Rather than granting gay Syrian refugee Jojo Jako Yakob asylum, the Scottish government offered him £46 to go back home, where he’ll surely face violent discrimination. [Scotsman]
Disgusting.
Help make sure LGBTQ+ stories are being told...
We can't rely on mainstream media to tell our stories. That's why we don't lock Queerty articles behind a paywall. Will you support our mission with a contribution today?
Cancel anytime · Proudly LGBTQ+ owned and operated
David
Minor point. It isn’t the Scottish government that has offered him the money, it is the UK government. Certain matters are dealt with locally by the Scottish government and some, such as immigration and asylum are dealt with by the UK government for all the constituent countries (Scotland, England, Wales, Northern Ireland).
Bill Perdue
According to the Scotsman, he could face more than violent discrimination. They said “HIS only crime was to be gay. For that he was half-drowned, brutally beaten and then fell into a coma. He survived, escaped from jail, fled his country and eventually arrived, exhausted and bedraggled, here in Scotland. And now the Government wants to send him back.
Gay rights activists demanded that homosexuals, such as Yakob, who were facing clear persecution in their homeland, should be granted asylum. But a spokesman for the Syrian Embassy responded by describing homosexuality as a ‘disease’, which the country sought to ‘treat’.”
The English government is applying a ‘fast track’ approach to deport the many asylum seekers held in their ‘detention’ camps in less than humane conditions. They recently held a hunger strike and refused to return to their cells to protest the callous and unjust English deportation proceedings. For many of them, their fate will be the same as that suffered by many European Jews who sought to flee Nazi Germany.
A not so minor point. The “UK”, like the Greater German Reich will disappear when Scotland secedes and Ireland is united and independent. The proper term for northern Ireland is English occupied Ireland.
Rob Moore
I must have read a different article. The one I read stated he was originally arrested for distributing anti-government leaflets. That is a crime in most dictatorships. The fact he is gay apparently became the motivation for savage beatings by the prison guards. That is also a hallmark of corrupt dictatorships, such as the Third Reich.
The support for secession in Scotland is not great enough to secede from a union that was created when a Scottish King succeeded to the English throne. Northern Ireland is no more occupied by the English than South Carolina is occupied by the Damn Yankees. Eire allowed the three northern counties to remain in the U.K. after a referendum. It hasn’t shown any recent inclination to want them back.
Bill Perdue
The sense of the articles in the Scotsman is that he feels that if he returned he’ll be persecuted for past actions and for being gay.
Ireland was forced to accept partition by the 1921 treaty and the nationalist movement has fought for unity and full independence since then primarily because of the violent apartheid style system inflicted on the Irish in the occupied North by colonists loyal to England.
The treaty, signed under duress is as valid as the treaties signed by nations invaded by the Nazis and Japanese during WWII. It’s as valid as treaties ceding Algeria to France prior to their war of Liberation. It’s as valid as treaties signed by the ‘south’ Vietnamese prior to 1972 and as valid as treaties between the US and Iraq or the US and the Sioux. That is to say it’s a fraud.
Regarding the drive for Scottish independence please see http : // www . guardian co . uk / commentisfree / 2007 / dec / 27 / scotland . politics
Rob Moore
The treaty of 1921 is at least as valid as the Treaty of Versailles ending World War I or the peace treaties signed by Germany, Italy, and Japan while under Allied occupation at the end of World War II. The Orangemen and the Provisionals waged a terror war against each for nearly 30 years with neither being able to defeat the other. When the Troubles started in the 1960s, the British sent in troops and set about suppressing both parties. I might add this was done with some brutality, but since neither the IRA nor the Orangemen were above bombings of civilians and murders of those they deemed enemies, their moral authority was somewhat diminished. I say this as someone whose maternal grandmother was from the Republic and lost three uncles in the Easter Rebellion. I was born outside London in Essex, but was still a Catholic. I have no problem with the Northern Counties reuniting with Ireland by popular choice, but murdering each other wasn’t working and left the region the poorest in the U.K. and poorer than the Republic the government of which was about as prone to jail captured Provisionals as the British. Eire developed itself and now prospers in a way Belfast only dreams because it set itself on a peaceful course over 8 decades ago. If it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have gone to such extreme measures as to maintain strict neutrality in World War II. It was Irish Americans who financed the Troubles not the Republic.
40% is hardly overwhelming support for Scottish independence. Most of that article was based on wishful thinking with about as much connection to reality as George Bush has. Scotland and England are much stronger together than separate with Scotland certainly the weaker of the two.