https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website felix bazalgette Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:59:25 +0000 https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website en https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Original-Pirate-Material Mon, 27 Jul 2026 07:59:25 +0000 felix bazalgette https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Original-Pirate-Material published as ‘The race to collect every book every written’ in the Financial Times Magazine (2026) ~4600 words The idea of a total library, one containing all the books in existence, had a peculiar hold on the mind of the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges. In 1939, he wrote an essay on the subject, tracing its history from the ancient philosopher Democritus to the 19th-century physicist Gustav Theodor Fechner, and then a short story imagining this library’s architecture and the psychological effect it would have on humans, were it ever finished. An initial reaction of “unbounded joy”, he thought, would curdle into a “disproportionate depression”. Borges, himself a librarian by profession and always drawn to open-ended lists, mused on the works that would lie in this total library, including: “the songs the sirens sang”, “my dreams and half-dreams at dawn on August 14, 1934”, “the secret and true name of Rome”, “the complete catalog of the Library” and “the proof of the inaccuracy of that catalog”. Were Borges writing today, he might include another text — a sealed complaint filed by the US Justice Department in a federal court in New York on October 21 2022. It was because of this document that 33-year-old Anton Napolsky and 27-year-old Valeriia Ermakova, two librarians travelling to Borges’ native country, unknowingly tripped an Interpol Red Notice when they arrived at an airport near Córdoba, in central Argentina, on October 22. Looking forward to two weeks’ holiday, and unaware of the bureaucratic storm gathering above them, they rented a car and drove south towards the picturesque lakeside town of El Calafate. Argentine authorities tracked them via their phones. The complaint, now public, accused the two Russians of running the largest illegal library in the world, a website with tens of millions of digital books, and millions of regular users, called Z-Library. The site provided an easily searchable database, enabling anyone to freely download pirated books, and also solicited users to upload their own files to its ever-expanding collection. When the pair reached the southern city of Rio Gallegos on November 3, officers from the Argentine Special Operations Unit arrested them. At the same time, all around the world, anyone logging on to Z-Library encountered a stark graphic stamped with the seal of the US Justice Department: This domain has been seized by the FBI. “It’s never nice to see a library burn down,” wrote Balázs Bodó, a professor of information law at the University of Amsterdam, “and this is what burning down a library looks like in the digital space.” To their supporters and their users, organisations such as Z-Library are known not as book piracy websites but as “shadow libraries”, and Bodó has written extensively on their history. According to him, this is not a story of crime and punishment — Russians illegally profiting from stolen goods — but rather a confrontation between two fundamental ideas of how the internet should work, perhaps even how the world should work. Since Napolsky and Ermakova were arrested, shadow libraries have moved from the margins — quietly used by readers and researchers — to the curious centre of the AI boom. Recent court cases have shown that some of the wealthiest tech companies in the world have relied on millions of books from shadow libraries to train their large language models (LLMs). In their ravenous quest for the written word, these companies have devoted vast resources towards achieving what seemed, to Borges, only a fable: a library of everything ever written. Last year, I met with Bodó, a youthful, slightly twitchy 51-year-old. At his suggestion, we had lunch in the café of Amsterdam’s oldest zoo. Bodó wore a pair of tiny round metal-frame glasses and a Hawaiian shirt. He told me about his interest in the underground transmission of knowledge, sparked by his time travelling in Bosnia in the weeks after the war ended in 1995. Back then he noticed that pirate media — bootleg VHS and cassette tapes — were the first to re-enter the country, well before any official distribution companies would tackle such a disrupted and risky market. “In the midst of the chaos,” he told me, describing joyous queues at pirate market stalls, “it was the pirates who were helping Bosnians back into contact with the world, with the wider culture.” Bodó grew up in Hungary, which was, for the first 15 years of his life, a communist country. Almost all of the major book shadow libraries in operation today are founded and run by people who grew up in Russia or post-Soviet satellite states. This, according to Bodó and to the pirates themselves, is not a coincidence. “The Soviet tradition of special respect for libraries, books and education in general largely shaped our project’s ideology,” one longtime administrator for Z-Library told me recently. Bodó quotes the Russian sociologist Valeria Stelmakh, who has argued that in the USSR “reading almost transplanted religion as a sacred activity” and that “literature became the unique source of moral truth for the population”. Bodó points to the Soviet-era samizdat traditions of private copying, hoarding and sharing of texts in an environment of official censorship, alongside “the economic ruin of the intelligentsia in the post-communist period”. Pirates argue that the copyright regime, guarded internationally by the US Justice Department and publishers’ associations in the US and the UK, is a recent, western and capitalist form of censorship, imposed upon the rest of the world. “A tool for profit extraction,” said the Z-Library administrator, “against the public interest, and usually to the benefit of publishers not authors”. They argued that Z-Library’s very existence “demonstrates systemic problems with information access in modern society”. Intrigued by these grand claims, and taken aback by the vehemence with which the FBI would hunt down a book-sharing website, I set out to understand the world of shadow libraries, talking to publishers’ associations, academics like Bodó, writers, researchers and the pirates themselves. Where do these organisations come from and how do they work? Are they communist folk heroes or dissembling crypto-capitalist grifters? Are they right to say that western-enforced copyright has become unmoored from its original purposes, no longer benefiting authors? And, with Z-Library back online, where are those internationally wanted librarians today? * During the second world war, when Borges first published his writings on la biblioteca total, the notion of a total library entered the realm of possibility thanks to advances in information technology. In 1945, in The Atlantic, a government scientist called Vannevar Bush proposed a kind of proto-internet, using networked forms of microphotography that were able to shrink down physical bookshelves. “A library of a million volumes could be compressed into one end of a desk,” he wrote. He speculated that the total sum of human written production — “a billion books, the whole affair” — would soon easily be “lugged off in a moving van”. The actual practice of digital librarianship is almost as old as the internet itself — Project Gutenberg, an attempt to make digital versions of public-domain texts available to all, was first launched on the Arpanet, a US government-backed precursor to the internet, in 1971. Its first text, typed out manually by a student at the University of Illinois, was the Declaration of Independence, followed by the Constitution and then the King James Bible, which was finally finished in 1989. The proliferation of scanning technology, leaps in digital storage efficiency and the rise of the World Wide Web in the 1990s led to an explosion in book digitisation in the early 2000s. Now books did not have to be laboriously typed out, and could be stored in online databases accessible from anywhere. Some projects, such as Google’s Project Ocean — 25 million books scanned and digitised between 2002 and 2015 — were run by corporations in partnership with universities. These were subject to early lawsuits from publishers’ and authors’ associations, which limited how they could be accessed and used by the public. At the same time, a number of smaller, grassroots digitisation projects were emerging, operating outside of the legal regimes that Google was ultimately subject to. Though they were likened to file-sharing pirate websites such as Napster and The Pirate Bay, which primarily dealt in music or movie files, many of the text-sharing projects consciously eschewed the “pirate” label. They preferred the organising principles, history and brand of the “library”. These projects sought to amass as many digital books as possible — through crowdsourced scanning or the amalgamation of existing databases — catalogue and index them, and make them freely accessible. One such project, Library Genesis or LibGen, was started by Russian scientists in 2008 to enable the free circulation of scientific papers. Another, Library.nu — founded in the mid-noughties by students operating out of Galway, according to The Sunday Times — became so large that it attracted the attention of publishers and law enforcement. In early 2012, it closed in the face of a lawsuit brought by 17 different publishers, but its digital archive was folded into that of LibGen, which became more popular as a result. This was an early example of what enforcement agencies now call “whack-a-mole” — the slippery, protean nature of shadow libraries makes them difficult to “burn down”. It was around this time, in early 2010, that the precursor to Z-Library, called BookFi, was founded by two students at St Petersburg State University, Napolsky and Vladislav Chikhira. BookFi differed from its shadow-library peers in an important way. LibGen aimed to collect “academic literature” and to avoid “junky books” and “bestsellers”. Sci-Hub, founded by the Kazakhstani programmer Alexandra Elbakyan in 2011, likewise had a tighter focus on scientific papers, many of which had been produced using public money but were sold on by private companies with large profit margins. BookFi, by contrast, had more generalist, Borgesian ambitions. Its aim, Napolsky and Chikhira told a tiny Russian-language news website in 2011, was nothing less than to become “the largest online library” in the world, “encompassing fiction, scientific, reference and technical literature”. Z-Library began life as a simple search engine for ebooks, running off a student laptop on St Petersburg State University’s internal network. It quickly spiralled into an ambitious ideological project. Napolsky and Chikhira, both just 20 years old at the time, declared that “books are a public asset, and their access should be unrestricted”. Today, Chikhira, judging by his social media accounts, lives a quiet life among a Russian exile crowd in İzmir, Turkey, where he moved after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022. He works as a software engineer. By all appearances, he’s no longer involved in the Z-Library project, and he did not respond to my requests for an interview. His fellow student founder, Napolsky, however, continued to work on Z-Library throughout the 2010s, as it increased in stature, expanding both its collection and its international user base. It was during this period that Valeriia Ermakova joined the project, and she and Napolsky started a romantic relationship. Information on the couple, including how and when exactly Ermakova came to the project, is scarce. (Repeated requests to interview the pair — through their US lawyers, former classmates and a source at Z-Library — were unreturned or rebuffed, citing the risk of influencing the ongoing case against them.) It is left to a florid piece of shadow-library fanfic, circulating on social media, to imagine this moment: Ermakova, inspired by Z-Library’s mission, reaches out to Napolsky over the dark web in 2016, declaring that “I want to help you.” Soon, the couple are working together in the name of “a shared vision: THE LIBERATION OF KNOWLEDGE”. As it expanded, moving into its second decade of operation in the early 2020s, Z-Library matured. It featured an easy-to-use search bar interface, surrounded by images of leather-bound volumes, projecting the comforting aura of an old-fashioned library. It had book recommendations, based on a user’s search history, and selections of books popular with other users, and even email alerts for users subscribed to particular topics. Last year, an administrator of Z-Library, self-described as “one of the project’s oldest participants”, agreed to an interview on the condition of anonymity. (They would have met in person, but only in Russia or Belarus.) Over a number of months, I sent questions via email, and received detailed answers weeks later in .txt file attachments, described as “collective commentary from the Z-Library team”. They outlined to me what the mature phase of the organisation, still in operation today, looks like. “Roughly 20 people work on developing and maintaining the project,” they said, with a “team composition that is quite standard for IT products — development group, testing group, designer and technical support team”. Though the anonymous administrator declined to tell me “absolute budget figures”, they claimed it would be “typical for an IT project of this scale”, all funded by small donations from their millions of users. Emails from Ermakova to a potential payments provider, accessed by the FBI and published in court documents, suggested that its monthly income in 2020 was around $50,000, rising to $150,000 during donation drives, which are mounted annually. The Z-Library administrator named the biggest expense as infrastructure maintenance — “3,000-5,000 processor cores and several petabytes of data storage” — followed by payroll for their team of “specialists” who keep the project running. * There are three main rules that such a project must abide by if it is to avoid enforcement action by western agencies, the founder of one Europe-based shadow library told me. The first is to operate within a niche, ideally one as specific as possible: no universalist ambitions, no mass-market books. Second, allow publishers and authors to make takedown requests, and comply with those requests quickly and comprehensively. Third, and perhaps most importantly, don’t allow money anywhere near the project. No donations, no tiered memberships, no subscriptions. As soon as money becomes a part of the system, the founder told me, you open yourself up to charges that you are profiting from stolen material — that you are not a library but a criminal enterprise. By mid-2022, Z-Library was breaking all of these informal rules, by design, and it was beginning to attract attention. It solicited donations and offered a premium tier, for $1, which allowed unlimited downloads of books (users were otherwise limited to 10 per day). Though the site nominally complied with takedown requests, the crowdsourced nature of its archive, with hundreds of books uploaded by volunteers every day, made compliance difficult in practice. And, finally, because of its universalist aims, it was drawing in audiences beyond the millions of young students around the world who had traditionally used it to obtain textbooks and academic literature. Among these new audiences were North American readers of young adult fiction, specifically fans of the phenomenally successful author Colleen Hoover, who had a new book out in 2022. That year, TikTok posts by Hoover fans promoted Z-Library as a remarkable new way to download her works for free. The posts clocked millions of views. Publishers’ associations in the US and the UK began to devote more resources to investigating Z-Library. Publishers’ associations are, perhaps surprisingly, highly investigatory in nature and closely linked to police forces — the UK Publishers Association, for example, has a staff member on long-term secondment to the City of London Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit. According to a source familiar with the operation against Z-Library, researchers in one publishers’ association assembled a dossier on the shadow library, documenting its domain names and, for the first time, definitively linking its activities to two named Russian individuals. These details were passed on to Interpol and the FBI. The source described a “stars-aligning moment”, with all the elements to entice US law enforcement agencies to take action to defend publishers’ interests. There were US authors whose copyright had plainly been infringed, named individuals linked to the “international criminal networks” responsible and, finally, those individuals were set to travel outside of Russia in the near future, to a country with an extradition treaty with the US. It seems that Napolsky and Ermakova had been linked to Z-Library due to a number of mistakes that look amateurish in hindsight. One of the ways the site took donations was via Amazon gift cards sent to Z-Library Gmail addresses. Napolsky had allegedly used his personal Gmail account as the back-up email for many of these donation accounts, and entered his name, phone number and address on Amazon accounts that cashed Z-Library donations. Likewise, Ermakova had registered her card details, and her St Petersburg address, with an Amazon account that redeemed donated gift vouchers, according to the complaint. All of these accounts were further linked by IP address data that showed that they usually logged in at the same time, from the same location. Both Amazon and Google complied with an FBI warrant, providing information to investigators about Napolsky and Ermakova’s account activities, and (in Google’s case) the contents of their inboxes. For example, the Amazon account associated with Ermakova, which had cashed some Z-Library donations, had “placed more than 110 orders totalling over $13,628.32, most of them for beauty and apparel products” over a three-year period, according to the complaint filed in 2022. It was presumably the Gmail inbox access that also alerted the FBI to Napolsky and Ermakova’s travel plans. The night before they flew from St Petersburg to Córdoba, via Asunción, an application for arrest warrants against the pair was granted by the district court in New York. “Z-Library has robbed individuals of the fruits of their labor,” wrote an FBI special agent in the warrant application, “for NAPOLSKY and ERMAKOVA’s personal gain”. The next day, at 9.45am, the pair arrived in Argentina and the Interpol Red Notice was activated. When Argentine police finally swooped on November 3, it was, according to the Z-Library administrator, “a complete surprise for all project participants”. Two weeks later, the pair were charged with copyright infringement, wire fraud, conspiracy to commit wire fraud, and money laundering conspiracy, and an extradition request was made. As the legal process rumbled on into the new year and throughout 2023, in both Argentine and US courts, the two Russians settled into house arrest in Córdoba. By May 2024, the extradition process seemed to have stalled. Argentine courts had refused to approve it, waiting for more information from the FBI, and were also awaiting the result of an application by the Russians to the Argentine Supreme Court for refugee status. Meanwhile, courts in the US had been mulling over a memorandum filed the previous September by Napolsky and Ermakova’s US lawyers, arguing that the charges themselves had been improperly filed by the FBI. It was during this stalemate that Patronato de Liberados, an Argentine charity responsible for monitoring bail conditions, found the Russians missing from their assigned flat in Córdoba during a routine check. Another international arrest warrant was issued for Napolsky and Ermakova, and, in the absence of any trace of them passing through airports, the Spanish-language outlet La Voz speculated that they had gone underground in Argentina. However, in June last year, the administrator at Z-Library told me that they were both “currently safe in Russia”. How had they managed to get there? No more details were forthcoming, either from Z-Library or their US lawyers, both unwilling to divulge anything that might affect the ongoing case. The source close to the investigation suggested that, in order for Napolsky and Ermakova to escape Argentina while they were subject to an international arrest warrant, the Russian state would have to be involved. “You can imagine something to do with Russia,” they said, “but I couldn’t possibly comment on that.” One Spanish-language newspaper reported that Russian diplomatic staff were a constant presence at the Argentine court proceedings, even sometimes correcting court translators on points of legal vocabulary. The left-humanist ethos of Z-Library doesn’t seem to be a natural partner to Vladimir Putin’s extreme rightwing, repressive dictatorship. Napolsky’s co-founder Chikhira and many of their former classmates felt they had to leave Russia after its invasion of Ukraine in 2022. I asked the Z-Library administrator why they thought their project was allowed to operate safely under Putin. On that point, I received no answer. * A revealing aspect of the fight between shadow libraries and enforcement agencies is the obsession, on both sides, with terminology. The former tend to eschew talk of pirates and piracy. “For me, piracy means stealing to enrich yourself somehow,” the European shadow library founder told me. “I don’t see our work in those terms.” But for those on the enforcement side, any mention of the word “library” raises hackles. The preferred term, the source close to the operation to shut down Z-Library told me, was “organised criminal network”. These “criminal networks” were not to be considered in “cultural” terms, and had no “appropriate place in content ecosystems”. These clashes over language are attempts to manoeuvre the battle on to favourable terrain. Enforcement agencies want this to be a simple case of theft, while the shadow librarians want a debate about ancient ideals and modern inequalities. How, for example, is it fair that