown corporation, and it would remain that way until 1988, at which point it was merged with the Saskatchewan Mining Development Corporation and privatized under the name Cameco. Gilbert Labine died in 1970, one of the most respected figures in the Canadian mining industry and a legend in the mining community to this day.

Historical and present complicity

In 1998, the Dene people formally apologized to Japan for their role in assisting the Canadian government’s extraction of the uranium that was used to level Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even though many of them had little choice. By contrast, the Canadian government has never publicly discussed its role in the bombings, let alone apologized to Japan for its involvement in US nuclear research.

Needless to say, Canada has never apologized to the Dene either. The only major step the government has taken toward redressing the damages it has done was a 2005 investigation into cancer rates at Délı̨nę. The final report stated that former ore carriers are no more likely to suffer from cancer than the average Canadian, a result that many Dene refuse to accept given Canada’s staunch refusal to humanely rectify its past and present atrocities against Indigenous peoples.

Morris Neyelle, who worked at the Eldorado mine in 1978, summed up his feelings thusly: “I can’t have that trust with [the government] if they don’t apologize… I really don’t understand because the community of Délı̨nę, they are a peaceful people. They’re prepared to forgive.”

Owen Schalk is a writer based in Winnipeg. His areas of interest include post-colonialism and the human impact of the global neoliberal economy. Follow him on Twitter @OwenSchalk.

How the Canadian military is fueling the climate crisis
An excerpt from Yves Engler’s new book, ‘Stand on Guard for Whom?’

Yves Engler / November 12, 2021 

Members of the Canadian Armed Forces during an operation in Afghanistan. The photo has been digitally altered for operational security reasons. Photo courtesy the Canadian Armed Forces website.

The following is an excerpt from Yves Engler’s new book, Stand on Guard for Whom? A People’s History of the Canadian Military, released this year by Black Rose Books.

Though it receives relatively little attention, the Canadian Forces’ ecological footprint is immense. It ranges from decimating animal life to releasing substantial greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. In fact, the Department of National Defence emits far more carbon than any other institution. According to the government’s 2017 defence policy review, DND “represents more than half of the Government of Canada’s greenhouse gas emissions.” Despite this, CF operations are exempt from the government’s emission reduction targets.

Military vehicles, planes, and warships consume significant fossil fuels. But even before becoming CF property war tools emit a great deal of carbon and other pollutants. Manufacturing guns, tanks, submarines, naval frigates, and fighter jets consumes significant energy and produces many waste products. Bullet and small arm production generate hazardous wastes such as ozone-depleting substances, volatile organic compounds and heavy metals.

The CF operates a few hundred planes and naval vessels and has 30,000 land vehicles. Once built, planes, vessels and tanks all guzzle petrol even if rarely used outside of drills. A Forbes headline aptly referred to “Fuel-Sucking Military Vehicles.” A Humvee consumes around a litre of gas every five kilometers it travels while naval frigates carry 665,000 litres of fuel.

Fighter jets are incredibly fuel intensive. During six months of bombing Libya in 2011 a half dozen RCAF jets consumed 14.5 million pounds (8.5 million litres) of fuel. An hour of flying a CF-18 consumes hundreds of litres of fuel and in a usual year RCAF planes log thousands of training hours. For their part, the Snowbird performance aircraft participate in dozens of airshows in multiple locations each year. Nine CT-114 Tutors usually perform for about 35 minutes at these events.

Since 1992 the RCAF has had five mid-air refuelling aircraft that can each carry 24,000 pounds of jet fuel. According to a 2018 Skies Mag article, the CC-130HT aerial refuelling aircraft “has been extensively used since its operational introduction in 1993.” Two Canadian air-to-air refuelling tankers supported the bombing of Libya in 2011 and between late 2014 and 2018 they distributed 65 million pounds of fuel for the (mostly US) bombing of Syria and Iraq.

Flying is fuel intensive and its climatic impact is generally about twice the CO2 emitted alone. The release point of the carbon enhances its warming impact and other flying “outputs” produce additional climatic impacts. Fighter jets burn an especially toxic fuel, which allows them to fly higher and faster than commercial aircraft.

***

A century later the ecological toll of the First World War lingers in eastern France. The traces of trench networks and blast holes remain visible while huge amounts of ordnance are collected each year. Near Verdun, France, a 700 square kilometre no-go Red Zone has over 10 million explosives. The soil has elevated concentrations of copper, lead, zinc, mercury and tin. Arsenic levels in parts of the Red Zone continue to rise, meaning the chemicals are acting up.

Seven decades after the war unexploded ordnance and debris litter central Korea. Deforestation in the north is partly due to fires caused by bombings, which destroyed dams and thousands of acres of farmland.

