Which bit of the answer to the question “Purpose of visit?” did the Border Agency staff in Nairobi not understand? To travel to London to receive a Parliamentary Press Gallery award from the Speaker of the House of Commons for services to the promotion and defence of press and democratic freedom, was the answer.
Yet, and in spite of being endorsed by his employer, the BBC’s Mohamed Olad Hassan was refused a visa to enter Britain (see story page 5). He was told he had supplied insufficient documentation, including proof of earnings. Olad was dealing with the High Commission in Nairobi, the nearest diplomatic mission to his home in Mogadishu, hundreds of miles across the Kenyan-Somalian border.
Although interviewed twice he was never told he should bring such documentation. The overriding concern of the Border Agency officials appears to have been that Olad and his wife Naima would demand political asylum once they reached Britain, a risible notion given Olad’s single-minded determination to report on the plight of his people to the wider world.
Because of the bureaucratic paranoia which results in people of Olad’s nationality, colour and religion (he is Muslim), being treated as second-class citizens, his chance to be recognised in person for that was bluntly denied. In a classic Catch-22 hurdle, no minister would have been able to intervene to knock some common sense into the heads of the keepers of the red tape in Nairobi because a minister can only deal with properly completed applications. And, of course, Olad did not possess a properly completed application.
If it has achieved nothing else, Olad’s attempt to visit Britain, with its democratic institutions and free press, to collect an award for his attempts to uphold and bring similar pillars of democracy to his own country exposes the labyrinthine and institutionally racist system to which upstanding and honourable people such as Olad are subjected.
Ministers, who must feel somewhat hamstrung themselves, might want to take a close look at the way border control rules are being implemented for the sake of greater fairness. At the very least, they should ensure that they can in future intervene when common sense needs to prevail.
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Bloody Sunday was the moment the Troubles began to spiral out of control, prolonging unrest, aiding the IRA’s recruitment and costing more lives. The perfunctory and insultingly whitewashed Widgery report exacerbated anger and the belief that British Army troops had been allowed to shoot unarmed civilians attending a peaceful protest on British streets with impunity and official cover-up.
The Saville report took too long and therefore cost more than it should have. But that is not the point. Its conclusions deliver a truth that had to be told: the victims were innocent – official. A climactic and hopefully cathartic truth that brings justice and vindication for the families, friends and the peoples of Ireland after 38 years