an impoverished university student in China or India must pay thousands of dollars to highly profitable North American corporations simply to get online access to the textbooks or articles necessary for their education? The takedown of Z-Library in 2022, though hailed as a triumph by publishers and law enforcement, revealed the extent to which shadow libraries had successfully set the terms of this debate. Even authors who believed their earnings had been harmed by Z-Library drew a distinction between piracy of commercial fiction and that of academic literature, treating the former as harmful and the latter as almost sacrosanct. Hoover, whose pirated books may have initiated the whole operation, was moved to release a statement. “I was once a college student who couldn’t afford textbooks,” she wrote in a Facebook post, which notably declined to condemn Z-Library. “I’d never willingly make that harder for people.” What should be concerning for mainstream publishers is that, unlike the academic focus of Sci-Hub or LibGen, Z-Library wants to push the argument even further, away from the struggles of impoverished students and to the heart of the copyright contract itself. In the past this might have been easy ground for publishers, but in recent years it has become more fraught. In the past two decades, around the world, author income has plummeted. In the UK, a series of depressing surveys by the Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society document this slide: from 2006 to 2022, they found that median earnings for authors had declined by just over 60 per cent. Meanwhile, the profits of the big publishing companies have increased. According to the ALCS, the publishing industry has become a microcosm of wider inequalities, “characterised by winner-takes-all dynamics and extremely high levels of earnings inequality”, with only a few percentage points of total publishing industry revenue making its way to authors at all. With median annual author income now at around £7,000, the question is increasingly who can afford to be an author, rather than who can write well enough or work hard enough to be one. The argument that a global community of readers and writers should wholeheartedly support copyright enforcement because it funds literary production — because it enables authors from all backgrounds to write — is a compelling one. If, however, copyright is enforced with a militarised zeal akin to the war on drugs, and authors’ earnings relentlessly squeezed, then the argument becomes a little harder to make. Z-Library’s broad-brush claim that copyright is “a tool for profit extraction” that benefits “publishers not authors” will ring true for more and more people. * The destruction of Z-Library in 2022 turned out to be merely an outage. After three months, its administrators announced its return, with a new system designed to evade domain shutdowns. This brief hiatus did, however, give rise to a new book piracy website called Anna’s Archive, launched days after the Z-Library arrests, in a conscious response to them. Though it has many features of a library, this new organisation makes archival preservation its main aim: “to catalog all the books in existence”; ensure that they are never lost using duplicated, crowdsourced and geographically distributed storage; and to make them available to all. It has, by its own reckoning, collected about 16 per cent of all the books and articles in the world, and 750,000 individual downloads are made through the site every day. Anna’s Archive might make publishers nostalgic for their old foe. Unlike Z-Library, with its documented history and messy paper trail, no one has been convincingly connected to it. Lawsuits against Anna’s Archive go unanswered, and arrest warrants cannot be filed. And, while Z-Library’s administrators agonise about moves towards “content commercialisation”, unwilling to completely betray their communist roots, Anna’s Archive is much more pragmatic. The organisation embraces the pirate identity, and anything that might help it attain its final goal of the total archive is considered: advertising, paid membership and high-speed paid access to its considerable archive for the training of corporate AI models. A series of lawsuits in the past few years has revealed how pivotal shadow libraries have been for the training of LLMs. A suit earlier this year alleged that Google, once an informer on Napolsky and Ermakova, had actually used their shadow library to train its Gemini model. Anthropic, meanwhile, according to documents released as part of another suit, built its own internal shadow library out of stolen copyright material downloaded from pirate sites to improve Claude. (Anthropic agreed to settle with a group of authors and publishers late last year for $1.5bn. Their general counsel Aparna Sridhar said the court’s ruling meant that “training AI on books is fair use under copyright.”) Suits against Meta surfaced documents showing that shadow library material had been used to train its Llama model, with authorisation from “MZ”, which some speculate is Mark Zuckerberg. (“We respect third-party intellectual property rights,” said a Meta spokesperson at the time, “and believe our use of information to train AI models is consistent with existing law.”) Anna’s Archive, young and nimble, unconstrained by history, seems ready to capitalise on this opportunity. Documents from a recent lawsuit against the chipmaker Nvidia claimed that the company had been in talks with administrators from Anna’s Archive to negotiate a fast download of their entire holdings, rather than laboriously crawling through captchas and limited download speeds. The pirate archivists are very open about the practice — blog posts often offer significant batches of written material to AI companies at a price, with conditions designed to give them a competitive edge, such as exclusive access to the material for a year following sale, before it is added to the public archive. * In the Amsterdam zoo, Bodó outlined two traditions of the internet to me, ones that he saw playing out in the AI gold rush today. On one side is the libertarian capitalist tradition, with its roots in Silicon Valley, which sees the entire corpus of the world’s literature as a resource to be mined by machines to create profitable subscription services, automate jobs and concentrate wealth. On the other side is the anarcho-communist tradition, originating in grassroots mutual-aid projects in post-Soviet countries, which seeks to collect and preserve the world’s literature for individual users to read, enjoy and learn from as they please. “Move fast and break things” versus “move fast and save things”. With the recent collaboration between Anna’s Archive and Big Tech, these traditions seem, strangely, to have fused — each takes what they want from the deal, but what will the rest of us get? The total library imagined by Borges almost 90 years ago was generative rather than acquisitive. It was not based on a successful effort to collect all books, but rather on the iterative combination of “all 25 orthographic symbols” until every possibility was exhausted and all books lay within its stacks. The result, he thought, would ultimately be disastrous: a “vast, contradictory Library, whose vertical wildernesses of books run the incessant risk of changing into others that affirm, deny, and confuse everything like a delirious god”. https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Fratelli-Carbonai Wed, 18 Sep 2024 16:11:22 +0000 felix bazalgette https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Fratelli-Carbonai Fratelli Carbonai Commissioned by the New Yorker, premiered at AFI Fest in 2023, released in 2024.~ 17 mins Text published August 21st 2024: ~ 800 words It’s a rainy, dark December morning in the mountains of Calabria, southern Italy, and Nazareno Scrivo has arrived for work. He’s stressed. “Bad weather for making charcoal,” he says tersely, pointing through the trees to a ruined batch, going up in flames like a bonfire. Nazareno has come up here before sunrise, while his sons catch a couple more hours of sleep back at home, to keep an eye on the vast charcoal mounds called scarazzi—if rain washes away the earth piled on top, the slow-burning wood beneath will be exposed to the air, swiftly turning the whole batch to ash. “Winter is horrible,” he says, grabbing his spade and disappearing into the darkness. “Brutto.” That grim morning, Josh Hughes, my friend and co-director, and I arrived with our camera, making a film about Nazareno and his fellow charcoal makers, known in southern Italy as carbonai. We first became interested in their world because of the strange history of the commodity, and the ancient art of making it, which has roots that stretch beyond the early Metal Ages, six thousand years ago. During the time we filmed in Italy, however, the country and the carbonai were undergoing some very modern ruptures that would become part of the story, too. We made a couple of weeks-long filming trips to Calabria in 2022, on either side of the September election that delivered Giorgia Meloni, and the most far-right Italian government in living memory, to power. Televisions in bars played her hypnotic, threatening speeches, and local newsagents sold Mussolini calendars. It was in this context that we got to know Fofana, a Malian working at the site with the local carbonai. After a tough adolescence, in which he fled Mali and arrived in Italy alone as a teen-ager, Fofana made friends with the then boss of the charcoal site through a chance encounter, and was offered a job. The boss, a man Fofana remembers fondly, and whose picture decorates various walls throughout the site, died during the early days of the pandemic, leaving Fofana’s future with the carbonai a little more uncertain. While his friendships with the other younger workers were developing, viciously dehumanizing attitudes toward people of his background were being normalized in national debates. As we filmed, we became interested in how this tough group of men, working an exhausting job in the mountains, seemed to have built a fragile sense of community that resisted the relentlessly xenophobic logic of the far right—but, we wondered, was it really a community of equals, and would it last? Before the exploitation of coal and oil, charcoal was the only fuel that burned hot enough to forge metal; for most of its life as a commodity, it was linked with warfare and heavy industry, the rise and fall of empires. Nazareno Scrivo and his sons, the latest in a long line of charcoal burners in Serra San Bruno, do this job because of a decision two hundred and fifty years ago by the Bourbons, once rulers of Sicily and southern Italy, to build a vast metalworks in the Calabrian town of Mongiana. For a hundred years, Mongiana supplied European militaries with a steady flow of pikes and rifles, and the wooded mountains of central Calabria were filled with nomadic families of carbonai turning trees into charcoal to feed the furnaces of what was, for a time, the biggest metalworks in Europe. The Scrivos are one of the last remaining carbonai families in the area, and Calabrian charcoal is, of course, no longer used to make weapons: every bag that leaves the site is destined for Italian barbecues, imparting a woody aroma to melanzane, pepperoni, and salsicce cooked alla griglia. Younger generations are eschewing the dirty and difficult work, even despite the chronic lack of other opportunities in Calabria, and the economic viability of the business is increasingly undermined by cheaper charcoal made in modern metal kilns. Charcoal makers, working in a declining traditional industry, are precisely the kind of demographic that liberal commentators and right-wing demagogues alike believe to be particularly susceptible to nativist ideas; for a while, at least, the carbonai seemed to show that another politics was possible in the face of attempts to divide and rule. But the film is now something of a time capsule of that frenetic period around the election in 2022, when Italy decisively lurched to the right. Meloni is going from strength to strength, and, as of this year, Fofana’s no longer with the carbonai—after almost a decade working at the site, he decided to find better-paid, easier work in Rome, where he’s now living. He’s still saving up, so that one day he can visit the family he left behind in Bamako fourteen years ago. https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/about Fri, 05 Apr 2019 12:21:53 +0000 felix bazalgette https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/about window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'UA-138127984-1'); <img width="3000" height="3000" width_o="3000" height_o="3000" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0c6187b333a1f3c4a9689dfb2034969e00931b7c3187451d3e92f4b39328ec8b/the-screens.jpg" data-mid="242496424" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0c6187b333a1f3c4a9689dfb2034969e00931b7c3187451d3e92f4b39328ec8b/the-screens.jpg" /> My first book, an essay about photography, will be published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. My poetry, journalism and essays have appeared in The Guardian, The New Yorker,&nbsp;The London Review of Books blog, The New York Review of Books, The Financial Times,&nbsp;The Economist, The White Review, Sight &amp; Sound, New Internationalist,&nbsp;MAP Magazine, New Statesman, Elephant, Photomonitor, Little White Lies, Blackbox Manifold, 3:AM Magazine and SPAMZINE among others. I’ve twice been shortlisted for the Fitzcarraldo Editions essay prize.&nbsp; My most recent film, co-directed with Joshua Hughes, was ‘Fratelli Carbonai’, about charcoal makers in Calabria. Comissioned by the New Yorker, it premiered at AFI fest and was nominated for the Grand Jury Award. Previous films we’ve made have been nominated for a One World Media award, featured on Nowness&nbsp;and selected as a Vimeo Staff Pick. My photography has been published in The Guardian, The White Review, and a few small press chapbooks. I’ve written fiction and essays for photobooks including Praberians by Thomas Rousset (Loose Joints), The Third Hand by Marton Perlaki (InOtherWords), and In Excelsis by Mary Manning (Mahler LeWitt). email -&nbsp;insta Archive: Shadow Libraries piece - Financial Times MagazineTrompe l’oeil and the Van der Kelen - The Guardian (text + photo) 46 photos - The Guardian Fake Photos - The Guardian Fratelli Carbonai - The New Yorker ‘Fingery Eyes’, in The Third Hand by Marton Perlaki - InOtherWords Fratelli Carbonai - AFI FEST (premiere) Keanu Experience - The Guardian‘Philosophy of the Kiosk’, in In Excelsis by Mary Manning - Mahler Lewitt Five Poems by Catherine Byron Pubs Piece - The Guardian ‘A Report on the Prabérians’, in Prabérians by Thomas Rousset - Loose Joints Pot Plant Experience - The GuardianProtest Photos World - The Guardian Protest Photos UK - The GuardianPenis Museum Experience - The Guardian What Comes To Mind - Resonance Extra/ OutlandsMeteor Experience - The Guardian Awoko - Vimeo Staff Pick Haircut&nbsp;Experience - The Guardian Awoko - Short of the Week How do you say corruption in English? - London Review of Books blog Five Informative Poems - Earthbound Press Charles Jones - RA Magazine Architecture + Modern Warfare - The Economist Earth + Anthropocene - The Economist Welcome to Harmondsworth - Full Frame Bud Glick - The Economist An almost obsolete species – MAP Magazine Rediscovery: The Ballad of Gregorio Cortez - Sight and Sound Long read: Exodus and Empire in Thatcher's Britain - New Internationalist Jean Cocteau's Orphée - Little White Lies Siza and Collovà in Salemi - The Guardian El Grito - Sight &amp; Sound Remodelling Mayhem - The New York Review of Books Daily 'Monsanto: A Photographic Investigation' - The White Review Natural Magic - Fitzcarraldo Editions essay prize shortlist Tacita Dean - The Economist Immigration detention deaths on the rise - New Internationalist Forensic Architecture - Elephant Anni Albers - Elephant Magazine A murderous fury - MAP Magazine Three poems - Blackbox Manifold Gramsci's 'Prison Notebooks' - The Economist Notes on the history of a detention centre - The White Review Harry Gruyaert - 1843 Sure Hope Again STREET - Fruitlands 3 Wolfgang Tillmans - New Statesman Mark Neville - The Economist Un Chien Andalou - Little White Lies The Seaside - The Economist Moot @ Free Verse L'Italia ci guarda - The Economist Moot Press with And/Or Gallery/ Slip/ Praxis Moot Press @ Parasol Unit – Praxis 3 Francis Alÿs Ciudad Juarez Projects - The Economist Exposing Libya's dark past - 1843 magazine Corona - Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize shortlist Mouna Karray Nobody Will Talk About Us - Photomonitor The luxury mall – Troposphere Editions Tripe Murray Bourne - 1843 magazine William Henry Fox Talbot - The Economist Strange and Familiar - The Economist Easter Rising 1916 - The Economist Stadium Hotel - Nowness A Predator Drone in Djibouti - Whitey on the Moon Thule - Whitey on the Moon At Harmondsworth - London Review of Books blog anatomical terms of location - 3:AM Magazine https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Awoko Fri, 05 Apr 2019 12:02:04 +0000 felix bazalgette https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Awoko window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'UA-138127984-1'); AwokoScreened at international festivals, Short of the Week, Vimeo Staff Pick, distributed by Minute Shorts (2021) ~ 8 mins .embed-container { position: relative; padding-bottom: 56.25%; height: 0; overflow: hidden; max-width: 100%; height: auto; } .embed-container iframe, .embed-container object, .embed-container embed { position: absolute; top: 0; left: 0; width: 100%; height: 100%; } This film is about a group of men who print a newspaper five nights a week. At the Awoko printing press in Freetown, Sierra Leone, they suffer power cuts, ageing machines and dangerous chemicals – but it’s also a place to sleep, chat, joke and, of course, earn money. Some of the older men like James and Joe have worked in the industry their whole lives, while the younger printers like Ibrahim and Sheka see no future in it – they would rather be lawyers, or accountants, if they could afford the university fees. Newspaper printing has a rich history in Freetown, Sierra Leone, established as a colony for former slaves in the late eighteenth century. The first movable type printing press in sub-Saharan Africa arrived there in the 1790s, and in the nineteenth century the city became a centre of writing and publishing in West Africa. Weekly newspapers printed in Freetown travelled thousands of miles, connecting a vast transnational readership and fostering the anti-colonial movement that would lead to a rejection of European rule in the twentieth century. Today, in a country where fewer than 15% of the population have access to the internet, print newspapers remain a vital, if precarious and declining, institution. Newspaper printers in Sierra Leone sometimes take a political risk with their work – they've been arrested by governments in the past – but they also, every night, take on personal risks working with toxic chemicals and ageing machines in order to keep information flowing out to their many thousands of readers. So while this film is about one night shift at the Awoko press, it’s also about the fact that, around the world, the vibrant public sphere and political change promised by journalism doesn’t happen by accident, but through untold hidden hours of boring, messy, dangerous work. Directors: Joshua Hughes, Felix BazalgetteProducer: Sorcha BaconA Try Hard Film https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Home-is-always-a-ship-1 Fri, 22 Mar 2019 23:13:21 +0000 felix bazalgette https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Home-is-always-a-ship-1 window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'UA-138127984-1'); Home is always a shipBook-length essay consisting of text, photographs, scans, documents and ephemera. Excerpted in Failed States (2019) <img width="5050" height="5050" width_o="5050" height_o="5050" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4064d579473b111b935c1c4add5300a2ca26a980fe1adf2b572a20c8feec059b/1a-harmondsworth-lane-AM.jpg" data-mid="38296358" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/4064d579473b111b935c1c4add5300a2ca26a980fe1adf2b572a20c8feec059b/1a-harmondsworth-lane-AM.jpg" /> <img width="2534" height="2589" width_o="2534" height_o="2589" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/c62314b4d002e04df37158087dbd423701959b1d6a5037f8aab78bb0e1321470/1b-harmondsworth-lane-PM.jpg" data-mid="38296371" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/c62314b4d002e04df37158087dbd423701959b1d6a5037f8aab78bb0e1321470/1b-harmondsworth-lane-PM.jpg" /> Planes take off and land, people go to church or mosque or temple, to their jobs in the airport during the week, international flight crews flow in and out on overnight stopovers, the jumble sale takes place every month, protests take place every year, flowers are laid on memorials, bulbs are planted on the village green then removed a few months later, men are delivered or taken away in shackles in the early hours of the morning, some kill themselves, landladies retire and move away, tourists spread out from the coach, the old barn has its open day. Trees flower and lose their leaves or (being non-deciduous) grow steadily, recording how the environment changed from year to year with their billowing forms and shapes, the rings in their trunks. Lawns are mowed, crops are harvested, notes are made. Fields sink. Fields sink because gravel is mined from what used to be agricultural land, then rubbish is put into the ground in its place, and then fields are laid back on top. Pipes stick out of the ground near footpaths and fences, vents for the gases released by the rubbish as it decomposes underground. Fields over landfill gently sink for years after they are laid, settling over the contours of their new archeology. * “Home is always a ship,” says the sailor Gerard Gales in B. Traven’s The Death Ship (1926). Gales loses his identification documents in the first pages of the novel and spends the rest of it drifting around the world, from border to hostile border, ship to leaky ship. Sailors, according to Gales, “don’t even know which company the ship they are on belongs to.” Their only interest is the ship that is their home and that nourishes them. It’s hard to imagine an air steward