The first Gulf War resulted in a “toxic battlefield.” While the Iraqis fouled the air by burning oil wells, coalition forces destroyed pipelines, refineries and sewers, spilling sewage and oil. The US also fired shells with depleted uranium, which probably increased the incidence of cancer and congenital disease for those nearby. During the war the CF disposed of plastics, batteries, medicine, dead animals, and unexploded ordnance in burn pits. A large CF base abroad can burn tens of thousands of kilograms of waste daily.

During the 1999 bombing of Serbia NATO jets dropped bombs containing depleted uranium. NATO’s effort, the author of “Environmental impact of the war in Yugoslavia on south-east Europe” notes, “to destroy industrial sites and infrastructure caused dangerous substances to pollute the air, water and soil.” The deliberate destruction of chemical plants caused significant environmental damage.

Environmental protection wasn’t part of the agreement between the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force and the UN or Afghan government. US bombing in Afghanistan disrupted important migratory passageways for birds. To destroy crops during the 2000s war Canadian and US forces employed incendiary white phosphorus munitions, which are linked to ailments in animals. The CF also littered the landscape with tens of millions of bullets and shells. Leftover Canadian mortars reportedly killed three children in February 2009, prompting a demonstration calling for “death to the Canadians.”

The Kandahar airfield, which housed tens of thousands of Canadian troops, was responsible for significant waste. A “poo pond” of human waste fouled the air while large quantities of hazardous waste material accumulated. These included oils, lubricants, solvents, pesticides, detergents, compressed gas cylinders, bulbs and batteries, nickel-cadmium and lithium as well as waste containing asbestos and contaminated soils. A leaked US Army memo stated that the burn pit at its largest Afghan base posed “long-term adverse health conditions” to those breathing the air.

NATO severely damaged Libya’s Great Manmade River aquifer system. On July 22, 2011, NATO planes bombed and destroyed much of its pipe-making facilities at Brega. Without providing evidence, NATO claimed Gaddafi’s forces stored weapons at the facility and fired rockets from the site. Attacking the source of 70 percent of the population’s water may have been a war crime. Human Rights Investigations wrote, “even if rockets were being fired from within the location (for which no evidence has been produced) or this facility was being used for military storage by Gadaffi forces, or housed armoured vehicles, attacking the pipe-making factory in a way that leaves it severely damaged is illegal as this facility is important to the water supplies of Libyan civilians.” Since the 2011 war millions of Libyans have faced a chronic water crisis.

BURN PIT

Impacting large sea life, naval frigates use the ocean as their trash can. Ships dump food waste in the Arctic sea and navy guidelines permit Canadian submarines to dump oily bilge water into the sea. Anecdotes in various military histories suggest RCN vessels have discharged a great deal of oil during war. More recently, HMCS Calgary spilled 10,000- 20,000 litres of F-76 fuel into the Georgia Strait in February 2018 while HMCS Halifax spilled “an unspecified quantity of oil” into the Halifax harbour in July 2019. HMCS Athabaskan dumped 800 litres of fuel into the same waterway in January 2016. Earlier in the decade HMCS St. John’s spilled 9,000 litres of diesel fuel into the Halifax harbour and HMCS Preserver spilled another 14,000 litres there.

Even after they are no longer operational, naval vessels pollute the seas. Many RCN vessels have been sunk to the ocean floor. In 2007 US and Canadian gunboats, as well as fighter jets, disposed of HMCS Huron 100 kilometres off of Vancouver Island. Officially, the method of disposal was listed as “firing by naval sea sparrow missiles, aircraft machine guns, and naval gunnery (including MK48 torpedoes).” HMCS Huron was sunk two kilometres down to the ocean floor. In response Jennifer Lash, from the group Living Oceans, complained that the military was “treating the ocean like a garbage dump … No one even knows what kind of marine life there is down there.”

Huge amounts of toxic material have been released at naval testing sites. According to an internal assessment of CF Maritime and Experimental Test Ranges (CFMETR), 93,000 kilometres of copper wire and 2,200 tons of lead, lithium batteries and other toxic materials were dumped at Nanoose Bay between 1965 and 1995. While they refuse to allow independent scientists to investigate the torpedo-testing site, the RCN insists its soft mud bottom can absorb these toxins.

On the east side of Vancouver Island, CFMETR is largely used by US nuclear-powered and nuclear weapons-capable submarines. In the 1990s US submarines fired thousands of torpedoes at the facility (the soft seabed allows them to retrieve expensive torpedoes).

DND suspects dozens of lakes or underwater spots are laden with unexploded ordnance. For nearly half a century, the CF pounded Lac Saint-Pierre, near Trois-Rivières, with shells as big as 155 millimeters (the size of a large fire extinguisher). DND admits that more than 300,000 projectiles were tested in Lac Saint-Pierre and they maintain a year round ‘caution zone’ at a lake that had 8,000 live shells on its bottom five years after shelling ended in 2000. Lead and mercury from the weaponry can harm animal and human health.


