The Wexford asylum seeker tragedy
Kurdistan Solidarity Ireland's fundraising effort for a memorial plaque
'The day hope ran out' so ran the headline of the Wexford Echo December 12th, 2001, describing the horrific tragedy of 8 December in which eight people, four of them children were found dead in the container of a truck in Drinagh Industrial Park, Wexford.
The dead were part of a group of thirteen asylum seekers; an Albanian and Algerian man and eleven others of Kurdish origin from southeast Turkey. Those who died were all from the predominantly Kurdish region of southeast Turkey.
Survivor Karadade Guler from Muras, Elbistan lost his wife Saniye, and two children; Imam, aged nine and Berkan, aged four.
Kadriye Kalendergil, also from Elbistan survived but lost her husband, Hasan and children; Zeliha, aged 10 and Kalendar, aged 12.
Two unrelated young men, Yuksel Ucaroglu from Antep and Mostafa Demir from Aksaray also died.
Sixteen year old Eyup Isik from Antep survived as did the Algerian and Albanian men who are currently living in Ireland.
The tragedy touched Irish people and assistance in the form of money and messages of support flooded into a bank account set up by the hospital chaplain and social worker. The calamity was the talk of Wexford and fundraisers and whip-rounds were organised to demonstrate the sympathy locally for the victims and the bereaved.
Members of the Kurdish community in Ireland visited the survivors and relatives at Wexford general hospital and helped to support them with personal donations, interpreting and making arrangements for the repatriation of the bodies.
Politicians from all sides expressed sympathy and horror at the terrible losses. Everybody agreed that the traffickers who had exposed these most vulnerable people to this horrific death for profit deserved the full opprobrium for their callous involvement. However, an over-emphasis on 'bringing human traffickers to justice' was, at one stage obscuring the very real dangers and hardships that had provoked these asylum seekers to risk their own and their loved-ones' lives.
Asylum seekers from southeast Turkey
According to the World Refugee Survey 2000 (US Committee for Refugees) Turkey has the fifth largest internally displaced population in the world with between 0.5 and one million people, mainly Kurds, in refugee camps, shanty towns or squatter settlements around Turkey.
Turkey was the third most common country of origin of asylum seekers coming to western Europe between 1990-99 (according to the State of the World's Refugees UNHCR 2000 Oxford University Press p 160).
More than 300,000 asylum seekers of Turkish origin came to Western Europe in this period. The majority, though not all of these, claim Kurdish identity.
In the early 1990s, more than 2,500 Kurdish villages in the southeast of Turkey were forcibly evacuated by the Turkish army, resulting in the displacement of more than one million people.
In Turkey, there is 'systematic torture' of detainees, widescale arbitrary arrest of political activists and of human rights workers and their officials.
At the time of writing there is an ongoing hunger strike by political prisoners where more than 40 prisoners have died in twelve months.
The human rights abuses, the cultural and political repression and the economic hardship which the citizens of the predominantly Kurdish southeast of Turkey suffer has been well documented by Human Rights Watch, by Amnesty International and by the Human Rights Association in Turkey.
Although there are at least 25 million Kurds in the Middle East they have no state of their own and their identity and nationality are disputed. So, consequently is their right to asylum. This is particularly true of Kurds in Turkey where the constitution and laws makes the assertion of a Kurdish identity a treasonable offence.
The Wexford victims were described as Turkish in almost every Irish media report.
Kurdistan Solidarity Ireland spoke to the relatives and survivors in Wexford in December. They were very appreciative of the support and sympathy extended to them by members of the public, by the hospital staff who were particularly compassionate and by the officials from the Department of Justice who assisted them in many ways.
In accordance with the wishes of the relatives of those who died, KSI hopes to mount a plaque to the victims in Wexford so that they will not become nameless victims of 'fortress Europe' and of the persecution and hardship that drives people to leave their homes, their families and all that is familiar to them. In this we also wish to mark the fact that unfortunately, more than 150 years after the Irish famine, 'coffin ships' continue to exist.
We are working now to raise funds for the memorial, and to bring over their family members to help us to acknowledge the terrible human loss that occurred on December 8th 2001.
We invite you to contribute to this fund to
Kurdistan Information Network at
TSB, 70 Grafton Street, Dublin 2 no. Sort code 990610 A/c no. 00486001
or send cheque payable to the above at
12 Avonbeg park, Tallaght, Dublin 24.
Kurdistan Solidarity Ireland can be contacted at:
kurdsol@iol.ie
or by phone at 01 4621626 / 086 8805826
Website: Kurdistan Soldarity Ireland
Related Link
Press Statement from Solidarity with Hunger Strikers in Turkey - from December 2001