talking about a passenger jet in such terms. For air crew it’s the opposite of what Gales describes — the company that you belong to is what gives the work its peculiar character, while the vessels themselves shuffle across the globe anonymously, internationally, their crews chopping and changing day by day, hour by hour. Air crew hardly have a chance to get acquainted with each other during a voyage, unlike the sailors on the ‘Yorikke’ — Traven’s eponymous death ship — and some staff rotas are designed so that you would have to toil for about six years, on average, before you worked onboard a flight with same person twice. It was Stan who told me this latter fact, during one of the first interviews I did in Harmondsworth, recorded on my phone in Costa Coffee in a hotel next to the perimeter wall of the airport, set back from the Bath Road, behind the McDonalds, not far from the detention centre. Stan, now retired, is part of &nbsp;curious demographic in this area that has been created by the airport, since it was built on land requisitioned by the government under war laws in 1945. Stan reads The Daily Mail, votes Tory, goes to church (he is the local churchwarden) and has been to more countries than you or I ever have or will. He knows the best places for sushi in Tokyo, has killed time strolling the streets of San Francisco and Singapore, and partied in Australia. (Unlike the brisk direct flight managed by some airlines today, the journey to Australia, in the seventies, used to be a twenty-one day peripatetic amble across the world, with multiple stopovers on the way and a carnivalesque sense of occasion — or so I gather from the misty look in Stan’s eyes as he describes it to me.) People belonging to this uniquely late twentieth-century demographic can be found everywhere around Harmondsworth — like Penny, who worked on the luggage desk at Heathrow in the same era as Stan, and — like Stan — lives directly in the area that will be razed to the ground if the new runway is built. During the seventies, Penny once told me, she used to hitch a free ride on the plane to Los Angeles every single month to get her hair done at her favourite Hollywood salon. Her and Stan’s generation was given homes, stable incomes and pensions by the new age of global mobility that made the airport swollen and prosperous — until now, when these same homes are threatened by the airport’s continued rampant expansion, and the pollutants it pumps out into the area. Then there’s another demographic in Harmondsworth, the kind of photographic negative to Stan and Penny, their counterweight. It numbers roughly a thousand, almost all men, but sometimes women and children. Most only stay in the area for a matter of weeks, but some have been stuck here for years. * It was in 1958 that air travel decisively began to supersede shipping as a mode of international passenger transport — that year, for the first time, more people travelled across the Atlantic by plane rather than by boat. Over the next decade new commercial jet routes began to spring up around the globe. By 1968 flights to and from Heathrow connected the U.K. to many of the countries which, up until very recently, had been its colonial possessions; countries like India, Sri Lanka, Nigeria, Jamaica, nations still known today — somewhat euphemistically considering the unidirectional flow of wealth that was colonialism’s defining feature — as ‘the Commonwealth’. That year, fears about new arrivals from these countries prompted a landmark piece of anti-immigration legislation put forward by Labour: the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, which removed the right of entry to the U.K. for Commonwealth citizens and imposed onerous new restrictions, forms and queues. It was during the lead-up to this bill being passed that Enoch Powell made his ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech. Harmondsworth detention centre opened in 1970 to house the new victims of this legislation. Legislation conjured the detention centre into being, and gathered people from all around the world inside it. Over the decades, legislation also expanded it and changed its purpose — by the late eighties Thatcher’s Conservative government had introduced stiff financial penalties for airlines if they allowed someone onboard without a valid visa. As a result the border was thrown outside of the U.K. into every point of departure around the world, and airlines were made into border guards. (The recent drownings in the Mediterranean are a direct result of this legal innovation, adopted by wealthier nations from the eighties onwards). The border was also drawn inwards, with an expanding immigration detention and border force bureaucracy. Police, doctors, landlords, bank clerks and university administrators joined airline staff in the effort to enforce the border. These changes meant that Harmondsworth became less of a place to hold new arrivals from Heathrow until their papers were sorted, and more a place to detain those without visas picked up anywhere around the U.K. — a conduit for deportation flights out of Heathrow. By the turn of the twenty-first century it was the largest detention centre in the U.K., and in Europe. * In the late fifties, Hannah Arendt described the situation of the millions who found themselves stateless across Europe after the First World War. “The stateless person, without right to residence and without the right to work, had of course constantly to transgress the law,” she wrote. “He was liable to jail sentences without ever committing a crime.” This was the nightmare, skilfully made tragicomic, that B. Traven’s stateless narrator faces in The Death Ship. “If you don’t belong to a country in these times,” he tells the reader, “you had better jump into the sea.” In every country he enters he is subject to officious, entitled interrogation — every police force has the authority (and inexplicable desire) to deprive him of his liberty; but none of them can give him a new passport. “I would give a second tenth of my million to find out who it is, in reality, that makes the laws about passports and immigration. I have not so far found an ordinary human being who would say anything in favour of that kind of messing up of people’s private affairs.” * She tries another tack. ‘Can you explain to me what exactly inspired you about Brian Cox?’ Amir once sent me his asylum interview, which he’s given me permission to reproduce here. The surreal questions repeatedly fired at him might have been funny, he told me, had the consequences of answering them incorrectly not been so serious. He spent 52 days in Harmondsworth Immigration Removal Centre trying to secure his refugee status, without the help of a lawyer. Much of his case hinged around proving that, as a known atheist, it was unsafe for him to return to the country where he was born (where atheism is punishable by death). Hence the strangely urgent questions from the Home Office interviewer regarding the popular TV physicist Professor Brian Cox, whose factual science programming about the origins of the universe informed Amir’s nascent atheism in the eight years he lived in the U.K., before he was arrested at dawn by immigration officials and police, and taken to Harmondsworth. * Why am I telling you all of this? Because it is, in my opinion, the stuff you need to have in mind when you look at this collection of images, scans, documents and fragments. There are no portraits, but they are about people — the traces they leave and the structures they build; and all the different layers, levels, scales, experiences and degrees of displacement, piled on top of each other, exerting pressure on them, in this one small area west of London, sandwiched between an airport and a motorway. <img width="5162" height="5162" width_o="5162" height_o="5162" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2ad4bcd10821ee10cce7133619e7070e17a07e4460c4f389316bdaac16c0dc98/2a-cloud.jpg" data-mid="41669893" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2ad4bcd10821ee10cce7133619e7070e17a07e4460c4f389316bdaac16c0dc98/2a-cloud.jpg" /> <img width="4983" height="4992" width_o="4983" height_o="4992" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/a5761dff27bf8b30f109928e82c2951e991616bfd54e9746183ea72f4178169b/2b-mountains.jpg" data-mid="41669894" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/a5761dff27bf8b30f109928e82c2951e991616bfd54e9746183ea72f4178169b/2b-mountains.jpg" /> <img width="5100" height="6688" width_o="5100" height_o="6688" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/59c0571b90c5a5d39c7e3331c1857a5435e453d9608ab70051fd460fc78d43b5/flyer-front.jpg" data-mid="41669900" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/59c0571b90c5a5d39c7e3331c1857a5435e453d9608ab70051fd460fc78d43b5/flyer-front.jpg" /> <img width="5100" height="6688" width_o="5100" height_o="6688" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/ac5cc83f15660898aec15e77cee237c890c22cfdb69be49bd6cd04aa75bc8dd4/flyer-back.jpg" data-mid="41669899" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/ac5cc83f15660898aec15e77cee237c890c22cfdb69be49bd6cd04aa75bc8dd4/flyer-back.jpg" /> <img width="5174" height="5174" width_o="5174" height_o="5174" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/5123b64fdee6f549a5b7ae14d73d0c0d06c30fc32c20dbc600d4fe62cea08e99/4a-house-interior-view-to-garden.jpg" data-mid="41669895" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/5123b64fdee6f549a5b7ae14d73d0c0d06c30fc32c20dbc600d4fe62cea08e99/4a-house-interior-view-to-garden.jpg" /> <img width="5185" height="5181" width_o="5185" height_o="5181" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/db62f4ea32036de992e7cf490eb050c4ad2559ed1b6e5f18d73b81cafa3687bb/4b-interior-house-detail.jpg" data-mid="41670000" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/db62f4ea32036de992e7cf490eb050c4ad2559ed1b6e5f18d73b81cafa3687bb/4b-interior-house-detail.jpg" /> <img width="391" height="818" width_o="391" height_o="818" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/4bee86227ce9ad2aff1acd08b08c5e1de92fa426791c1a360ebd14159c720456/Brian-Cox-questions.jpg" data-mid="41670082" border="0" data-scale="100" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/391/i/4bee86227ce9ad2aff1acd08b08c5e1de92fa426791c1a360ebd14159c720456/Brian-Cox-questions.jpg" /> <img width="445" height="818" width_o="445" height_o="818" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/da9131160f74e64adca9ebed702745bf471e35758622c5cbd9538e69867e233d/brian-cox-answers.jpg" data-mid="41670081" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/445/i/da9131160f74e64adca9ebed702745bf471e35758622c5cbd9538e69867e233d/brian-cox-answers.jpg" /> <img width="4983" height="4983" width_o="4983" height_o="4983" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/67c03bf2eb154a52617694b434f0a61f6dd5621c26e36d5ab554d07336b13708/5a-open-day-barn.jpg" data-mid="41669897" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/67c03bf2eb154a52617694b434f0a61f6dd5621c26e36d5ab554d07336b13708/5a-open-day-barn.jpg" /> <img width="4984" height="5015" width_o="4984" height_o="5015" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/914d2ac4dc68c71ce026f435e25a18948936193d2fec10e288bc2b7ea82e89c5/5b-three-timescales.jpg" data-mid="41669898" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/914d2ac4dc68c71ce026f435e25a18948936193d2fec10e288bc2b7ea82e89c5/5b-three-timescales.jpg" /> <img width="934" height="494" width_o="934" height_o="494" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/e56b0b12181d2f362dea1bbb6fb8604dd45da0962ed870f3910c59a56d5ea1c4/landfill-diagram.png" data-mid="41670230" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/934/i/e56b0b12181d2f362dea1bbb6fb8604dd45da0962ed870f3910c59a56d5ea1c4/landfill-diagram.png" /><img width="4712" height="4712" width_o="4712" height_o="4712" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dc177f2b22834b07c3a97d74d9bcb9730675b7d85ec19579fde13b1f64b1c141/perimeter.jpg" data-mid="41671202" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/dc177f2b22834b07c3a97d74d9bcb9730675b7d85ec19579fde13b1f64b1c141/perimeter.jpg" /> <img width="2594" height="2594" width_o="2594" height_o="2594" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/2b1fade88fa6362a70d24e471dee242dfa4ef627657ce7fe4af7bb9c45110a0d/3-clearing.jpg" data-mid="41671197" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/2b1fade88fa6362a70d24e471dee242dfa4ef627657ce7fe4af7bb9c45110a0d/3-clearing.jpg" /> <img width="786" height="202" width_o="786" height_o="202" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/14322b910bfa0d15a811b2c916583767e1c916485b8a8234357e4e7fb2e0ca8f/are-you-feeling-ok-question.jpg" data-mid="41670231" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/786/i/14322b910bfa0d15a811b2c916583767e1c916485b8a8234357e4e7fb2e0ca8f/are-you-feeling-ok-question.jpg" /> <img width="895" height="202" width_o="895" height_o="202" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/8546eb4e66e52408306b2cae14b70fdb5fc5a98bb99994e3860c5f56074f4bd7/okay-answer.jpg" data-mid="41670731" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/895/i/8546eb4e66e52408306b2cae14b70fdb5fc5a98bb99994e3860c5f56074f4bd7/okay-answer.jpg" /> https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Notes-on-the-history-of-a-detention-centre-2 Sat, 23 Mar 2019 09:41:57 +0000 felix bazalgette https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Notes-on-the-history-of-a-detention-centre-2 window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'UA-138127984-1'); Notes on the history of a detention centre Published in The White Review (2017) ~5000 words <img width="929" height="929" width_o="929" height_o="929" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dc629c54102cd3e9fe78ce2fd58c17b8b7fb5904a9134a1c4c4d764ebfd78a63/landscape-4.jpg" data-mid="38313871" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/929/i/dc629c54102cd3e9fe78ce2fd58c17b8b7fb5904a9134a1c4c4d764ebfd78a63/landscape-4.jpg" /> Looking back at Harmondsworth as he left, after 52 days inside, Amir was struck by how isolated the detention centre seemed. Set back from the A4, it runs along the northern boundary wall of Heathrow, separated from the road by a car park and shielded from view by a line of houses and trees. ‘The location is such that nobody can see you,’ he told me, a year after his release. ‘This is how they make you feel cut off.’ A year and a half ago I was scrolling aimlessly on the internet when I came across a simple website called ‘Detained Voices’, consisting of a series of short quotations from people who were being detained in ‘immigration removal centres’ in the U.K. Reading these disturbing fragments of testimony started me on a path that eventually put me opposite Amir in a Costa coffee shop in Stratford, as he told me about life in Harmondsworth. As I’ve learnt more about immigration detention I have become increasingly mystified by the place it occupies in our national discourse. A set of nine prison-like buildings dotted around the country, these immigration removal centres are a recent phenomenon, yet already feel like part of the national furniture. Harmondsworth, the first purpose-built immigration detention centre in the U.K., was constructed in 1970 on the fringes of Heathrow, the country’s largest airport. It had a capacity of 44. Over the eighties and nineties more and more facilities popped up around the country, until a burst of building under New Labour after the millennium brought the total number of places in these centres to just over 4,000 today. I became obsessed with the history of detention and with the building of Harmondsworth itself. Rebuilt and expanded in 2001, it is now the largest detention centre in Europe. I know which architectural practice designed the building (HLM Architects), who manufactured the heavy iron security doors (Lloyd Worrel Ironmongery), how much the retrofitted sprinkler system cost (£17 million) and who provided the toilets lacking in ligature points (The Plumb Centre). I learnt what ligature points are. I learnt about the seven people who have died in Harmondsworth, and the three more who died shortly after being released. I also learnt how detention, since its very inception, has been roundly condemned in areas that are meant to represent public life in Britain: in the Commons, in the Lords, in the papers (from The Telegraph, to The Sunday Times, to the Guardian); in massive official reviews and regular reports; by filmmakers, charities, activists and campaigners; by Conservatives and Ed Miliband’s Labour party, whose manifesto pledged to put an end to it if they were elected in 2015. Yet despite all this the practice of detaining immigrants remains curiously under-examined, on the edge of the country’s political consciousness, an unpleasant yet apparently unavoidable phenomenon. This is not just a matter of a lack of education, a lack of knowledge about the reality of detention centres. Thanks to work by and with people who have experienced detention, details are now accessible enough for anyone who wants to type a phrase into Google. Regular protests inside and outside detention centres, the constant stream of abuse allegations that flow out of the women’s facility Yarl’s Wood, and suicides and deaths are reported on. But the reports always fail to gain traction in wider society and wider media, and detention continues apace. As a result I’ve come to think that this lacuna – where there should be moral outrage, the continuation of detention despite its great expense, inefficiency and cruelty – is a political phenomenon that goes to the heart of how the U.K. sees itself and its history, and, worryingly, where it might be going. Accordingly this essay is largely not about life in detention, but rather about how detention happened and what it might mean. I’ll never know what it is like to be taken from my home one morning by the U.K. Border Agency and imprisoned without trial, but I do know what it is like to be part of a society that deems this violence both acceptable and normal. Speaking to Amir, who now campaigns with the group Freed Voices, made up of people who have been through detention, was a necessary step towards understanding this violence, and the effects it has on those it targets. A week before he spoke to me, Amir had passed the house in which he had been living when the immigration officials came for him a year ago. He shook with fear as they battered on the door at six in the morning, so hard that he thought they were going to break it. This was the beginning of his journey out of the society in which he had spent the last eight and a half years. Amir described to me with forensic detail the small indignities that announced his new situation. After the raid he was taken to a tiny windowless police cell, the officer saying ‘this is your castle.’ When his possessions were being logged, an officer laughed at the fact he had a Waitrose card, as though someone like him couldn’t, and later, buying food, a member of staff at the detention centre shop threw him his chocolate bar ‘like you’d throw a bone to a dog’. But he also remembered the policewoman who gave him books to read and a pen so he could write down his thoughts, and the man who sat with him for almost an hour in the first detention centre he was sent to, near Gatwick, when he had retreated into silence and started refusing his meals. This officer talked him into fighting his case. He remembers and repeats the names of these two people: Margaret and Octavian. The hostile attitude of staff seemed so systematic that, despite generous allowances for the conditions under which they were working, Amir came to believe that it was instilled by their training. The Home Office, he suggested, ‘train staff not to show any kind of courtesy, any kind of empathy, sympathy or emotion.’ He thought their abiding attitude was that ‘these people who are inside [Harmondsworth], are less human than you. That’s why you are in those white uniforms and they are at your disposal.’ This all tied into what Amir saw as the purpose of detention: to break you, to separate you from British society and force you to give up your claim to a share in it. In Harmondsworth they supplied a games console, but Amir never played it. They also supplied table tennis, a pool table, movies, a gym, but Amir regarded all these things as dangerous temptations, as part of the ‘trap’ of detention. He watched other people fall into that trap, ‘living there like it’s their home, accepting that reality.’ He told me that he wasn’t there to watch movies, to play table tennis or video games, to read books – for him these things were ‘false entertainments’, designed to sap your energy in a hostile environment. If you become absorbed in these distractions then ‘slowly,’ he told me, ‘you lose your interest in your real case, in your real objective, and you start accepting those false things, and you start accepting whatever the Home Office thinks is true.’ That moment of defeat is when they serve you with your documents, and put you on a plane. For Amir detention was nothing to do with settling the truth of his claim to asylum – that could have been done without imprisoning him. Instead it felt like a more fundamental fight about what constituted reality, with the Home Office not only imposing their version of it upon him but also more insidiously using the fraught environment of Harmondsworth to break his resistance. There is more than one suicide attempt each day across the immigration estate, and Harmondsworth, regarded by many as the last stop before deportation, has seen the most suicide attempts of any detention centre. * The year that Amir was detained was the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, celebrated in the unthreatening bracket of British ‘Heritage and Culture’ by a Conservative government unwilling to look at the small print. One of King John’s gifts to his subjects was the agreement, in article 29, that ‘No free man may be arrest- ed, imprisoned, dispossessed of his goods, or placed outside the law or molested in any way; we will not place our hands on him nor will have others place their hands on him, except after a legal judgement by his peers according to the law of the realm.’ The idea came to be known as Habeas Corpus, later restated by parliament in 1679 as the notion that a person (their physical body) had to be present at a trial to justify detention. Yet in 2015, 30,000 people in the United Kingdom were deprived of their liberty without trial and without a time limit. The clue to how this happened might lie in the formulation ‘free man’ and how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries certain non-residents were gradually removed from that category as the British Empire was dismantled and fear of postcolonial migration grew. In 1890 W.F. Craies could confidently write that ‘the Crown has no prerogative to interfere with the free ingress or exit of any alien friend ... any attempt at such interference can be stopped by Habeas Corpus or action of false imprisonment.’ Yet these ideas gradually fell out of favour. ‘Aliens came to be seen as set apart,’ writes the academic Daniel Wilsher, ‘a group to be politically and administratively managed, not judicially protected.’ By 1968 the Commonwealth Immigrants Act had wiped away the traditional legal notion that all citizens of the British Empire were equal subjects who there- fore had the right to settle in Britain, to work and to vote. It was a landmark in anti-immigration legislation, removing the right of free entry for British citizens from the Commonwealth and imposing long queues and restrictions upon entry. Harmondsworth was built in 1970, to house the growing number of people who ran afoul of these new laws while they tried to appeal their status. ‘It is of the essence of the Immigration Act that people will be discriminated against on the grounds of race and nationality and it is the function of certain officials to ensure that the discrimination is effective,’ a bluntly honest Home Office lawyer told the Guardian in 1980, after another act was passed, finally eliminating what remained of the rights of Commonwealth citizens to settle in the U.K., giving police the power to stop and search and ask for immigration documents. The border began to turn inwards. This run of anti-immigration legislation eventually reached its peak in the Nationality Act of 1981, which defined British citizenship in opposition to all who didn’t have a family link to someone born in the United Kingdom. Many saw this as a pointedly racial manoeuvre, aimed at finally excluding all former subjects of the Empire from settling in Britain, people who had previously held British passports but were now considered undesirable aliens. On hearing of the new Act, Enoch Powell triumphantly announced that ‘from the humiliation of having no nation to which we distinctively belong, the people of the United Kingdom are now setting themselves free.’ A legal scholar, David Dixon, described it at the time as ‘constitutionalising racism’. The climate was so ugly that it prompted Salman Rushdie to write an extraordinary essay entitled ‘The New Empire within Britain’, published in 1982, in which he directly addressed white readers, telling them that the country was ‘undergoing a critical phase of its post-colonial period, and this crisis is not simply economic or political. It’s a crisis of the whole culture, of society’s entire sense of itself.’ Rushdie contended that the racist judgements underpinning the empire had been turned inwards and imposed on the non-white people of Britain. ‘British thought, British society, has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism,’ he wrote. ‘It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends.’ * In 1970 a young Italian living in Rome, Giorgio Agamben, wrote a letter to Hannah Arendt. Agamben was 28 years old, and had recently discovered Arendt’s writings, which had given him what he called a ‘decisive experience.’ He enclosed with the letter an essay for Arendt to read, called ‘On the Limits of Violence’, with the misspelled post-script that ‘I should have been unable to wright [it] without the guide of your books.’ The essay begins by outlining the Ancient Greek conception of the polis, ‘a way of life founded on the word, and not on violence.’ Agamben argues that the Greeks believed language to be non-violent, citing that in the ancient world there were no penalties for lying, and that the essential characteristic of political life was ‘peitharkhia, the power of persuasion’ – a belief that truth, in and of itself, could exert persuasive power in the human mind. If something was truthful, Agamben argued, the Greeks thought it would naturally have the power to persuade – and vice versa. He contrasts this trust in language and politics with ‘the modern age,’ which he accuses of ‘enact- ing a calculated plot to introduce violence into language itself.’ This he identifies as ‘the only widespread form of violence that our society can claim to have invented: propaganda’. Agamben’s writings have underpinned a surge of academic writing on detention centres in recent years. He put forward a number of concepts that built on Arendt’s work, and has sought to explain how democratic governments create ‘states of exception’, areas which are paradoxically legislated to be outside the law. He chooses the figure of ‘the camp’, rooted in a study of Auschwitz, to elaborate on how such spaces develop and how ‘anything is possible’ within them. Agamben’s theories are both generalising and seductive, not least because he is prone to dizzyingly provocative notions. These include that we are faced by a ‘camp virtually every time that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crimes committed in it and regard- less of the denomination and specific topography it might have’. He implicitly asks us to look at Harmondsworth and trace a connection between it and the worst crimes of the twentieth century, because both are ‘space[s] in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of law is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not depend on the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that act temporarily as sovereign.’ * There are now nine large detention centres and a handful of smaller facilities around ports and airports, referred to as ‘short term holding facilities’. Most of this growth came under New Labour, who opened seven new centres between 2000 and 2009, alongside expanding and renovating Harmondsworth. The U.K. detains foreign nationals who have served their prison sentences and await deportation, people who have gone against the terms of their visa or lack one altogether, and people whose asylum claims have been rejected. This country has one of the largest detention populations in Europe, and Harmondsworth is the largest detention centre in Europe, with a capacity of 615. The building is four stories high and occupies a space of about 20,000 square metres. It is large and bland and imposing. A government report a decade ago de- scribed it as ‘impressive and powerful.’ If British national identity has a concrete, architectural form, this might be it. Like the Nationality Act of 1981, it is built on the power to exclude. Its surroundings speak of the changes that British society has undergone in recent decades. To the northeast are the gleaming white Ballardian headquarters of British Airways, surrounded by rolling landscaped forms that look computer rendered. The headquarters are shielded from the detention centre by a small waterway and a thick line of trees. Directly to the north is a BT warehouse – the vans need to drive down a road lined with razor wire between Harmondsworth and Colnbrook, its sister facility, in order to get there. BA was privatised in 1987, while BT was privatised in 1984. Even the Road Research Laboratory, the government transport organisation on whose land Harmondsworth was built, was privatised in 1996. Harmondsworth detention centre has always been private. In the 1960s, it was the responsibility of airlines to detain passengers who were refused entry to the U.K. At Heathrow, Securicor were already employed to do this, so their services were ex- tended to the new centre outside the walls of the airport. The Home Office justified the decision by saying that ‘the use of police to control people who were not criminals would be too oppressive and because it was felt that immigration officers, who are civil servants, could not be asked to perform such tasks.’ The Home Office seem un- sure of, or unwilling to think about, the violence of such detention. Those in detention experience it as punitive – in testimonies it is regularly compared to prison – but the Home Office wanted to define the buildings as mere warehouses, like the industrial units that often surround them, holding centres for stuff that is on its way out. To this end they changed the name from detention centre to ‘Immigration Removal Centre’, nominally yoking it to the deportation process of which it was supposed to be a part, though in fact roughly half the people put into detention are eventually released back into the U.K. (Capturing, imprisoning and then releasing these innocent people, as happened to Amir, costs an estimated £76 million a year.) Initially framed as an administrative measure to ensure deportation, rather than a punishment, the violence of detention was overlooked and obscured, going right down to the design of the buildings, which, though imposing on the outside, it was hoped would have interiors that reflected a ‘relaxed, non-institutional aesthetic’, according to the architectural firm who constructed Harmondsworth. Over time, a number of riots in the new detention centres have exposed this as a mismatch between design and purpose. In moments of high tension, and amid com- plaints of mistreatment, detainees in Harmondsworth and Yarl’s Wood have been able to break their way out of their cells, smashing straight through the cheap plaster- board the walls were made of. Three months after opening, half of Yarl’s Wood burnt down, while Harmondsworth has been rebuilt three times in the past 15 years as a re- sult of what the government calls, with the British institutional talent for euphemism, ‘disturbances’. Later centres, like Colnbrook, which lies next to Harmondsworth, have learnt from these ‘disturbances’ and built their cells out of concrete, adapting the buildings more closely towards the harsh reality of their function. * In recent years there’s been a pushback against Agamben’s ideas, led by academics like Mary Bosworth and Alison Mountz, who have performed lengthy and in-depth ethnographic research in detention centres. They find his theories too general, unable to capture the intimate textures of exclusion that are produced in detention centres, too quick to obscure the agency of those who are presented as helpless victims of sov- ereign power. They can’t, for example, take account of Amir’s feeling that he engaged in battle with the Home Office, and won. Of the Home Office official who visited him on his first night and told him he should not claim asylum because he would be rejected, he says, ‘I wanted to prove that idiot wrong. And I proved him wrong.’ Harmondsworth isn’t the unassailable fortress of sovereign power that it projects itself to be – it can be (and has been) damaged, even destroyed by the people it was built to control. What I instead find myself most drawn to in the constellation of Agamben’s work that surrounds detention centres is that early letter to Arendt, and its attempts to under- stand exactly how language, violence and politics are intertwined. For those involved in the rapid expansion of the detention system under the New Labour government, the imprisonment of thousands of people without trial and without a time limit was not a legal or a moral question but one of communication. We know this because of letters published in a 2004 report about the Yarl’s Wood fire. On 10 March, 2000, one senior civil servant, Sir David Omand, wrote to another, Sir Richard Wilson: You will see in particular that we are looking urgently at the Home Secretary’s requirement at expansion of the detention estate to 4,000 places. We believe that this would, if feasible, have a significant deterrent effect. [...] Detention is a key element in effective enforcement and it contributes to the impression potential asylum seekers have of the U.K. ... We also believe that up to a further 1,500 places would significantly enhance the deterrent effect for new asylum seekers. A month later the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, wrote to the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, justifying any expenditure on the detention estate’s expansion on the grounds that it would ‘send a strong message’. It was as though detention had be- come divorced from moral reality and had become simply a signal – the more people detained, the more powerful the signal. This is not just introducing violence into language, as the young Agamben warned, this is using violence as a language. It’s worth thinking about who those civil servants and politicians thought they were speaking to with that violence, beyond the apparent global audience of potential asylum seekers. At the time these decisions were being made the department in question was in the media almost daily. ‘The coverage was very critical,’ according to the report. Our capacity to imprison without trial was enlarged because it would send a message, a threatening one to those abroad seeking sanctuary and an emboldening one to those at home seeking enemies. Time and time again this same deterrent argument is used to prevent more humane treatment of refugees and migrants, whether it is then-Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond arguing against stopping people drowning in the Mediterranean or Home Secretary Amber Rudd recently suspending the Dubs amendment, which gave 350 unaccompanied children refuge in the United Kingdom before it was deemed to have run its course (there are currently an estimated 13 million children displaced by conflict around the world). Using inhumanity as a deterrent is clearly a short-sighted way to deal with a vast movement of people. These arguments are made by politicians because there is assumed to be a receptive audience for them, not because they are sensible or right. This is the standard of political discourse at the moment, and it is the barren ground into which campaigners and journalists try to plant a seed of resistance towards immigration detention and the constellation of racist policies of which it forms a substantial part. Like Agamben’s Ancient Greeks, we still cling to the idea in politics that if something is true it will be inherently persuasive – if something bad is exposed to society, it will be fixed. But this also, obviously, depends in the first place on the values of the society in question. The government seems confident of the anti-immigrant fervour in this country, and, according to the lawyer Frances Webber, has moved further than any other European country in requiring average citizens to enforce the ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants – ‘staff in hospitals, local authorities, universities and colleges, prospective employers, bank staff and landlords, as well as road haulage contractors, train, airline and shipping operators,’ have all now become responsible for checking and reporting the immigration status of those they encounter. As long ago as 1987 the Conservative MP Jeremy Hanley complained that prison-like detention centres were unsuitable for people who, ‘after all, have not been convicted of any crime’. Yet years of concerted effort to forge a link between crime and immigration during the early 2000s – a phenomenon that academics have even formulated an ugly word for, ‘crimmigration’ – have allowed comments like this, by the Conservative minister Mims Davies in 2015, to become commonplace in defence of immigration detention – ‘A state cannot allow those who break the law to continue to live as though they have not done so. The rule of law depends on us upholding it appropriately.’ The sledgehammer irony was utterly lost on Davies, who presents detention as some kind of essential arm of the moral authority of the state and its laws, rather than an illegal innovation that threatens to fatally undermine them. * As January slipped into February this year, like many other listlessly outraged people I compulsively read the endless news reports about the executive order that President Donald Trump signed, banning entry to the U.S. from certain countries. What struck me in reading many of these reports were the accounts people gave to journalists as they, stranded in different parts of the world or at home in the U.S., searched for themselves in the language of the executive order, trying to work out if it applied to them, trying to work out if an aspect of their identity had taken on a sudden, dangerous legal dimension, on the heels of a dangerous political dimension which had been taking shape for quite some time. The scenes made me recall, involuntarily, a similar one of a young Austrian look- ing over recently published laws in a coffee house in Vienna in 1935. ‘I needed only to skim them and already I could perceive that they applied to me,’ wrote Jean Amery, decades later. ‘After I had read the Nuremberg Laws I was no more Jewish than a half hour before. My features had not become more Mediterranean Semitic, my frame of reference had not suddenly been filled by magic power with Hebrew allusions, the Christmas tree had not wondrously transformed itself in to the seven-armed candelabra.’ And yet ‘society ... had just made me formally and beyond any question a Jew, or rather it had given a new dimension to what I had already known earlier, but which at the time was of no great consequence to me, namely, that I was a Jew.’ Immediately after the U.S. election there was a largely white, male line of commentary arguing that something called ‘identity politics’ was to blame, that Hillary Clinton had spent too much time and energy specifically appealing to non-white, non-male people. In this mindset ‘identity politics’ is, bizarrely, the cause of racism rather than a reaction to it. Of course the politics of identity has been practiced consistently and relentlessly by Western states for a long time – indeed different European and American political cultures, from the rise of nationalism and colonialism in the eighteenth century, have always taken the political potential of identity very seriously, as Amery experienced. Immigration detention is part of this lineage of state identity politics, states attempting to define themselves against others based on a narrow, racialised under- standing of identity. It arose in Britain during a time of great post-colonial anxiety, and it’s no coincidence that it has expanded during the years after 9/11, a political period that has seen a worryingly casual attitude towards Islamophobia – culminating in the specific tone of the Brexit debate, and Trump. To detain people in this way, in a manner that would usually be expected to attract great scandal, you need to create a category of detainable person. As evidenced from the detention population, this category is overwhelmingly non-white, and from countries tied to Britain’s colonial past. There’s no reason why that category could not also generously expand, as it has done before. For now the outlook isn’t good. Theresa May has a poor record on detention, both in the Home Office and as prime minister. In March, in a half empty side room at the Houses of Parliament, a handful of cross party MPs attempted to hold Minister for Immigration Robert Goodwill to account. The most vocal anti-detention MPs, across all parties, tend to be those with detention centres in their constituencies – due to their regular contact with people in detention, and knowledge of their stories, they can’t ignore the reality of it. Those in the room heard many of these stories, along with news that the average time of detention was actually lengthening, that progress on abolishing the detention of pregnant women and children was still stalling, and that vulnerable people and those with mental health conditions continued to suffer in the system. As for Amir, the happy ending is also yet to come. He speaks excellent English, but still he worries that it won’t be enough to get him the kind of job he deserves, that he’s studying for, in an office rather than going door to door with surveys. He’s always on temporary contracts that only last a month or two, always looking for more work. On top of that the political climate worries him – he won’t feel safe in his status until he’s granted permanent residency in a few years. Until then, even though he’s been confirmed as a refugee, he lives in fear that the decision might somehow be reversed and he could end up in detention again or, worse, deported. Still, despite his present worries he continues to remember that day, when he looked back at Harmondsworth, from the outside, as one of the happiest in his life. The way he describes it to me he was almost delirious. He had only ever seen the surrounding area briefly through the windows of a transport van, at night, and had no idea how to get home. He got on the wrong bus, which took him up a side road, where the detention centre suddenly and unexpectedly becomes visible in full profile across an expansive green field. It was a light summer evening, and getting out and looking at the buildings, waiting for a bus to take him back the other way, he imagined all the people he knew still in there, still stuck in their rooms, still under the threat of deportation, and he told me over his coffee that he feels guilty now because in that moment he didn’t even feel sad for them, he just felt happy he wasn’t in there any more. ‘I never thought I would enjoy waiting for the bus,’ he told me, smiling. When he got back home to Walthamstow, his friends were there waiting for him. https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Earl-William Sat, 23 Mar 2019 09:57:07 +0000 felix bazalgette https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Earl-William window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || []; function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);} gtag('js', new Date()); gtag('config', 'UA-138127984-1'); Earl William Published in The New Internationalist&nbsp;(2018) ~5000 words <img width="1068" height="1508" width_o="1068" height_o="1508" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0b89c9e02f962a301084bfa60fa50475b138721334fdab5d12f1349bb778832c/Screen-Shot-2018-12-17-at-16.10.04.png" data-mid="38314033" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0b89c9e02f962a301084bfa60fa50475b138721334fdab5d12f1349bb778832c/Screen-Shot-2018-12-17-at-16.10.04.png" /> There are trainspotters and plane-spotters, so it's no surprise that