US Air Force fighters during the 1991 Gulf War. 

Photo by Everett Historical/Shutterstock.

There are over one thousand known munitions dumpsites off the east coast. After the Second World War 180,000 tons of munitions was dumped just offshore of Sydney, Nova Scotia.

In 2010 DND reported that chemical and biological munitions were disposed in over 100 sites across the country. CBC interviewed a former military officer who said in the late spring of 1985 he was ordered to escort a flatbed truck along an empty road to a freshly dug pit at CFB Gagetown. Over 40 full or semi-full barrels—some dented or in various states of decay—were dumped in the spongy soil. Most of them were wrapped with an orange stripe with the words “Agent Orange”.

From the end of the Second World War until the 1970s the CF dumped chemical weapons into the ocean. After the Great War the military disposed some chemical weapons in the Atlantic. On a larger scale the Directorate of Chemical Warfare and Smoke dumped many containers full of mustard and nerve gas munitions into the sea in 1945.

A large quantity of chemical munitions were dumped 8,200 feet below sea level one hundred kilometers from Tofino, on Vancouver Island. In 1946 the RCN sunk 30,000 drums of mustard gas near Sable Island, 160 kilometres east of Halifax. In total 2,800 tons of mustard gas was dumped around the canyons in the eastern Scotian Shelf, a 700 kilometre long and 100 kilometre wide area. According to the CF, chemical or biological weapons were dumped in at least 28 sites off the east coast.

Exposure to these chemicals causes cancers and depresses immune systems in sea life. They also pose a potential threat to fishers and oil exploration teams (oil interests pushed the government to map the chemical weapons dumps in the Atlantic).

After the Second World War the Canada-Britain-US tripartite Advisory Committee on the Effectiveness of Gas Warfare Materiel in the Tropics shared data from a number of test sites. Between 1945 and 1947 the US and Canada exploded more than 30,000 chemical arms on the Panamanian island of San Jose. Uninhabited by humans and relatively isolated (though not too far to get supplies from the mainland), the island was used to conduct “chemical warfare tests under existing jungle conditions.”

In 2001 Ottawa refused Panama’s request for help to clean up 3,000 unexploded Canadian-made mustard-gas shells and at least eight unexploded 500 and 1,000-pound bombs containing phosgene and cyanogen chloride. A large amount of munitions were also dropped into the sea around the island. Across Canada there is unexploded ordnance at “several hundred” sites, according to a government analysis. In 2011, Wellers Bay near Trenton, Ontario, was closed to the public after DND personnel found hundreds of kilograms of weapons fragments. They believed “500-pound bombs” may still be buried underground in a popular beach area where bombers trained during the war.

Toxins from remnants of explosives and unexploded ordnance seep into local ecosystems and drinking water. “Unexploded or deflagrated RDX [a common explosive] does not degrade in soil and, because of its solubility in water, migrates easily to groundwater and off military property,” a 2011 DND report says. “This may trigger a serious environmental problem and becomes a public health concern if the groundwater is used for drinking.”

Shooting ranges also pose a threat to local water sources. The lead in bullets can seep into local ecosystems. A potent neurotoxin, lead alters the formation of the brain and is an important cause of intellectual disability and behavioural problems (the steep decline in violent crime over the past four decades has been linked to the elimination of leaded gasoline).

Bases are also full of pesticides and herbicides. An internal report (made public in 1997) described CFB Shearwater and CFB Greenwood as a “cocktail of toxic chemicals.” It found 542 CF sites contaminated across the country requiring cleanup. Philip J. Anido points out that since the French constructed Québec City’s Citadel in the late 1600s, colonial military installations have left contaminated waste.90

Beyond the toxins at military sites, CF training has damaged robust and rare fauna. To dig trenches soldiers often rip out prairie grasses while trucks drive over flora and ground-bird nesting areas.92 Destruction in the north was particularly stark. In “The Cold War on Canadian Soil: Militarizing a Northern Environment” Whitney Lackenbauer writes, “military mega-projects radically transformed the human and physical geography of the North. Bulldozers tore permafrost off the ground, disrupting ecosystems and creating impassable quagmires.”

The Distant Early Warning (DEW) Line, a network of 63 radar and communication stations in the Arctic Circle, was an ecological calamity. Built in the early 1950s to counter the purported Russian menace, the 4,500-kilometre line from the northwest coast of Alaska to the eastern shore of Baffin Island required 460,000 tons of material to be transported north. Alongside maritime and land transport, 45,000 commercial flights delivered goods as many as 5,000 kilometres. And 9.6 million cubic yards of gravel was produced on site.

The off-road vehicles brought to the north damaged vegetation and melted permafrost. Activities associated with the DEW line were linked to depleted fish stocks and agitating caribou and other game Indigenous peoples subsisted on.

When the DEW line was abandoned a few years after being completed an incredible amount of material was left behind. There were rotted vehicles in lakes, containers full of hazardous materials and dumps leaking arsenic and PCBs. When the cleanup began three decades after the sites were abandoned, over 200,000 cubic metres of soil contaminated by diesel fuel was placed in nearby “land farms” where it was tossed and turned until the hydrocarbon evaporated to more acceptable levels. Additionally, 35,000 cubic metres of waste—mostly soil contaminated with PCBs and lead—was shipped south to be incinerated or buried.

About 1,000 kilometres south of the DEW line, the 98 radar sites of the “Mid Canada Line” spilled PCB’s and other toxic substances for decades. For years the Mushkegowuk Council, which represents seven Indigenous communities in northern Ontario, campaigned for the government to clean up the heavy metals, DDT, asbestos, PCBs and petroleum hydrocarbon from the abandoned radar sites that contaminated their soils, groundwater, animals and foods. Nearly a half-century after the line was abandoned Ontario and Ottawa put up $100 million to clean up Mid-Canada Line contamination.

In the 1980s low level training flights by US, British and German fighter jets in Labrador scared wildlife and damaged the Innu’s way of life. As a result of supersonic jets skimming the ground, ducks laid eggs a month early, caribou changed migration patterns and beavers all but vanished.

***

For some reason there has been little political scrutiny of the military’s ecological footprint or the fact its GHG emissions are exempted from reductions targets. In 2017 Tamara Lorincz, author of a report titled “Demilitarization for Deep Decarbonization,” pointed out that not a single MP publicly questioned the climate impacts of new fighter jets or the CF in general.

Ironically, Googling the topic mainly turns up articles about the CF protecting the environment. Military statements, for example, describe the RCN’s role in defending offshore energy platforms from possible attack and resulting ecological damage. The 1971 White Paper on defence called for the RCAF to survey Canadian waters to detect pollution from foreign vessels and arrest ships that breached Canadian environmental regulations. A few years after the DEW and Mid Canada Lines caused extensive ecological damage, the White Paper asserted that the CF would ensure “a harmonious natural environment” in the north.

The military can ‘greenwash’ its operations partly because the environmental movement largely ignores the CF and warfare. But regardless of this blind spot from many environmentalists, militarism is inherently anti-ecological.

Yves Engler has been dubbed “one of the most important voices on the Canadian Left today” (Briarpatch), “in the mould of I.F. Stone” (Globe and Mail), and “part of that rare but growing group of social critics unafraid to confront Canada’s self-satisfied myths” (Quill & Quire). He has published nine books.

Noam Chomsky warns of ‘very dangerous’ US antagonism of China

“Biden has pretty much picked up Trump’s foreign policy”

Brett Wilkins / December 1, 2021 / 4 min readSYNDICATED

USA POLITICSASIA

Appearing on Democracy Now! last week, Noam Chomsky accused US President Joe Biden of continuing a perilous policy of confrontation with China. Photo by Tomas Roggero/Flickr.

Linguist and dissident Noam Chomsky this week condemned the Biden administration’s aggressive anti-China foreign policy, while dismissing the imperialist notion that Beijing poses a threat to the United States and urging a departure from the “provocation” that for decades has characterized the US stance toward the rising giant.

Appearing on Democracy Now! last week, Chomsky—a renowned critic of American militarism—accused President Joe Biden of continuing a perilous policy of confrontation with China.

While acknowledging that Biden “has eliminated some of the more gratuitously savage elements” of former President Donald Trump’s policies—including suspending US funding for the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA)—Chomsky contended that “the trajectory is not optimistic.”

“Biden has pretty much picked up Trump’s foreign policy,” he asserted. “The worst case is the increasing provocative actions towards China. That is very dangerous.”

Chomsky continued:

By now there is constant talk about what is called the China threat. You can read it in sober, reasonable, usually reasonable journals, about the terrible China threat, and that we have to move expeditiously to contain and limit the China threat.

What exactly is the China threat? Actually that question is rarely raised here. It is discussed in Australia, the country that is right in the claws of the dragon. Recently the distinguished statesman, former Prime Minister Paul Keating, did have an essay in the Australian press about the China threat. He finally concluded realistically that the China threat is China’s existence.

Speaking at the National Press Club of Australia earlier this month, Keating—who served as prime minister representing the center-left Labour Party from 1991 to 1996—accused his country’s right-wing government of acting against its own interests by supporting the United States as it engages in what anti-imperialists have called “saber-rattling” over Taiwan.