there are also people who spend their days obsessed with passenger ferries. For the community of people obsessed with ferries, specifically roll-on roll-off ferries of the 1960s and 1970s, the Earl William is relatively unremarkable. The ship was built in 1964 in Norway and bought by the British Railways Board in 1976 to sail between the Channel Islands and Portsmouth, under the nationalized Sealink brand. In 1984, with privatization in full swing, Sealink was sold to Sea Containers, a sprawling company belonging to the charismatic US entrepreneur James Sherwood, owner of the Orient Express, close acquaintance of the prime minister and a Conservative donor. The state livery was taken off the Earl William’s funnel, though the new branding – ‘Sealink British Ferries’ – still projected the image of a stirring national industry. Sea Containers, for tax purposes, was registered in Bermuda. I became interested in the Earl William not because it was one of three revolutionary ‘Thoreson Viking’ roll-on roll-off ferries built in the 1960s, nor because of its spectacular end: in 2011, repurposed as a floating hotel in Trinidad and Tobago, it hit an oil-drilling vessel off the coast of Venezuela while being towed for repairs, and sank without a trace after causing $100-million worth of damage. What drew me to the Earl William was its use over the summer of 1987 as a floating immigration detention centre moored at the port of Harwich, Essex, holding people from Ethiopia, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, Uganda, the Seychelles and Nigeria, and – its largest constituency – 60 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. It was the first time the UK had ever used a ship as a migrant detention centre and, once everyone was on board, it was the largest in the country. * In 1983, almost 200,000 Tamil refugees fled Sri Lanka, amid pogroms and the violent rhetoric of politicians from the Sinhalese majority. They presented Tamils, many of whom had roots in southern India, as foreign usurpers. Though there had been a sizeable Tamil population in Sri Lanka since at least the third century BCE, in the 19th and 20th centuries a large number came to the island from southern India to work on tea and coffee plantations – the island came under British rule in 1833 and remained a colonial possession until 1948. During this period, the British engineered preferential access to employment and education for the Tamils over the Sinhalese. By the 1940s, roughly 60 per cent of civil-service jobs were held by Tamils, who made up around 15 per cent of the population. When Ceylon became the independent nation of Sri Lanka in 1948 and the Sinhalese majority took over, Tamils became the focus of popular resentment for their preferential treatment by the British. The first anti-Tamil riot took place in 1956 – the Gal Oya massacre – in which over 150 were killed. Further pogroms followed in 1958, 1977 and then in 1983, when an estimated 4,000 people were killed and 150,000 made homeless in what became known as ‘Black July’, commemorated every year among the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. I met Mr Jana, director of the Tamil Welfare Association in Newham, east London, to learn more about what it was like to seek refuge from Sri Lanka in the 1980s. He took me to an upstairs room for a chat in the association’s office, its walls painted muted orange, after a long day helping Tamils in the UK deal with immigration authorities, domestic violence, racism and the benefits system. Mr Jana and a friend of his caught a plane out of Sri Lanka in 1985. That year the British government had imposed entry restrictions on Sri Lankans – the first time anyone from any of the ex-colonial Commonwealth countries had needed a visa to visit the UK. Despite the well-reported repression of Tamils, Margaret Thatcher visited Sri Lanka in April 1985 to meet the president, and the UK continued to provide training for the Sinhalese-majority army and sell weapons to the government. In the wake of ‘Black July’ two years earlier President Jayawardene had said, ‘We cannot think of [the Tamils], not about their lives or their opinion... Really, if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people will be happy.’ Many British newspapers followed the anti-Tamil line, as a selection of headlines from May 1985 shows – Daily Express: ‘We will stop the Tamil “flood” vows Britain.’ Daily Mail: ‘Tamils facing a closed door.’ And Daily Mirror, referring to the Home Secretary at the time, Leon Brittan, with a bit of a tongue-twister: ‘No open door. Brittan warning race war runaways.’ At that time, as domestic panic was being stoked, only around 2,500 Tamils had applied for asylum in the UK, compared with 19,000 in France, 20,000 in Germany and over 100,000 in India. Mr Jana arrived at Heathrow Terminal 3 in the midst of this hostile mood, with a dozen other Tamils. Some had the address of friends and family who would host them and so were allowed into the country. Mr Jana had no address to give, so he was detained along with eight others, first at Harmondsworth detention centre, next to Heathrow, and then at Ashford Remand Centre in Hounslow, west London. ‘I spent around 26 days there,’ he told me, ‘then slowly Tamil refugees started to be removed from the detention centres back to Sri Lanka.’ Just days before a group of Tamils were due to be deported, Jana managed to speak to the secretary of Jeremy Corbyn MP, who intervened on their behalf; a discussion in parliament followed, it was covered in the media and the Home Office decided against the removal of the Tamils held in detention, Mr Jana among them. ‘About 30 people were released, and we ended up living in east London.’ From a one-bedroom flat shared by eight people, Mr Jana and his friends set up the organization that would become the Tamil Welfare Association in Newham (TWAN). They would make the journey up to Terminal 3 on a daily basis to welcome new arrivals and advocate on their behalf. ‘We were new in the country,’ says Mr Jana, ‘but I’d been here longer than others, studied the Underground map and learnt a bit of English.’ What was it like arriving in the mid-1980s as a refugee from Sri Lanka? Mr Jana breaks it down for me: support from the Tamil community and aggression from the general public. ‘They were in a mind-set of “these people are bogus, or bogus refugees”,’ he says. The next few years were tough. ‘Police started to harass us… And also other white people tried to call us names.’ There was plenty of racist violence in Newham, including, in November 1986, a firebomb pushed through a letterbox on nearby Burgess Road, which killed three Tamil refugees. They had no family in the country so TWAN organized the funeral. Mr Jana takes out a file and shows me pictures of the coffins laid out in a hall. It was in 1987, almost two years into his gruelling work with TWAN, when Mr Jana’s story intersected with that of the Earl William ferry. * The idea of keeping asylum-seekers imprisoned on a ship was first proposed by a civil servant called TC Platt. He had heard of a similar approach in Denmark, where the authorities worked with the Red Cross to keep almost 900 asylum seekers on converted ferries and container ships in Copenhagen harbour. ‘There would obviously be a great deal of parliamentary, media, community and other external interest,’ he wrote cautiously, as he sounded out the idea to ministers in a January 1987 memo. ‘There would be references to a “prison ship”…’ The then-Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, looked over details of the Earl William and was gratified to find that it was ‘unlikely to appear too luxurious or too spartan’. For many, the relatively recent institution of immigration detention was hazily thought of as a punishment, meaning luxury was inappropriate and might attract hostile headlines. Mr Platt was not wrong about media interest. That summer the detention ship proved extremely controversial and was regularly reported on by national and local papers. It was routinely called a prison ship and condemned stridently by leftwing groups and papers, and cautiously by rightwing broadsheets. The Daily Mail took a predictable line, fuming that the newly refurbished Earl William was certainly not spartan enough for the detainees, whom they labelled ‘gatecrashers in cushy berths’. When I remind Mr Jana of the Daily Mail piece, he expresses three decades of accumulated weariness with a shrug: ‘We always have problems with these people.’ The first detainees came on board the Earl William in early May. Some were part of a group of 64 Tamils, including 24 women and 9 children, whom the government had tried unsuccessfully to deport en masse earlier that year. Mr Jana and his colleagues, with a canny awareness of what would make headlines, had organized what became known as the ‘trousers down’ protest, after Tamils stripped off on the Heathrow runway as they were being forced to board a plane back to Sri Lanka. The flight was delayed long enough for news of a High Court injunction staying the deportation to arrive. The Sri Lankan High Commission in London weighed in, sinisterly playing on British prejudices to try to prevent the Tamils getting asylum: ‘They are coming here more than anything else for financial gain,’ the spokesperson told the BBC. ‘If they are allowed to stay they are given all the social security benefits, they can send their children to school and will be housed free.’ In reality, many in the group of Tamils remained in immigration detention, eventually being moved together onto the Earl William. Others on the boat had been in immigration detention for more than a year before arriving. It was, by all accounts, a stifling and surreal place. Posters left over from the ship’s previous incarnation as a holiday boat still offered discounted ferry rides to Holland to see the tulips. Muslim detainees prayed in a long, narrow former duty-free shop which had been cleared of cigarettes and alcohol. The downstairs car deck was repurposed into a football pitch and sealed packages of airline food were delivered every 10 days by van: sweet and sour pork, spaghetti Bolognese, boeuf bourguignon, fish or meat curry. All detainees were locked out of their cabins between 7am and 8pm. With access to the open-air decks restricted because of the suicide risk, most people spent their days in one of the ship’s four lounges, sitting in the ‘aircraft style seating’ watching videos. Hunger-striking Tamils, protesting against their detention, lay around ‘like dead men staring into space and refusing to budge’, according to one security guard. Their banner, hung over the side of the ship, read: ‘British people! Don’t let us die.’ ‘We hate this place,’ 18-year-old Sugirithni Navaratnam told a journalist from The Independent. ‘Harmondsworth [detention centre] felt safer. There are too many men here.’ There were eight women on board, including a 15-year-old girl. No sanitary towels were provided for the first two months of their stay (‘If they had mentioned them, they would have been provided,’ the Home Office said, when asked for comment) and there was no separate space for women. ‘This forces us into the company of the boys,’ said Sugirithni. ‘We are frightened.’ Onlookers studied the ferry from the Harwich quay with curiosity and apprehension. ‘Nobody wanted the nuclear waste dumps and nobody wants this,’ a local resident told a reporter, referring to a failed government attempt to bury radioactive waste in Essex. As the summer wore on, detainees became more and more frustrated. ‘We are desperate to get off the ship,’ said one 27-year-old Tamil. ‘We cannot understand why we are being held here. When are they going to make a decision?’ * Ever since immigration detention began formally in Britain with the opening of the first centre in 1970 at Harmondsworth, it has always been a tortuous process. Even today the UK is one of the only countries in Europe that does not have a set time limit on how long someone can be held in detention, and the decision to detain is not taken in front of a court, as per the ancient laws of Habeas Corpus, but by low-level officials in an obscure and inefficient bureaucracy. Anyone deemed not to be a British citizen can be taken from their home in a raid under immigration powers and held for as long as the system wants – the longest stints have been up to five years. Since the days of the Earl William the system has expanded dramatically. In July 1987, the ship’s capacity of 120 detainees made it the largest detention centre in the country. Today it would be dwarfed by the facilities next to Heathrow: Harmondsworth – now expanded to be the biggest purpose-built detention centre in Europe – and Colnbrook, which together can hold over 1,000 people. There are roughly another 2,000 detention places around the country spread across seven smaller facilities, as well as holding cells at air- and seaports. I used to be a volunteer visitor to immigration detention centres for a charity, going every couple of weeks to meet with people detained at Harmondsworth. After the long journey out west to Heathrow, at the end of the London Underground’s Piccadilly Line, I would catch a bus round the north perimeter of the airport. As I walked up Bath Road, the vast squat detention centre hove into view. The building always surprised me. What combination of factors, which different spans of human effort had folded the barbed wire into place, laid the bricks, plugged in the CCTV cameras, set up the staff rotas, ordered the chairs for the visitor centre – all these actions, in aggregate, seemed baffling. What forces had made them seem right, rational, necessary? For this reason I’m interested in the forces that propelled the Earl William into Parkeston Quay in the spring of 1987, beyond its diesel engine. At this time immigration detention was a relatively new phenomenon. How does something like the Earl William detention ship happen? There are the simple accidents of history, the contingent channels by which an idea flows around the world, the quotidian pressures suffered by bureaucrats – TC Platt sees a report about the Danish policy and thinks it will do here: prisons are overcrowded and the initial plan to house migrants at the old Naval College in Greenwich has fallen through. But there were also economic, political and historical forces at work. Sea Containers – the private company that had bought Sealink, and the Earl William, from the government – was struggling. With its owner a personal friend of the Conservative Party, and the political impetus not to see a newly privatized service collapse only a few years in, the rental of the Earl William from the company at £2,500 ($3,290) a day (over £7,000 – $9,200 – in today’s money) would have made perfect sense among those charged with waving the decision through. ‘The deal has provided Sealink with a welcome financial fillip at a difficult time for it and its parent company, Sea Containers Limited of Bermuda,’ noted The Guardian archly that June. Perhaps the repurposed Earl William made sense as part of a newly muscular, neoliberal attitude towards ethics. ‘It is a business arrangement and we are here to make money,’ a Sealink representative told the papers bluntly after criticism. The National Union of Seamen had at first refused to crew the ship, maintaining that its ‘members are seafarers and… do not wish to be involved in any policing exercise’ – eventually their members disobeyed them and signed up for the contracts with Sealink, at a time when work was drying up as other ferries were sold or put out of service, amid a stubbornly high unemployment rate. Another way to understand the Earl William, though, is as a small but significant episode in the ongoing history of post-colonial Britain. These people found themselves imprisoned on a boat, in part because they had the misfortune to arrive in the UK after a wave of legislation that had gradually reduced the rights of Commonwealth citizens. The latest of these was the decision, in 1985, to lay visa restrictions on a Commonwealth country, Sri Lanka, for the first time. ‘It was only with great reluctance that I decided that it was necessary to impose a visa requirement on a fellow Commonwealth country,’ said the Home Secretary. ‘The need for it will be kept under review and I hope that it can be lifted in due course.’ Today almost half of Commonwealth countries need visas to enter the UK; the rest need to get an ‘entry certificate’ before they go, and a visa for stays longer than six months. * The hedging of the rights of Commonwealth citizens – the vast majority of whom are people from countries that had formerly been colonized by the UK – began in the 1960s. From 1948, the year that Ceylon became the independent Commonwealth nation of Sri Lanka, and the passing of the British Nationality Act, anyone from a previously colonized country had the status of ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’, which meant they could travel to and settle in the UK, and, like all other British citizens, they were immune to deportation powers. By 1962 there were fears about post-colonial migration following the arrival of what is now called the ‘Windrush Generation’ – migrants from the West Indies encouraged to come to the UK after the Second World War to fill labour shortages, who first arrived on the HMT Empire Windrush. That year the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed, allowing deportation of Commonwealth citizens for the first time and introducing a system of work vouchers for new arrivals. ‘We want to reduce to the absolute minimum the power of deportation of Commonwealth citizens,’ said the Labour MP James MacColl ruefully at the time. ‘It is profoundly distasteful.’ Yet more acts were passed in 1968 and 1971. ‘In terms of British nationality law,’ wrote the Sri Lankan British writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan in 1976, summing up the recent course of legislation, ‘this would mean that a British citizen was not completely a British citizen when he was a black British citizen.’ This process culminated with the British Nationality Act in 1981, which defined British citizenship in terms of ‘family links’ to the United Kingdom, definitively re-orientating citizenship rights away from most of those who had been imperial subjects, such as the Sri Lankan Tamils, and towards an implicitly racialized conception of Britishness. For Conservatives this was a chance to pivot away from the less appealing aspects of Britain’s colonial legacy; as Timothy Raison MP declared at the Conservative party conference in 1980: ‘We have got finally to dispose of the lingering notion that Britain is somehow a haven for all those whose countries we once ruled.’ For many the Act represented a dangerous new chapter in post-colonial amnesia, ‘expressly designed to deprive black and Asian Britons of their citizenship rights’, as Salman Rushdie wrote in 1982. David Dixon, a legal academic writing at the time, believed that ‘the racism spawned by imperialism is now used to evade its consequences’. Above all, Dixon warned, ‘the creation of citizenship must not be based on converting control upon people’s movements into constitutional forms’. It’s a measure of how far we’ve come that Dixon’s words take a little while to untangle today, so accustomed are we to citizenship being tied up with an all-pervasive border regime. Thanks to the 1981 Act, and a number of laws passed since, the citizenship of someone who has immigrated to Britain carries far fewer protections than the citizenship of someone who was born here. If you can prove that you were born in the UK to British parents, you can’t be deported, you can’t be imprisoned without trial and you can’t have your citizenship stripped from you. If, on the other hand, you’re a naturalized citizen, or have dual nationality, or seem to someone at the Home Office like you’re not a citizen, you are vulnerable to all these abuses. Back in 1987 many struggled to make sense of immigration detention, especially when it came in such a patently odd and unusual form as the 100-metre-long Earl William. ‘I mean, everyone’s demanding this right and the other,’ fulminated Gerald Wallington-Hayes, the Mayor of Harwich, to The Guardian in 1987 as he defended the presence of the detention ship in his town. ‘If someone breaks into your house, I think you should have a right to defend your property in any way you wish. Now, immigrants are violating our space in just the same way. Don’t forget these people here have broken the law as far as we’re concerned.’ Wallington-Hayes drew on the language of law and order to render acceptable the use of the ship as a detention centre, and though the Home Office doggedly insisted that the Earl William was not a ‘prison ship’, the name caught on. All newspapers used it that summer, and the name persists in Harwich today. A few people I spoke to, taking the sun on the pier, remembered it as a prison. ‘We didn’t want rapists and people of that character parked so close to the pier,’ one man told me, explaining local opposition to the plan. For many, the most ready cultural memory of prison ships was, via Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, the site of ‘prison hulks’ moored in the Thames. These were decommissioned ships, with their masts and rigging removed, used to hold prisoners of war in the Napoleonic era and also used to imprison people about to undergo penal transportation to the colonies (usually Australia). ‘We feel insulted,’ said union head Bob Rayner, ‘that British seamen are being approached to turn back the clock to the days of transportation.’ A Conservative minister called Edward Bickham complained that this perfectly reasonable idea was being sullied by ‘an emotional campaign’. ‘There is nothing intrinsically wrong with keeping people on a ship,’ he wrote, ‘if it is secure and the ship is properly berthed.’ * ‘Earlier on today apparently a woman rang the BBC and said she had heard that there was a hurricane on the way,’ TV weatherman Michael Fish told his viewers. ‘Well if you are watching, don’t worry, there isn’t.’ On 15 October 1987 a great storm swept across London and the southeast of England. Fish famously underestimated its power: that night hurricane-speed winds uprooted 15 million trees and killed 18 people. When Paul Day arrived at Harwich Port at first light on 16 October, with the storm still raging, it was chaos. Paul used to crew nuclear submarines before going into merchant shipping; in the 1980s, he was, among other things, a salvage expert living near his native Harwich. I spoke to him about the night of the storm in the side-office of his son’s steelworks in Kirby Cross, Essex. ‘I went down with my workforce to the manager and to the harbour board, to see what was happening. They were all panicking and running around, radios weren’t working and stuff like that.’ There was a tanker out of control, full of fuel and rubbing up against the quay. Sparks were flying and the harbourmaster was worried it would explode, taking a nearby LPG gas storage facility and most of Harwich with it. In all of the drama no-one had paid much attention to the Earl William. The spot it had occupied on Parkeston Quay was empty. Out over the other side of the Stour, toward Shotley, Paul could see the ship through the hurricane winds, ‘the blur of it’ beached on a mud bank. They borrowed a launch and headed out to the stricken ferry, which had broken its moorings overnight in the storm and collided with a number of barges out in the harbour, gashing holes in its side before sinking into the mud at low tide. The lower levels of the ship, the engine rooms, were completely flooded. As Paul came alongside they climbed on board and headed up to the top of the boat, where they found all 78 detainees safe and accounted for, along with crew and security, sheltering in the officers’ mess, just behind the wheelhouse. With the help of detainees on board, Paul and his crew spent the next 14 hours welding large pieces of sheet metal over the holes in the side of the boat, often in neck-deep water as the ship was pounded by waves. ‘We got the hull watertight, pumped out everything.’ Then at high tide ‘we steamed it up ourselves to Parkeston Quay with all the immigrants on board’. The government gave everyone temporary admission to the UK on compassionate grounds, releasing them from the detention system after, for some, over a year inside. The port authority called Mr Jana in the middle of the night, and he drove with a coach to collect the Tamils. His strident colleague Vairamattu Varadakumar was quoted in The Guardian: ‘For months we have been campaigning for their release,’ he told journalists. ‘Now the furious hand of nature has replied. * The Daily Telegraph, December 1987. ‘Which group of detainees was glad to have run aground?’ Page 44 for the answers. ‘Tamil refugees detained aboard the notorious prison hulk the Earl William. They were provisionally freed after it went aground in the October gales.’ A question in the newspaper’s end of year quiz is one of the last references in the British press to the Earl William detention centre; by 1988 the ship was back to ‘plying an honest trade’, as one shipping writer put it, taking paying passengers on the overnight route from Liverpool to Dún Laoghaire. Despite dominating the news in August, the story was quickly forgotten in the commotion of the storm, perhaps because of Douglas Hurd’s prudent decision to release all detainees immediately. ‘We were lucky that there was not a much bigger political row,’ wrote Edward Bickham to civil servants in November, as TC Platt concluded that ‘given what happened last month… politically the use of the Earl William for immigration detention is no longer readily defensible’. But for the storm, and the authorial choices of Charles Dickens, Britain could be a country that still uses ships as detention centres. The practice has come and gone in other northern European countries, including Denmark and the Netherlands, which until recently used a ship called the Bibby Kalmar to hold asylum-seekers. Some shocking opinions were collected by reporters at the time regarding those held on the Earl William. A group of teenagers spoke of how they didn’t want ‘pakis’ in their town; a sailor eating at a mess room nearby proposed that ‘they should ferry them out into the Channel and kick them off into the sea’. It’s thought that white people in Britain don’t say things like this any more – at least not to journalists, or not as often, or not in public. So is it better to arrive as a refugee today than it was in 1987? ‘[It’s] not that much different,’ says Mr Jana. ‘Same type of attitude by the immigration officers, same type of detention centres; no, not that much has changed. They are keen to detain more people.’ Along with the expansion of the detention system, the nature of citizenship has moved on since 1987. Laws passed that year made airlines financially responsible for those who arrived without a proper visa, projecting the border outwards into foreign airports and effectively making airline staff police it. The border has since spread both further outwards and inwards – legislation in the past 30 years has ensured that all manner of professions, from landlords to doctors, have become obliged or incentivized to enquire about the immigration status of those they encounter. The ‘Windrush Scandal’ earlier this year happened as a result of all of these overlapping changes, in both law and culture, over many decades. The Tories might come across as the villains of this story – set as it is in 1987, the dark heart of Thatcherism – but the progressive erosion of rights that were previously taken for granted has long been a tag-team effort from both sides of the political spectrum. The large modern purpose-built detention centres – Harmondsworth, Colnbrook, Yarl’s Wood – bequeathed to us today were built under New Labour in the first years of the millennium. The British Nationality Act of 1981, condemned as ‘constitutionalizing racism’, was based on recommendations published by the previous Labour government. After the storm, the Home Office quietly pursued many of those it had made a public show of releasing. A newspaper report from 1989 describes the plight of an 18-year-old Tamil refugee, held on the Earl William then deported along with four other Tamils back to Sri Lanka. Soon after his return he was imprisoned and beaten, accused of partaking in ‘subversive activities’ by local police. Evidence of this maltreatment only came to light after a dogged human rights lawyer, David Burgess, travelled to Sri Lanka to collect evidence pro bono, in order to hold the Home Office to account for failing to abide by the Geneva Convention. Eventually Burgess won the case and the five Sri Lankans were allowed sanctuary. The events of 1987, which included suicides among other asylum-seekers refused sanctuary as well as the attempted mass deportations, led to a renewed sense of purpose among many refugee organizations, who together launched the ‘Charter ’87 for Refugees’ that November – an attempt to strengthen and formalize the protections afforded to asylum-seekers in the UK and prevent their slow erosion. By the time the Earl William sank to the bottom of the sea off Venezuela in 2011, the charter had long been forgotten. https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Earl-William-1987 Mon, 17 Dec 2018 16:12:21 +0000 felix bazalgette https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Earl-William-1987 <img width="1068" height="1508" width_o="1068" height_o="1508" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/0b89c9e02f962a301084bfa60fa50475b138721334fdab5d12f1349bb778832c/Screen-Shot-2018-12-17-at-16.10.04.png" data-mid="38295975" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/0b89c9e02f962a301084bfa60fa50475b138721334fdab5d12f1349bb778832c/Screen-Shot-2018-12-17-at-16.10.04.png" /> (New Internationalist December 2018) ~ 5000 words There are trainspotters and plane-spotters, so it's no surprise that there are also people who spend their days obsessed with passenger ferries. For the community of people obsessed with ferries, specifically roll-on roll-off ferries of the 1960s and 1970s, the Earl William is relatively unremarkable. The ship was built in 1964 in Norway and bought by the British Railways Board in 1976 to sail between the Channel Islands and Portsmouth, under the nationalized Sealink brand. In 1984, with privatization in full swing, Sealink was sold to Sea Containers, a sprawling company belonging to the charismatic US entrepreneur James Sherwood, owner of the Orient Express, close acquaintance of the prime minister and a Conservative donor. The state livery was taken off the Earl William’s funnel, though the new branding – ‘Sealink British Ferries’ – still projected the image of a stirring national industry. Sea Containers, for tax purposes, was registered in Bermuda. I became interested in the Earl William not because it was one of three revolutionary ‘Thoreson Viking’ roll-on roll-off ferries built in the 1960s, nor because of its spectacular end: in 2011, repurposed as a floating hotel in Trinidad and Tobago, it hit an oil-drilling vessel off the coast of Venezuela while being towed for repairs, and sank without a trace after causing $100-million worth of damage. What drew me to the Earl William was its use over the summer of 1987 as a floating immigration detention centre moored at the port of Harwich, Essex, holding people from Ethiopia, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan, Uganda, the Seychelles and Nigeria, and – its largest constituency – 60 Tamil refugees from Sri Lanka. It was the first time the UK had ever used a ship as a migrant detention centre and, once everyone was on board, it was the largest in the country. * In 1983, almost 200,000 Tamil refugees fled Sri Lanka, amid pogroms and the violent rhetoric of politicians from the Sinhalese majority. They presented Tamils, many of whom had roots in southern India, as foreign usurpers. Though there had been a sizeable Tamil population in Sri Lanka since at least the third century BCE, in the 19th and 20th centuries a large number came to the island from southern India to work on tea and coffee plantations – the island came under British rule in 1833 and remained a colonial possession until 1948. During this period, the British engineered preferential access to employment and education for the Tamils over the Sinhalese. By the 1940s, roughly 60 per cent of civil-service jobs were held by Tamils, who made up around 15 per cent of the population. When Ceylon became the independent nation of Sri Lanka in 1948 and the Sinhalese majority took over, Tamils became the focus of popular resentment for their preferential treatment by the British. The first anti-Tamil riot took place in 1956 – the Gal Oya massacre – in which over 150 were killed. Further pogroms followed in 1958, 1977 and then in 1983, when an estimated 4,000 people were killed and 150,000 made homeless in what became known as ‘Black July’, commemorated every year among the Sri Lankan Tamil diaspora. I met Mr Jana, director of the Tamil Welfare Association in Newham, east London, to learn more about what it was like to seek refuge from Sri Lanka in the 1980s. He took me to an upstairs room for a chat in the association’s office, its walls painted muted orange, after a long day helping Tamils in the UK deal with immigration authorities, domestic violence, racism and the benefits system. Mr Jana and a friend of his caught a plane out of Sri Lanka in 1985. That year the British government had imposed entry restrictions on Sri Lankans – the first time anyone from any of the ex-colonial Commonwealth countries had needed a visa to visit the UK. Despite the well-reported repression of Tamils, Margaret Thatcher visited Sri Lanka in April 1985 to meet the president, and the UK continued to provide training for the Sinhalese-majority army and sell weapons to the government. In the wake of ‘Black July’ two years earlier President Jayawardene had said, ‘We cannot think of [the Tamils], not about their lives or their opinion... Really, if I starve the Tamils out, the Sinhala people will be happy.’ Many British newspapers followed the anti-Tamil line, as a selection of headlines from May 1985 shows – Daily Express: ‘We will stop the Tamil “flood” vows Britain.’ Daily Mail: ‘Tamils facing a closed door.’ And Daily Mirror, referring to the Home Secretary at the time, Leon Brittan, with a bit of a tongue-twister: ‘No open door. Brittan warning race war runaways.’ At that time, as domestic panic was being stoked, only around 2,500 Tamils had applied for asylum in the UK, compared with 19,000 in France, 20,000 in Germany and over 100,000 in India. Mr Jana arrived at Heathrow Terminal 3 in the midst of this hostile mood, with a dozen other Tamils. Some had the address of friends and family who would host them and so were allowed into the country. Mr Jana had no address to give, so he was detained along with eight others, first at Harmondsworth detention centre, next to Heathrow, and then at Ashford Remand Centre in Hounslow, west London. ‘I spent around 26 days there,’ he told me, ‘then slowly Tamil refugees started to be removed from the detention centres back to Sri Lanka.’ Just days before a group of Tamils were due to be deported, Jana managed to speak to the secretary of Jeremy Corbyn MP, who intervened on their behalf; a discussion in parliament followed, it was covered in the media and the Home Office decided against the removal of the Tamils held in detention, Mr Jana among them. ‘About 30 people were released, and we ended up living in east London.’ From a one-bedroom flat shared by eight people, Mr Jana and his friends set up the organization that would become the Tamil Welfare Association in Newham (TWAN). They would make the journey up to Terminal 3 on a daily basis to welcome new arrivals and advocate on their behalf. ‘We were new in the country,’ says Mr Jana, ‘but I’d been here longer than others, studied the Underground map and learnt a bit of English.’ What was it like arriving in the mid-1980s as a refugee from Sri Lanka? Mr Jana breaks it down for me: support from the Tamil community and aggression from the general public. ‘They were in a mind-set of “these people are bogus, or bogus refugees”,’ he says. The next few years were tough. ‘Police started to harass us… And also other white people tried to call us names.’ There was plenty of racist violence in Newham, including, in November 1986, a firebomb pushed through a letterbox on nearby Burgess Road, which killed three Tamil refugees. They had no family in the country so TWAN organized the funeral. Mr Jana takes out a file and shows me pictures of the coffins laid out in a hall. It was in 1987, almost two years into his gruelling work with TWAN, when Mr Jana’s story intersected with that of the Earl William ferry. * The idea of keeping asylum-seekers imprisoned on a ship was first proposed by a civil servant called TC Platt. He had heard of a similar approach in Denmark, where the authorities worked with the Red Cross to keep almost 900 asylum seekers on converted ferries and container ships in Copenhagen harbour. ‘There would obviously be a great deal of parliamentary, media, community and other external interest,’ he wrote cautiously, as he sounded out the idea to ministers in a January 1987 memo. ‘There would be references to a “prison ship”…’ The then-Home Secretary, Douglas Hurd, looked over details of the Earl William and was gratified to find that it was ‘unlikely to appear too luxurious or too spartan’. For many, the relatively recent institution of immigration detention was hazily thought of as a punishment, meaning luxury was inappropriate and might attract hostile headlines. Mr Platt was not wrong about media interest. That summer the detention ship proved extremely controversial and was regularly reported on by national and local papers. It was routinely called a prison ship and condemned stridently by leftwing groups and papers, and cautiously by rightwing broadsheets. The Daily Mail took a predictable line, fuming that the newly refurbished Earl William was certainly not spartan enough for the detainees, whom they labelled ‘gatecrashers in cushy berths’. When I remind Mr Jana of the Daily Mail piece, he expresses three decades of accumulated weariness with a shrug: ‘We always have problems with these people.’ The first detainees came on board the Earl William in early May. Some were part of a group of 64 Tamils, including 24 women and 9 children, whom the government had tried unsuccessfully to deport en masse earlier that year. Mr Jana and his colleagues, with a canny awareness of what would make headlines, had organized what became known as the ‘trousers down’ protest, after Tamils stripped off on the Heathrow runway as they were being forced to board a plane back to Sri Lanka. The flight was delayed long enough for news of a High Court injunction staying the deportation to arrive. The Sri Lankan High Commission in London weighed in, sinisterly playing on British prejudices to try to prevent the Tamils getting asylum: ‘They are coming here more than anything else for financial gain,’ the spokesperson told the BBC. ‘If they are allowed to stay they are given all the social security benefits, they can send their children to school and will be housed free.’ In reality, many in the group of Tamils remained in immigration detention, eventually being moved together onto the Earl William. Others on the boat had been in immigration detention for more than a year before arriving. It was, by all accounts, a stifling and surreal place. Posters left over from the ship’s previous incarnation as a holiday boat still offered discounted ferry rides to Holland to see the tulips. Muslim detainees prayed in a long, narrow former duty-free shop which had been cleared of cigarettes and alcohol. The downstairs car deck was repurposed into a football pitch and sealed packages of airline food were delivered every 10 days by van: sweet and sour pork, spaghetti Bolognese, boeuf bourguignon, fish or meat curry. All detainees were locked out of their cabins between 7am and 8pm. With access to the open-air decks restricted because of the suicide risk, most people spent their days in one of the ship’s four lounges, sitting in the ‘aircraft style seating’ watching videos. Hunger-striking Tamils, protesting against their detention, lay around ‘like dead men staring into space and refusing to budge’, according to one security guard. Their banner, hung over the side of the ship, read: ‘British people! Don’t let us die.’ ‘We hate this place,’ 18-year-old Sugirithni Navaratnam told a journalist from The Independent. ‘Harmondsworth [detention centre] felt safer. There are too many men here.’ There were eight women on board, including a 15-year-old girl. No sanitary towels were provided for the first two months of their stay (‘If they had mentioned them, they would have been provided,’ the Home Office said, when asked for comment) and there was no separate space for women. ‘This forces us into the company of the boys,’ said Sugirithni. ‘We are frightened.’ Onlookers studied the ferry from the Harwich quay with curiosity and apprehension. ‘Nobody wanted the nuclear waste dumps and nobody wants this,’ a local resident told a reporter, referring to a failed government attempt to bury radioactive waste in Essex. As the summer wore on, detainees became more and more frustrated. ‘We are desperate to get off the ship,’ said one 27-year-old Tamil. ‘We cannot understand why we are being held here. When are they going to make a decision?’ * Ever since immigration detention began formally in Britain with the opening of the first centre in 1970 at Harmondsworth, it has always been a tortuous process. Even today the UK is one of the only countries in Europe that does not have a set time limit on how long someone can be held in detention, and the decision to detain is not taken in front of a court, as per the ancient laws of Habeas Corpus, but by low-level officials in an obscure and inefficient bureaucracy. Anyone deemed not to be a British citizen can be taken from their home in a raid under immigration powers and held for as long as the system wants – the longest stints have been up to five years. Since the days of the Earl William the system has expanded dramatically. In July 1987, the ship’s capacity of 120 detainees made it the largest detention centre in the country. Today it would be dwarfed by the facilities next to Heathrow: Harmondsworth – now expanded to be the biggest purpose-built detention centre in Europe – and Colnbrook, which together can hold over 1,000 people. There are roughly another 2,000 detention places around the country spread across seven smaller facilities, as well as holding cells at air- and seaports. I used to be a volunteer visitor to immigration detention centres for a charity, going every couple of weeks to meet with people detained at Harmondsworth. After the long journey out west to Heathrow, at the end of the London Underground’s Piccadilly Line, I would catch a bus round the north perimeter of the airport. As I walked up Bath Road, the vast squat detention centre hove into view. The building always surprised me. What combination of factors, which different spans of human effort had folded the barbed wire into place, laid the bricks, plugged in the CCTV cameras, set up the staff rotas, ordered the chairs for the visitor centre – all these actions, in aggregate, seemed baffling. What forces had made them seem right, rational, necessary? For this reason I’m interested in the forces that propelled the Earl William into Parkeston Quay in the spring of 1987, beyond its diesel engine. At this time immigration detention was a relatively new phenomenon. How does something like the Earl William detention ship happen? There are the simple accidents of history, the contingent channels by which an idea flows around the world, the quotidian pressures suffered by bureaucrats – TC Platt sees a report about the Danish policy and thinks it will do here: prisons are overcrowded and the initial plan to house migrants at the old Naval College in Greenwich has fallen through. But there were also economic, political and historical forces at work. Sea Containers – the private company that had bought Sealink, and the Earl William, from the government – was struggling. With its owner a personal friend of the Conservative Party, and the political impetus not to see a newly privatized service collapse only a few years in, the rental of the Earl William from the company at £2,500 ($3,290) a day (over £7,000 – $9,200 – in today’s money) would have made perfect sense among those charged with waving the decision through. ‘The deal has provided Sealink with a welcome financial fillip at a difficult time for it and its parent company, Sea Containers Limited of Bermuda,’ noted The Guardian archly that June. Perhaps the repurposed Earl William made sense as part of a newly muscular, neoliberal attitude towards ethics. ‘It is a business arrangement and we are here to make money,’ a Sealink representative told the papers bluntly after criticism. The National Union of Seamen had at first refused to crew the ship, maintaining that its ‘members are seafarers and… do not wish to be involved in any policing exercise’ – eventually their members disobeyed them and signed up for the contracts with Sealink, at a time when work was drying up as other ferries were sold or put out of service, amid a stubbornly high unemployment rate. Another way to understand the Earl William, though, is as a small but significant episode in the ongoing history of post-colonial Britain. These people found themselves imprisoned on a boat, in part because they had the misfortune to arrive in the UK after a wave of legislation that had gradually reduced the rights of Commonwealth citizens. The latest of these was the decision, in 1985, to lay visa restrictions on a Commonwealth country, Sri Lanka, for the first time. ‘It was only with great reluctance that I decided that it was necessary to impose a visa requirement on a fellow Commonwealth country,’ said the Home Secretary. ‘The need for it will be kept under review and I hope that it can be lifted in due course.’ Today almost half of Commonwealth countries need visas to enter the UK; the rest need to get an ‘entry certificate’ before they go, and a visa for stays longer than six months. * The hedging of the rights of Commonwealth citizens – the vast majority of whom are people from countries that had formerly been colonized by the UK – began in the 1960s. From 1948, the year that Ceylon became the independent Commonwealth nation of Sri Lanka, and the passing of the British Nationality Act, anyone from a previously colonized country had the status of ‘Citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies’, which meant they could travel to and settle in the UK, and, like all other British citizens, they were immune to deportation powers. By 1962 there were fears about post-colonial migration following the arrival of what is now called the ‘Windrush Generation’ – migrants from the West Indies encouraged to come to the UK after the Second World War to fill labour shortages, who first arrived on the HMT Empire Windrush. That year the Commonwealth Immigrants Act was passed, allowing deportation of Commonwealth citizens for the first time and introducing a system of work vouchers for new arrivals. ‘We want to reduce to the absolute minimum the power of deportation of Commonwealth citizens,’ said the Labour MP James MacColl ruefully at the time. ‘It is profoundly distasteful.’ Yet more acts were passed in 1968 and 1971. ‘In terms of British nationality law,’ wrote the Sri Lankan British writer Ambalavaner Sivanandan in 1976, summing up the recent course of legislation, ‘this would mean that a British citizen was not completely a British citizen when he was a black British citizen.’ This process culminated with the British Nationality Act in 1981, which defined British citizenship in terms of ‘family links’ to the United Kingdom, definitively re-orientating citizenship rights away from most of those who had been imperial subjects, such as the Sri Lankan Tamils, and towards an implicitly racialized conception of Britishness. For Conservatives this was a chance to pivot away from the less appealing aspects of Britain’s colonial legacy; as Timothy Raison MP declared at the Conservative party conference in 1980: ‘We have got finally to dispose of the lingering notion that Britain is somehow a haven for all those whose countries we once ruled.’ For many the Act represented a dangerous new chapter in post-colonial amnesia, ‘expressly designed to deprive black and Asian Britons of their citizenship rights’, as Salman Rushdie wrote in 1982. David Dixon, a legal academic writing at the time, believed that ‘the racism spawned by imperialism is now used to evade its consequences’. Above all, Dixon warned, ‘the creation of citizenship must not be based on converting control upon people’s movements into constitutional forms’. It’s a measure of how far we’ve come that Dixon’s words take a little while to untangle today, so accustomed are we to citizenship being tied up with an all-pervasive border regime. Thanks to the 1981 Act, and a number of laws passed since, the citizenship of someone who has immigrated to Britain carries far fewer protections than the citizenship of someone who was born here. If you can prove that you were born in the UK to British parents, you can’t be deported, you can’t be imprisoned without trial and you can’t have your citizenship stripped from you. If, on the other hand, you’re a naturalized citizen, or have dual nationality, or seem to someone at the Home Office like you’re not a citizen, you are vulnerable to all these abuses. Back in 1987 many struggled to make sense of immigration detention, especially when it came in such a patently odd and unusual form as the 100-metre-long Earl William. ‘I mean, everyone’s demanding this right and the other,’ fulminated Gerald Wallington-Hayes, the Mayor of Harwich, to The Guardian in 1987 as he defended the presence of the detention ship in his town. ‘If someone breaks into your house, I think you should have a right to defend your property in any way you wish. Now, immigrants are violating our space in just the same way. Don’t forget these people here have broken the law as far as we’re concerned.’ Wallington-Hayes drew on the language of law and order to render acceptable the use of the ship as a detention centre, and though the Home Office doggedly insisted that the Earl William was not a ‘prison ship’, the name caught on. All newspapers used it that summer, and the name persists in Harwich today. A few people I spoke to, taking the sun on the pier, remembered it as a prison. ‘We didn’t want rapists and people of that character parked so close to the pier,’ one man told me, explaining local opposition to the plan. For many, the most ready cultural memory of prison ships was, via Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, the site of ‘prison hulks’ moored in the Thames. These were decommissioned ships, with their masts and rigging removed, used to hold prisoners of war in the Napoleonic era and also used to imprison people about to undergo penal transportation to the colonies (usually Australia). ‘We feel insulted,’ said union head Bob Rayner, ‘that British seamen are being approached to turn back the clock to the days of transportation.’ A Conservative minister called Edward Bickham complained that this perfectly reasonable idea was being sullied by ‘an emotional campaign’. ‘There is nothing intrinsically wrong with keeping people on a ship,’ he wrote, ‘if it is secure and the ship is properly berthed.’ * ‘Earlier on today apparently a woman rang the BBC and said she had heard that there was a hurricane on the way,’ TV weatherman Michael Fish told his viewers. ‘Well if you are watching, don’t worry, there isn’t.’ On 15 October 1987 a great storm swept across London and the southeast of England. Fish famously underestimated its power: that night hurricane-speed winds uprooted 15 million trees and killed 18 people. When Paul Day arrived at Harwich Port at first light on 16 October, with the storm still raging, it was chaos. Paul used to crew nuclear submarines before going into merchant shipping; in the 1980s, he was, among other things, a salvage expert living near his native Harwich. I spoke to him about the night of the storm in the side-office of his son’s steelworks in Kirby Cross, Essex. ‘I went down with my workforce to the manager and to the harbour board, to see what was happening. They were all panicking and running around, radios weren’t working and stuff like that.’ There was a tanker out of control, full of fuel and rubbing up against the quay. Sparks were flying and the harbourmaster was worried it would explode, taking a nearby LPG gas storage facility and most of Harwich with it. In all of the drama no-one had paid much attention to the Earl William. The spot it had occupied on Parkeston Quay was empty. Out over the other side of the Stour, toward Shotley, Paul could see the ship through the hurricane winds, ‘the blur of it’ beached on a mud bank. They borrowed a launch and headed out to the stricken ferry, which had broken its moorings overnight in the storm and collided with a number of barges out in the harbour, gashing holes in its side before sinking into the mud at low tide. The lower levels of the ship, the engine rooms, were completely flooded. As Paul came alongside they climbed on board and headed up to the top of the boat, where they found all 78 detainees safe and accounted for, along with crew and security, sheltering in the officers’ mess, just behind the wheelhouse. With the help of detainees on board, Paul and his crew spent the next 14 hours welding large pieces of sheet metal over the holes in the side of the boat, often in neck-deep water as the ship was pounded by waves. ‘We got the hull watertight, pumped out everything.’ Then at high tide ‘we steamed it up ourselves to Parkeston Quay with all the immigrants on board’. The government gave everyone temporary admission to the UK on compassionate grounds, releasing them from the detention system after, for some, over a year inside. The port authority called Mr Jana in the middle of the night, and he drove with a coach to collect the Tamils. His strident colleague Vairamattu Varadakumar was quoted in The Guardian: ‘For months we have been campaigning for their release,’ he told journalists. ‘Now the furious hand of nature has replied. * The Daily Telegraph, December 1987. ‘Which group of detainees was glad to have run aground?’ Page 44 for the answers. ‘Tamil refugees detained aboard the notorious prison hulk the Earl William. They were provisionally freed after it went aground in the October gales.’ A question in the newspaper’s end of year quiz is one of the last references in the British press to the Earl William detention centre; by 1988 the ship was back to ‘plying an honest trade’, as one shipping writer put it, taking paying passengers on the overnight route from Liverpool to Dún Laoghaire. Despite dominating the news in August, the story was quickly forgotten in the commotion of the storm, perhaps because of Douglas Hurd’s prudent decision to release all detainees immediately. ‘We were lucky that there was not a much bigger political row,’ wrote Edward Bickham to civil servants in November, as TC Platt concluded that ‘given what happened last month… politically the use of the Earl William for immigration detention is no longer readily defensible’. But for the storm, and the authorial choices of Charles Dickens, Britain could be a country that still uses ships as detention centres. The practice has come and gone in other northern European countries, including Denmark and the Netherlands, which until recently used a ship called the Bibby Kalmar to hold asylum-seekers. Some shocking opinions were collected by reporters at the time regarding those held on the Earl William. A group of teenagers spoke of how they didn’t want ‘pakis’ in their town; a sailor eating at a mess room nearby proposed that ‘they should ferry them out into the Channel and kick them off into the sea’. It’s thought that white people in Britain don’t say things like this any more – at least not to journalists, or not as often, or not in public. So is it better to arrive as a refugee today than it was in 1987? ‘[It’s] not that much different,’ says Mr Jana. ‘Same type of attitude by the immigration officers, same type of detention centres; no, not that much has changed. They are keen to detain more people.’ Along with the expansion of the detention system, the nature of citizenship has moved on since 1987. Laws passed that year made airlines financially responsible for those who arrived without a proper visa, projecting the border outwards into foreign airports and effectively making airline staff police it. The border has since spread both further outwards and inwards – legislation in the past 30 years has ensured that all manner of professions, from landlords to doctors, have become obliged or incentivized to enquire about the immigration status of those they encounter. The ‘Windrush Scandal’ earlier this year happened as a result of all of these overlapping changes, in both law and culture, over many decades. The Tories might come across as the villains of this story – set as it is in 1987, the dark heart of Thatcherism – but the progressive erosion of rights that were previously taken for granted has long been a tag-team effort from both sides of the political spectrum. The large modern purpose-built detention centres – Harmondsworth, Colnbrook, Yarl’s Wood – bequeathed to us today were built under New Labour in the first years of the millennium. The British Nationality Act of 1981, condemned as ‘constitutionalizing racism’, was based on recommendations published by the previous Labour government. After the storm, the Home Office quietly pursued many of those it had made a public show of releasing. A newspaper report from 1989 describes the plight of an 18-year-old Tamil refugee, held on the Earl William then deported along with four other Tamils back to Sri Lanka. Soon after his return he was imprisoned and beaten, accused of partaking in ‘subversive activities’ by local police. Evidence of this maltreatment only came to light after a dogged human rights lawyer, David Burgess, travelled to Sri Lanka to collect evidence pro bono, in order to hold the Home Office to account for failing to abide by the Geneva Convention. Eventually Burgess won the case and the five Sri Lankans were allowed sanctuary. The events of 1987, which included suicides among other asylum-seekers refused sanctuary as well as the attempted mass deportations, led to a renewed sense of purpose among many refugee organizations, who together launched the ‘Charter ’87 for Refugees’ that November – an attempt to strengthen and formalize the protections afforded to asylum-seekers in the UK and prevent their slow erosion. By the time the Earl William sank to the bottom of the sea off Venezuela in 2011, the charter had long been forgotten. https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Notes-on-the-history-of-a-detention-centre Mon, 17 Dec 2018 16:12:29 +0000 felix bazalgette https://ztlifebaaeegltx.website/Notes-on-the-history-of-a-detention-centre <img width="929" height="929" width_o="929" height_o="929" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/dc629c54102cd3e9fe78ce2fd58c17b8b7fb5904a9134a1c4c4d764ebfd78a63/landscape-4.jpg" data-mid="38295976" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/929/i/dc629c54102cd3e9fe78ce2fd58c17b8b7fb5904a9134a1c4c4d764ebfd78a63/landscape-4.jpg" /> The White Review No.20 - Summer 2017 Looking back at Harmondsworth as he left, after 52 days inside, Amir was struck by how isolated the detention centre seemed. Set back from the A4, it runs along the northern boundary wall of Heathrow, separated from the road by a car park and shielded from view by a line of houses and trees. ‘The location is such that nobody can see you,’ he told me, a year after his release. ‘This is how they make you feel cut off.’ A year and a half ago I was scrolling aimlessly on the internet when I came across a simple website called ‘Detained Voices’, consisting of a series of short quotations from people who were being detained in ‘immigration removal centres’ in the U.K. Reading these disturbing fragments of testimony started me on a path that eventually put me opposite Amir in a Costa coffee shop in Stratford, as he told me about life in Harmondsworth. As I’ve learnt more about immigration detention I have become increasingly mystified by the place it occupies in our national discourse. A set of nine prison-like buildings dotted around the country, these immigration removal centres are a recent phenomenon, yet already feel like part of the national furniture. Harmondsworth, the first purpose-built immigration detention centre in the U.K., was constructed in 1970 on the fringes of Heathrow, the country’s largest airport. It had a capacity of 44. Over the eighties and nineties more and more facilities popped up around the country, until a burst of building under New Labour after the millennium brought the total number of places in these centres to just over 4,000 today. I became obsessed with the history of detention and with the building of Harmondsworth itself. Rebuilt and expanded in 2001, it is now the largest detention centre in Europe. I know which architectural practice designed the building (HLM Architects), who manufactured the heavy iron security doors (Lloyd Worrel Ironmongery), how much the retrofitted sprinkler system cost (£17 million) and who provided the toilets lacking in ligature points (The Plumb Centre). I learnt what ligature points are. I learnt about the seven people who have died in Harmondsworth, and the three more who died shortly after being released. I also learnt how detention, since its very inception, has been roundly condemned in areas that are meant to represent public life in Britain: in the Commons, in the Lords, in the papers (from The Telegraph, to The Sunday Times, to the Guardian); in massive official reviews and regular reports; by filmmakers, charities, activists and campaigners; by Conservatives and Ed Miliband’s Labour party, whose manifesto pledged to put an end to it if they were elected in 2015. Yet despite all this the practice of detaining immigrants remains curiously under-examined, on the edge of the country’s political consciousness, an unpleasant yet apparently unavoidable phenomenon. This is not just a matter of a lack of education, a lack of knowledge about the reality of detention centres. Thanks to work by and with people who have experienced detention, details are now accessible enough for anyone who wants to type a phrase into Google. Regular protests inside and outside detention centres, the constant stream of abuse allegations that flow out of the women’s facility Yarl’s Wood, and suicides and deaths are reported on. But the reports always fail to gain traction in wider society and wider media, and detention continues apace. As a result I’ve come to think that this lacuna – where there should be moral outrage, the continuation of detention despite its great expense, inefficiency and cruelty – is a political phenomenon that goes to the heart of how the U.K. sees itself and its history, and, worryingly, where it might be going. Accordingly this essay is largely not about life in detention, but rather about how detention happened and what it might mean. I’ll never know what it is like to be taken from my home one morning by the U.K. Border Agency and imprisoned without trial, but I do know what it is like to be part of a society that deems this violence both acceptable and normal. Speaking to Amir, who now campaigns with the group Freed Voices, made up of people who have been through detention, was a necessary step towards understanding this violence, and the effects it has on those it targets. A week before he spoke to me, Amir had passed the house in which he had been living when the immigration officials came for him a year ago. He shook with fear as they battered on the door at six in the morning, so hard that he thought they were going to break it. This was the beginning of his journey out of the society in which he had spent the last eight and a half years. Amir described to me with forensic detail the small indignities that announced his new situation. After the raid he was taken to a tiny windowless police cell, the officer saying ‘this is your castle.’ When his possessions were being logged, an officer laughed at the fact he had a Waitrose card, as though someone like him couldn’t, and later, buying food, a member of staff at the detention centre shop threw him his chocolate bar ‘like you’d throw a bone to a dog’. But he also remembered the policewoman who gave him books to read and a pen so he could write down his thoughts, and the man who sat with him for almost an hour in the first detention centre he was sent to, near Gatwick, when he had retreated into silence and started refusing his meals. This officer talked him into fighting his case. He remembers and repeats the names of these two people: Margaret and Octavian. The hostile attitude of staff seemed so systematic that, despite generous allowances for the conditions under which they were working, Amir came to believe that it was instilled by their training. The Home Office, he suggested, ‘train staff not to show any kind of courtesy, any kind of empathy, sympathy or emotion.’ He thought their abiding attitude was that ‘these people who are inside [Harmondsworth], are less human than you. That’s why you are in those white uniforms and they are at your disposal.’ This all tied into what Amir saw as the purpose of detention: to break you, to separate you from British society and force you to give up your claim to a share in it. In Harmondsworth they supplied a games console, but Amir never played it. They also supplied table tennis, a pool table, movies, a gym, but Amir regarded all these things as dangerous temptations, as part of the ‘trap’ of detention. He watched other people fall into that trap, ‘living there like it’s their home, accepting that reality.’ He told me that he wasn’t there to watch movies, to play table tennis or video games, to read books – for him these things were ‘false entertainments’, designed to sap your energy in a hostile environment. If you become absorbed in these distractions then ‘slowly,’ he told me, ‘you lose your interest in your real case, in your real objective, and you start accepting those false things, and you start accepting whatever the Home Office thinks is true.’ That moment of defeat is when they serve you with your documents, and put you on a plane. For Amir detention was nothing to do with settling the truth of his claim to asylum – that could have been done without imprisoning him. Instead it felt like a more fundamental fight about what constituted reality, with the Home Office not only imposing their version of it upon him but also more insidiously using the fraught environment of Harmondsworth to break his resistance. There is more than one suicide attempt each day across the immigration estate, and Harmondsworth, regarded by many as the last stop before deportation, has seen the most suicide attempts of any detention centre. * The year that Amir was detained was the 800th anniversary of the Magna Carta, celebrated in the unthreatening bracket of British ‘Heritage and Culture’ by a Conservative government unwilling to look at the small print. One of King John’s gifts to his subjects was the agreement, in article 29, that ‘No free man may be arrest- ed, imprisoned, dispossessed of his goods, or placed outside the law or molested in any way; we will not place our hands on him nor will have others place their hands on him, except after a legal judgement by his peers according to the law of the realm.’ The idea came to be known as Habeas Corpus, later restated by parliament in 1679 as the notion that a person (their physical body) had to be present at a trial to justify detention. Yet in 2015, 30,000 people in the United Kingdom were deprived of their liberty without trial and without a time limit. The clue to how this happened might lie in the formulation ‘free man’ and how, over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries certain non-residents were gradually removed from that category as the British Empire was dismantled and fear of postcolonial migration grew. In 1890 W.F. Craies could confidently write that ‘the Crown has no prerogative to interfere with the free ingress or exit of any alien friend ... any attempt at such interference can be stopped by Habeas Corpus or action of false imprisonment.’ Yet these ideas gradually fell out of favour. ‘Aliens came to be seen as set apart,’ writes the academic Daniel Wilsher, ‘a group to be politically and administratively managed, not judicially protected.’ By 1968 the Commonwealth Immigrants Act had wiped away the traditional legal notion that all citizens of the British Empire were equal subjects who there- fore had the right to settle in Britain, to work and to vote. It was a landmark in anti-immigration legislation, removing the right of free entry for British citizens from the Commonwealth and imposing long queues and restrictions upon entry. Harmondsworth was built in 1970, to house the growing number of people who ran afoul of these new laws while they tried to appeal their status. ‘It is of the essence of the Immigration Act that people will be discriminated against on the grounds of race and nationality and it is the function of certain officials to ensure that the discrimination is effective,’ a bluntly honest Home Office lawyer told the Guardian in 1980, after another act was passed, finally eliminating what remained of the rights of Commonwealth citizens to settle in the U.K., giving police the power to stop and search and ask for immigration documents. The border began to turn inwards. This run of anti-immigration legislation eventually reached its peak in the Nationality Act of 1981, which defined British citizenship in opposition to all who didn’t have a family link to someone born in the United Kingdom. Many saw this as a pointedly racial manoeuvre, aimed at finally excluding all former subjects of the Empire from settling in Britain, people who had previously held British passports but were now considered undesirable aliens. On hearing of the new Act, Enoch Powell triumphantly announced that ‘from the humiliation of having no nation to which we distinctively belong, the people of the United Kingdom are now setting themselves free.’ A legal scholar, David Dixon, described it at the time as ‘constitutionalising racism’. The climate was so ugly that it prompted Salman Rushdie to write an extraordinary essay entitled ‘The New Empire within Britain’, published in 1982, in which he directly addressed white readers, telling them that the country was ‘undergoing a critical phase of its post-colonial period, and this crisis is not simply economic or political. It’s a crisis of the whole culture, of society’s entire sense of itself.’ Rushdie contended that the racist judgements underpinning the empire had been turned inwards and imposed on the non-white people of Britain. ‘British thought, British society, has never been cleansed of the filth of imperialism,’ he wrote. ‘It’s still there, breeding lice and vermin, waiting for unscrupulous people to exploit it for their own ends.’ * In 1970 a young Italian living in Rome, Giorgio Agamben, wrote a letter to Hannah Arendt. Agamben was 28 years old, and had recently discovered Arendt’s writings, which had given him what he called a ‘decisive experience.’ He enclosed with the letter an essay for Arendt to read, called ‘On the Limits of Violence’, with the misspelled post-script that ‘I should have been unable to wright [it] without the guide of your books.’ The essay begins by outlining the Ancient Greek conception of the polis, ‘a way of life founded on the word, and not on violence.’ Agamben argues that the Greeks believed language to be non-violent, citing that in the ancient world there were no penalties for lying, and that the essential characteristic of political life was ‘peitharkhia, the power of persuasion’ – a belief that truth, in and of itself, could exert persuasive power in the human mind. If something was truthful, Agamben argued, the Greeks thought it would naturally have the power to persuade – and vice versa. He contrasts this trust in language and politics with ‘the modern age,’ which he accuses of ‘enact- ing a calculated plot to introduce violence into language itself.’ This he identifies as ‘the only widespread form of violence that our society can claim to have invented: propaganda’. Agamben’s writings have underpinned a surge of academic writing on detention centres in recent years. He put forward a number of concepts that built on Arendt’s work, and has sought to explain how democratic governments create ‘states of exception’, areas which are paradoxically legislated to be outside the law. He chooses the figure of ‘the camp’, rooted in a study of Auschwitz, to elaborate on how such spaces develop and how ‘anything is possible’ within them. Agamben’s theories are both generalising and seductive, not least because he is prone to dizzyingly provocative notions. These include that we are faced by a ‘camp virtually every time that such a structure is created, regardless of the nature of the crimes committed in it and regard- less of the denomination and specific topography it might have’. He implicitly asks us to look at Harmondsworth and trace a connection between it and the worst crimes of the twentieth century, because both are ‘space[s] in which, for all intents and purposes, the normal rule of law is suspended and in which the fact that atrocities may or may not be committed does not depend on the law but rather on the civility and ethical sense of the police that act temporarily as sovereign.’ * There are now nine large detention centres and a handful of smaller facilities around ports and airports, referred to as ‘short term holding facilities’. Most of this growth came under New Labour, who opened seven new centres between 2000 and 2009, alongside expanding and renovating Harmondsworth. The U.K. detains foreign nationals who have served their prison sentences and await deportation, people who have gone against the terms of their visa or lack one altogether, and people whose asylum claims have been rejected. This country has one of the largest detention populations in Europe, and Harmondsworth is the largest detention centre in Europe, with a capacity of 615. The building is four stories high and occupies a space of about 20,000 square metres. It is large and bland and imposing. A government report a decade ago de- scribed it as ‘impressive and powerful.’ If British national identity has a concrete, architectural form, this might be it. Like the Nationality Act of 1981, it is built on the power to exclude. Its surroundings speak of the changes that British society has undergone in recent decades. To the northeast are the gleaming white Ballardian headquarters of British Airways, surrounded by rolling landscaped forms that look computer rendered. The headquarters are shielded from the detention centre by a small waterway and a thick line of trees. Directly to the north is a BT warehouse – the vans need to drive down a road lined with razor wire between Harmondsworth and Colnbrook, its sister facility, in order to get there. BA was privatised in 1987, while BT was privatised in 1984. Even the Road Research Laboratory, the government transport organisation on whose land Harmondsworth was built, was privatised in 1996. Harmondsworth detention centre has always been private. In the 1960s, it was the responsibility of airlines to detain passengers who were refused entry to the U.K. At Heathrow, Securicor were already employed to do this, so their services were ex- tended to the new centre outside the walls of the airport. The Home Office justified the decision by saying that ‘the use of police to control people who were not criminals would be too oppressive and because it was felt that immigration officers, who are civil servants, could not be asked to perform such tasks.’ The Home Office seem un- sure of, or unwilling to think about, the violence of such detention. Those in detention experience it as punitive – in testimonies it is regularly compared to prison – but the Home Office wanted to define the buildings as mere warehouses, like the industrial units that often surround them, holding centres for stuff that is on its way out. To this end they changed the name from detention centre to ‘Immigration Removal Centre’, nominally yoking it to the deportation process of which it was supposed to be a part, though in fact roughly half the people put into detention are eventually released back into the U.K. (Capturing, imprisoning and then releasing these innocent people, as happened to Amir, costs an estimated £76 million a year.) Initially framed as an administrative measure to ensure deportation, rather than a punishment, the violence of detention was overlooked and obscured, going right down to the design of the buildings, which, though imposing on the outside, it was hoped would have interiors that reflected a ‘relaxed, non-institutional aesthetic’, according to the architectural firm who constructed Harmondsworth. Over time, a number of riots in the new detention centres have exposed this as a mismatch between design and purpose. In moments of high tension, and amid com- plaints of mistreatment, detainees in Harmondsworth and Yarl’s Wood have been able to break their way out of their cells, smashing straight through the cheap plaster- board the walls were made of. Three months after opening, half of Yarl’s Wood burnt down, while Harmondsworth has been rebuilt three times in the past 15 years as a re- sult of what the government calls, with the British institutional talent for euphemism, ‘disturbances’. Later centres, like Colnbrook, which lies next to Harmondsworth, have learnt from these ‘disturbances’ and built their cells out of concrete, adapting the buildings more closely towards the harsh reality of their function. * In recent years there’s been a pushback against Agamben’s ideas, led by academics like Mary Bosworth and Alison Mountz, who have performed lengthy and in-depth ethnographic research in detention centres. They find his theories too general, unable to capture the intimate textures of exclusion that are produced in detention centres, too quick to obscure the agency of those who are presented as helpless victims of sov- ereign power. They can’t, for example, take account of Amir’s feeling that he engaged in battle with the Home Office, and won. Of the Home Office official who visited him on his first night and told him he should not claim asylum because he would be rejected, he says, ‘I wanted to prove that idiot wrong. And I proved him wrong.’ Harmondsworth isn’t the unassailable fortress of sovereign power that it projects itself to be – it can be (and has been) damaged, even destroyed by the people it was built to control. What I instead find myself most drawn to in the constellation of Agamben’s work that surrounds detention centres is that early letter to Arendt, and its attempts to under- stand exactly how language, violence and politics are intertwined. For those involved in the rapid expansion of the detention system under the New Labour government, the imprisonment of thousands of people without trial and without a time limit was not a legal or a moral question but one of communication. We know this because of letters published in a 2004 report about the Yarl’s Wood fire. On 10 March, 2000, one senior civil servant, Sir David Omand, wrote to another, Sir Richard Wilson: You will see in particular that we are looking urgently at the Home Secretary’s requirement at expansion of the detention estate to 4,000 places. We believe that this would, if feasible, have a significant deterrent effect. [...] Detention is a key element in effective enforcement and it contributes to the impression potential asylum seekers have of the U.K. ... We also believe that up to a further 1,500 places would significantly enhance the deterrent effect for new asylum seekers. A month later the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, wrote to the Chief Secretary of the Treasury, justifying any expenditure on the detention estate’s expansion on the grounds that it would ‘send a strong message’. It was as though detention had be- come divorced from moral reality and had become simply a signal – the more people detained, the more powerful the signal. This is not just introducing violence into language, as the young Agamben warned, this is using violence as a language. It’s worth thinking about who those civil servants and politicians thought they were speaking to with that violence, beyond the apparent global audience of potential asylum seekers. At the time these decisions were being made the department in question was in the media almost daily. ‘The coverage was very critical,’ according to the report. Our capacity to imprison without trial was enlarged because it would send a message, a threatening one to those abroad seeking sanctuary and an emboldening one to those at home seeking enemies. Time and time again this same deterrent argument is used to prevent more humane treatment of refugees and migrants, whether it is then-Foreign Secretary Phillip Hammond arguing against stopping people drowning in the Mediterranean or Home Secretary Amber Rudd recently suspending the Dubs amendment, which gave 350 unaccompanied children refuge in the United Kingdom before it was deemed to have run its course (there are currently an estimated 13 million children displaced by conflict around the world). Using inhumanity as a deterrent is clearly a short-sighted way to deal with a vast movement of people. These arguments are made by politicians because there is assumed to be a receptive audience for them, not because they are sensible or right. This is the standard of political discourse at the moment, and it is the barren ground into which campaigners and journalists try to plant a seed of resistance towards immigration detention and the constellation of racist policies of which it forms a substantial part. Like Agamben’s Ancient Greeks, we still cling to the idea in politics that if something is true it will be inherently persuasive – if something bad is exposed to society, it will be fixed. But this also, obviously, depends in the first place on the values of the society in question. The government seems confident of the anti-immigrant fervour in this country, and, according to the lawyer Frances Webber, has moved further than any other European country in requiring average citizens to enforce the ‘hostile environment’ for immigrants – ‘staff in hospitals, local authorities, universities and colleges, prospective employers, bank staff and landlords, as well as road haulage contractors, train, airline and shipping operators,’ have all now become responsible for checking and reporting the immigration status of those they encounter. As long ago as 1987 the Conservative MP Jeremy Hanley complained that prison-like detention centres were unsuitable for people who, ‘after all, have not been convicted of any crime’. Yet years of concerted effort to forge a link between crime and immigration during the early 2000s – a phenomenon that academics have even formulated an ugly word for, ‘crimmigration’ – have allowed comments like this, by the Conservative minister Mims Davies in 2015, to become commonplace in defence of immigration detention – ‘A state cannot allow those who break the law to continue to live as though they have not done so. The rule of law depends on us upholding it appropriately.’ The sledgehammer irony was utterly lost on Davies, who presents detention as some kind of essential arm of the moral authority of the state and its laws, rather than an illegal innovation that threatens to fatally undermine them. * As January slipped into February this year, like many other listlessly outraged people I compulsively read the endless news reports about the executive order that President Donald Trump signed, banning entry to the U.S. from certain countries. What struck me in reading many of these reports were the accounts people gave to journalists as they, stranded in different parts of the world or at home in the U.S., searched for themselves in the language of the executive order, trying to work out if it applied to them, trying to work out if an aspect of their identity had taken on a sudden, dangerous legal dimension, on the heels of a dangerous political dimension which had been taking shape for quite some time. The scenes made me recall, involuntarily, a similar one of a young Austrian look- ing over recently published laws in a coffee house in Vienna in 1935. ‘I needed only to skim them and already I could perceive that they applied to me,’ wrote Jean Amery, decades later. ‘After I had read the Nuremberg Laws I was no more Jewish than a half hour before. My features had not become more Mediterranean Semitic, my frame of reference had not suddenly been filled by magic power with Hebrew allusions, the Christmas tree had not wondrously transformed itself in to the seven-armed candelabra.’ And yet ‘society ... had just made me formally and beyond any question a Jew, or rather it had given a new dimension to what I had already known earlier, but which at the time was of no great consequence to me, namely, that I was a Jew.’ Immediately after the U.S. election there was a largely white, male line of commentary arguing that something called ‘identity politics’ was to blame, that Hillary Clinton had spent too much time and energy specifically appealing to non-white, non-male people. In this mindset ‘identity politics’ is, bizarrely, the cause of racism rather than a reaction to it. Of course the politics of identity has been practiced consistently and relentlessly by Western states for a long time – indeed different European and American political cultures, from the rise of nationalism and colonialism in the eighteenth century, have always taken the political potential of identity very seriously, as Amery experienced. Immigration detention is part of this lineage of state identity politics, states attempting to define themselves against others based on a narrow, racialised under- standing of identity. It arose in Britain during a time of great post-colonial anxiety, and it’s no coincidence that it has expanded during the years after 9/11, a political period that has seen a worryingly casual attitude towards Islamophobia – culminating in the specific tone of the Brexit debate, and Trump. To detain people in this way, in a manner that would usually be expected to attract great scandal, you need to create a category of detainable person. As evidenced from the detention population, this category is overwhelmingly non-white, and from countries tied to Britain’s colonial past. There’s no reason why that category could not also generously expand, as it has done before. For now the outlook isn’t good. Theresa May has a poor record on detention, both in the Home Office and as prime minister. In March, in a half empty side room at the Houses of Parliament, a handful of cross party MPs attempted to hold Minister for Immigration Robert Goodwill to account. The most vocal anti-detention MPs, across all parties, tend to be those with detention centres in their constituencies – due to their regular contact with people in detention, and knowledge of their stories, they can’t ignore the reality of it. Those in the room heard many of these stories, along with news that the average time of detention was actually lengthening, that progress on abolishing the detention of pregnant women and children was still stalling, and that vulnerable people and those with mental health conditions continued to suffer in the system. As for Amir, the happy ending is also yet to come. He speaks excellent English, but still he worries that it won’t be enough to get him the kind of job he deserves, that he’s studying for, in an office rather than going door to door with surveys. He’s always on temporary contracts that only last a month or two, always looking for more work. On top of that the political climate worries him – he won’t feel safe in his status until he’s granted permanent residency in a few years. Until then, even though he’s been confirmed as a refugee, he lives in fear that the decision might somehow be reversed and he could end up in detention again or, worse, deported. Still, despite his present worries he continues to remember that day, when he looked back at Harmondsworth, from the outside, as one of the happiest in his life. The way he describes it to me he was almost delirious. He had only ever seen the surrounding area briefly through the windows of a transport van, at night, and had no idea how to get home. He got on the wrong bus, which took him up a side road, where the detention centre suddenly and unexpectedly becomes visible in full profile across an expansive green field. It was a light summer evening, and getting out and looking at the buildings, waiting for a bus to take him back the other way, he imagined all the people he knew still in there, still stuck in their rooms, still under the threat of deportation, and he told me over his coffee that he feels guilty now because in that moment he didn’t even feel sad for them, he just felt happy he wasn’t in there any more. ‘I never thought I would enjoy waiting for the bus,’ he told me, smiling. When he got back home to Walthamstow, his friends were there waiting for him.