“Taiwan is not a vital Australian interest,” Keating insisted in his controversial speech. “We have no alliance with Taipei.”

“We are committed to ANZUS for an attack on US forces, but… not an attack by US forces, which means Australia should not be drawn, in my view, into a military engagement over Taiwan,” he added, referring to the Australia, New Zealand, United States Security Treaty.

That Cold War-era pact is now 60 years old. More recently, the US and some of its close allies have antagonized Beijing by signing the anti-China Australia-United Kingdom-United States (AUKUS) military agreement. The US, Australia, India, and Japan have also launched the Quadrilateral Security Dialog to address concerns about China.

Chomsky said US antagonism toward China is motivated by the fact that the burgeoning superpower cannot be controlled by Washington.

“The US will not tolerate the existence of a state that cannot be intimidated the way Europe can be, that does not follow US orders the way Europe does but pursues its own course,” he said. “That is the threat.”

While acknowledging the “terrible things” the Chinese government does within its own borders, Chomsky insisted that “they are not a threat.”

Turning the rhetorical tables, he asked: “Is the US support for Israel’s terrorist war against two million people in Gaza where children are being poisoned—a million children are facing poisoning because there’s no drinkable water, is that a threat to China?”

“It is a horrible crime,” he said, “but it is not a threat to China.”

Critics of US foreign policy have noted that while China has not started a war in over a generation, the United States has invaded, bombed, or occupied over a dozen nations since the 1980s.

Chomsky called the imbalance in military power between the United States—which has thousands of nuclear weapons and spends more money on its war machine than the next 10 nations combined—and China “laughable.”

“One US submarine can destroy almost 200 cities anywhere in the world with its nuclear weapons,” he noted. “China in the South China Sea has four old noisy submarines which can’t even get out because they’re contained by superior US and allied force.”

Brett Wilkins is staff writer for Common Dreams.

This article originally appeared on CommonDreams.org.

THE MULTITUDE  NO ONE IS ILLEGAL 

European countries must provide safe routes for refugees

Ending the people smuggling trade will not be easy, but implementing safe pathways can and will undermine those seeking to exploit refugees and save lives, writes John Lannon
Having fled from war, persecution and violence, the trauma experienced in their home countries is compounded by violent and life-threatening experiences in Europe, often at the hands of police.

 Photo: AP/Rafael Yaghobzadeh

WED, 01 DEC, 2021 - 20:26
JOHN LANNON

As Europe comes to terms with the tragic deaths of 27 people in the English Channel, it’s time for governments, including Ireland’s, to do more to provide safe routes for people in need of international protection.

Deaths like these are predictable and preventable and can be avoided if governments work together in a timely and effective manner to share responsibility for the protection of refugees. The deaths included seven women and three children.

The desperation that drove them and others to undertake their perilous journey across a cold, dark sea in a flimsy boat highlights what a hostile environment Europe has become for people seeking safety and protection. It’s not just the English Channel in which people are dying.

People fleeing from oppression in Afghanistan, Syria, Iran and other parts of the world are losing their lives on other European Union borders. From January to September 2021 an estimated 1,369 migrants lost their lives while crossing the Mediterranean Sea.

Read More
EU plane to monitor Channel for crossings as leaders stress need to work with UK

And at least eight people have died on the Poland/Belarus border in recent weeks, having been trapped in a densely wooded border zone in sub-zero temperatures with no food or shelter.

Having fled from war, persecution and violence, the trauma experienced in their home countries is compounded by violent and life-threatening experiences in Europe, often at the hands of police. Just outside Dunkirk, local police have an ongoing policy of “continuous removal” of the tents of hundreds of people, mostly Iraqi Kurds, resulting in their meagre possessions being trashed, lost or stolen.

It shouldn’t be like this. Seventy years ago the 1951 Refugee Convention was established as a response to the urgent needs of refugees generated by World War II. In 2001, the UN’s Refugee Agency, the UNHCR, described it as a timeless treaty under attack.

This is the case now more than ever, as people are increasingly forced to flee persecution, war and human rights violations and to seek refuge in other countries. It’s time now for Europe to live up to the commitments made 70 years ago, and to ensure an effective collective response to the conflict and wars now being waged.

Governments have a duty to protect the fundamental rights of all people under their jurisdiction, regardless of their nationality and/or legal status. This includes providing access to asylum procedures.

According to a recent UK Refugee Council report, 98% of people crossing the English Channel in treacherous conditions claim asylum. Right now, people are being denied that right.

States have the sovereign power to regulate entry, and have an obligation to guard, control and protect their borders. However, international law provides that measures to this effect cannot prevent people from seeking asylum.

Instead of governments looking to apportion blame for the arrival of people who may be in need of international protection, they need to work together to ensure safe routes that provide solutions for refugees.

There is a range of options open to them, including refugee resettlement, family reunification, and complementary pathways that provide opportunities for refugees to enter and settle in a country through labour mobility, education and other schemes. They can also include community sponsorship programmes that are additional to resettlement, and humanitarian admission programmes.

As part of the UN Global Compact on Refugees, states committed to expanding access to third-country solutions, including opportunities for resettlement and complementary pathways for the safe admission of refugees. This ground-breaking agreement recognises that a sustainable solution to refugee situations cannot be achieved without international cooperation.

Read More
How are people-smuggling gangs exploiting English Channel crossings?

European countries, including Ireland, must therefore do more by providing safe pathways for people in need of international protection. The proposed Afghan Admissions Programme announced by the Irish government in September is a welcome initiative in this regard. However, the delay in implementing it is problematic for those at risk.

Members of the Afghan community in Ireland worry constantly about the safety of family members in Afghanistan and neighbouring countries. We should not force them, through our inaction, to make decisions like the people who died in the English Channel.

Evidence has shown that governments’ refusal or unwillingness to provide safe passage for people seeking refuge, while instead focusing their efforts on shutting down smuggling activities, will continue to result in loss of life. Despite the fact that thousands of people have drowned in the Mediterranean, the crossings have not ended. The same is true in the English Channel.

Ending the people smuggling trade will not be easy. But implementing safe pathways can and will undermine those seeking to exploit refugees. And it will save lives.

John Lannon is the CEO of Doras, a Limerick-based national organisation working to protect the rights of migrants, refugees and asylum seekers.

On Thursday, December 9th at 7pm Doras is hosting an online event with special guest speakers to mark its 21st anniversary as well as 21 years of Direct Provision. More information and free registration at www.doras.org

Letter from the U.K.

The Tragic Choices Behind Britain’s Refugee Crisis

The drowning of twenty-seven people in the English Channel was not an inevitable disaster.

By Sam Knight

December 1, 2021

Rafts that migrants used to cross the Channel now sit in a storage facility in Dover, England.

Photograph by Dan Kitwood / Getty

It has been a cold, calm November in southern England. Every few days, the autumnal murk has been punctured by skies of frigid, high-blue brilliance. And on these days, inflatable rubber boats—gray or black, sometimes as many as a few dozen—have set off from the wide, sandy beaches of northern France and chanced a course through the shipping lanes of the English Channel, seeking to bring migrants and refugees to the shores of Britain. “After five hours, the floating boat stopped working,” a Middle Eastern man who recently made the crossing, and whom I will call Adam, said. “Water started to enter our boat.” According to Adam, there were forty-eight people on his dinghy, including women and young children. He called the British Coast Guard from his cell phone and gave them the boat’s location. “She told me, ‘O.K., give us two hours,’ ” Adam recalled. “Two hours?” he replied. “We will be under the sea.” A patrol vessel reached them in an hour. While they were waiting to be rescued, a fishing trawler circled the dinghy three times, and a man shouted at them in English. “Just racists,” Adam told me. “They came and said, ‘Go back to your country. Go back to France.’ ”

On November 24th, a rubber boat like Adam’s got into difficulties soon after leaving the French coast, near Dunkirk. The French Interior Minister, Gérald Darmanin, later said that the craft was obviously unseaworthy, “like a pool that you blow up in your garden.” At around 2 p.m., fishermen on a passing trawler came across bodies in the sea. The temperature of the English Channel in late November is about eight degrees Celsius. A person in the water will lose consciousness in around an hour. By nightfall, twenty-seven bodies had been recovered, including those of seven women and three children. It was the worst maritime disaster in the English Channel since the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise, a car ferry, off Zeebrugge, in 1987, in which a hundred and ninety-three people drowned. Nobody was surprised. “It had to happen, and it happened,” Alain Ledaguenel, the head of Dunkirk’s lifeboat service, said. “We know that the means available for sea rescue are inadequate.”

I travelled to Dover the morning after the sinking. When the “small boats,” as they are euphemistically known, are intercepted on the English side of the Channel, or if they make it all the way to the shore, the passengers are picked up and taken to two facilities there, in the harbor docks. Around ninety-eight per cent claim asylum on arrival. On the day of the disaster, more than six hundred people had made it across. Many were still being processed—undergoing covid tests, having their fingerprints taken, being given dry clothes while their possessions were taken away and placed in clear plastic sacks—in a large white exhibition tent, erected in a parking lot. Independent inspectors have described the site, which is called the Tug Haven, as “a facility struggling to cope and fundamentally unsuitable for holding detainees for anything in excess of a few hours.” Delays frequently occur. The tent has narrow wooden benches for seating and no running water. One night in July, officials placed a six-thousand-pound order at a local Domino’s to feed hundreds of people who were forced to spend the night. A red double-decker bus is parked permanently at the Tug Haven, to provide extra seating. Last week, the top deck of the bus was half full of passengers with purple blankets round their shoulders, shielding their eyes from the low sun.

The number—and desperation—of people willing to risk their lives to reach Britain in this way has increased sharply in a short space of time. In 2019, fewer than two thousand people had made the voyage. In 2020, that number rose to eight thousand four hundred and seventeen. In the first eleven months of this year, the total has exceeded twenty-five thousand. On November 12th, eleven hundred and eighty-five people made the crossing—the current record for a single day. (Three people, who attempted the passage in kayaks, went missing and have not been found.) The daily flotillas have caused a crisis for Boris Johnson’s Brexit-inspired government, which was elected with a large majority in part because it offered a fantasy of an island-bound future, removed from such things. “At the referendum, us Brexiteers told the people that we would take back control,” Edward Leigh, a senior Conservative Member of Parliament, reminded the House of Commons last week. “It is clear that, in this aspect, we have lost control.”

In British politics, the main question relating to the boats is whether the country’s asylum system is too cruel or too kind. Leigh, who was speaking before the disaster, told the Commons, “If we tell the most desperate economic migrants in the world, ‘We will provide a free border taxi service across the channel, we will never deport you and we will put you up in a hotel for as long as you like,’ is it any wonder that more and more come?” He suggested suspending Britain’s human-rights legislation to deal with the emergency. Lee Anderson, a fellow Conservative M.P., from Nottinghamshire, has suggested that the government should move asylum seekers to the Falkland Islands—one of Britain’s last overseas territories, in the South Atlantic—while their cases are considered. “The only way we will put these people off is by giving them the message that if you come here you are going to be sent 8,000 miles away,” he told the Guardian.

To frighten off the boats, Johnson’s government is in the process of passing new immigration legislation that will distinguish between “Group 1 refugees,” who arrive in the country legally, and “Group 2 refugees,” who do not and who, therefore, cannot qualify for the same legal status—a distinction that is widely held to be a breach of the United Nations’ 1951 Refugee Convention. In September, the U.N.’s High Commissioner for Refugees described the classification of Group 2 refugees as “a recipe for mental and physical ill health, social and economic marginalisation, and exploitation.” Johnson’s ministers appeared to take this as encouragement. Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, who is responsible for the country’s borders, has promised to make small-boat crossings of the Channel “unviable.” Earlier this fall, volunteers from Channel Rescue, a human-rights organization that monitors activity from the British coast, spotted U.K. Border Force patrols practicing how to turn around unstable dinghies with Jet Skis. Patel is a former advocate of capital punishment and a close ally of the Prime Minister. Another clause in the proposed immigration bill appears to offer legal immunity for officials who end up drowning people in the Channel as long as “(a) the act was done in good faith, and (b) there were reasonable grounds for doing it.”

The other view of the oncoming boats and last week’s needless deaths is that these are the results of choices that have been made. Britain receives about a third as many asylum seekers as France does. In the twelve months leading up to September, there were thirty-seven thousand applications—a similar volume to the previous peak, during the European migrant crisis of 2015, but still a manageable load for a country of Britain’s size and wealth. In 2020, the U.K. ranked below Finland and Slovenia for the number of refugees it accepted, per capita. The small boats are the fruit of a conscious hostility. Traffickers are able to sell a space on a cheap dinghy with an unreliable engine and no pilot for three thousand pounds because the British and French authorities have successfully shut down other illicit routes into the country. In 2014, there were nights when an estimated two thousand people were trying to board trucks and trains through the Channel Tunnel. But those roads and freight yards are now guarded by fences, heat detectors, cameras, and dogs. The pandemic has reduced air travel and truck crossings further. “If you try to clamp down in one area, you see displacement elsewhere,” Patel said, at a parliamentary hearing last month. “We are all grownup enough to understand that.” The boats are new but the agony is not.

The Immigrants Deported to Death and Violence

During the hearing, Patel also claimed that seventy per cent of those who cross in small boats are single men and thus “effectively economic migrants”—a leap of reasoning otherwise known as a lie. Despite the protestations of Patel and many in her party, those who take their chances on the water are likely to be legitimate refugees. Analysis by the Refugee Council, a British N.G.O., has found that ninety per cent of those who arrive on boats come from ten countries, including Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Iran. In the U.K., around sixty per cent of asylum seekers from those countries are recognized as refugees on their first attempt, and a higher proportion on appeal.

In Dover, I met Joy Stephens, the chair of Samphire, an N.G.O. that works in the town to improve community relations and assist asylum seekers whose applications have failed. The charity was set up in 2002, to support asylum seekers who were being held in a former fortress on a hill above the town. (The detention center was closed in 2015.) By chance, Stephens was returning home from Calais on the evening of last week’s shipwreck. Her ferry was delayed while the bodies and survivors were recovered and rescued from the water. (Two men, from Iraq and Somalia, were found alive and suffering from hypothermia.) Stephens saw the news on her phone while she was waiting on the quayside. “We close our hearts to the fact that these are human beings, just like you and me,” Stephens said. “So crossing the waters, you know, all the way, I was thinking, Here am I with a ticket on this boat crossing safely, while other people have to risk their lives.”

Like other campaigners, Stephens supports the idea of establishing safe routes across the Channel, in the form of a humanitarian visa or a system for people to apply for asylum in Britain while staying on the French side of the water. “If there have been twenty-five thousand people arriving by boat, well, two-thirds of those have risked their life stupidly,” Stephens said, citing the high proportion of refugees on the boats. “They could have had the same processing done and crossed safely and legally on the ferry with me.” In the hours after the sinking, Lord Dubs, an eighty-eight-year-old Labour peer, who arrived in Britain as a child refugee from the Nazis, urged the government to work more closely with the French authorities. In 2016, Dubs helped create a loophole that allowed four hundred and seventy-eight unaccompanied children to travel to the U.K. so that they could be reunited with family members. That loophole was closed last year.

As ever with Johnson’s government—especially when it is faced with a moral challenge of deep complexity—you get distraction rather than solemnity. The night after the disaster, Johnson wrote a three-page letter to Emmanuel Macron, the President of France, proposing joint naval patrols and better intelligence sharing; immediately afterward, Johnson posted his message on Twitter. Macron saw this as a breach of diplomatic protocol. “I am surprised by methods when they are not serious,” he said, and disinvited Patel from an emergency meeting of European ministers, called to respond to the sinking.

It is not a coincidence that clandestine crossings of the Channel have surged during the discord of Brexit, which has frayed relations between Britain and the rest of the continent both practically and emotionally. In his letter to Macron, Johnson politely asked for a new agreement between the U.K. and the E.U., to return migrants and refugees to the bloc—a version of the exact arrangement that Britain triumphantly left slightly less than two years ago. You might think that could be a source of humility, or some regret. But that is not the kind of thinking that occurs to either Johnson or Patel. At the same time as the British government seeks to renege on its obligations to refugees, it has also cut its international-aid budget (which might otherwise help stabilize some of the regions people are forced to flee) and presided over an almighty backlog in the processing of asylum claims once people are in the U.K. During the pandemic, asylum claimants have been housed in former barracks and courtrooms, complete with cell doors and prison-style bunks. The mistreatment lands between the incompetent and the provocative. It diminishes us all. I asked Colin Yeo, a leading immigration barrister, about the government’s policy toward the small boats and their passengers. “This is not serious politics, in the sense of actually getting out and doing things and using your power to achieve change,” he said. “It’s just sort of performance. It’s theatre.”

I met Adam, the man who survived his crossing, in the parking lot of a hotel outside London. He wore a black tracksuit and glasses. After he was processed at the Tug Haven, in Dover, he was taken to a detention center, near Heathrow Airport, for a little more than a week. “They treat us like a human,” he said. “They are too good.” Then Adam was housed, with around four hundred other men, in a hostel near Elephant and Castle, in South London, which had been rejected by the local authority as unsafe to accommodate homeless people during the pandemic. The previous week, Adam had been moved, at short notice, to the hotel, which was next to a highway. Three Afghan men, in traditional dress, sat on the curb. The hotel had been requisitioned at short notice and there was a banner advertising last-minute wedding deals.

Adam was studying for a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence. He had worked as a software engineer before climbing into an inflatable boat in northern France. He had stayed in hotels before, on business, and was struck by the indignity of the modifications that had been made for the asylum seekers: the inadequate food, the lobby stripped of places to sit, the reticent staff. “When we just go through reception, they look to another way,” Adam said. “People are not stupid. . . . They understand how you look at me.” He spoke English, so was often called upon to translate or intercede in misunderstandings. But it was tiring. The previous night, some Kurdish men—the same nationality as most of the people who drowned last week in the Channel—had been playing loud music in the hotel. Adam did not speak Kurdish, so he went to bed. But he puzzled at the men’s intransigence and the attitude of the staff. “In quantum physics, I forget,” he said, searching briefly for the expression. “Every action has an opposite action. Why you do this?” I thought of Adam, and his bemusement, last week, when the small boat went down. Was that the intended consequence of closing a country to the most desperate and the most in need, or was it an accidental one? The action, or the reaction?