The People on the Boats

Amid a crisis over asylum in the UK, a UN translator dies at sea

The beach near Calabria where a boat carrying 250 migrants crashed on 25 February. Journalist and UN translator Torpekai Amarkhel was among them. Embedded in the landscape photo is a picture of her UN ID.

Before I get to this important story, I just want to make an appeal. Today, I was let go of my fact-checking job at a weekly online magazine. It’s business, I understand. It’s a blow, however.

When I entered Columbia Journalism School in August 2001, the seasoned professors told us the journalism business would be tough. I was warned. Still, I believed in myself, especially after a few early successes. Besides that, I love my job. I still do. There is no other profession in the world like it. I have gone to places others won’t go, seen things that many won’t see and written stories that helped unjustly sentenced prisoners in Oklahoma gain early release, highlighted racial injustice and black history and hand-delivered money and sports kit for refugees in Iraq so that they can have some relief and maybe some hope.

It keeps getting harder and harder to do my job, however. Opportunities are available, but the talent pool is bigger — and younger. Good stories are still out there, but it takes more and more effort to cut through the noise, the “click bait”, the influencers, the cult of celebrity. I still believe, however. I have faith that shoe-leather, original, heartfelt reporting and writing makes a difference in people’s lives. I have seen it many, many times. Still, it’s hard to remember that during stretches like this. I ask for your support now, more than ever. More than half my income is now gone. If you like my work, please subscribe to this newsletter. If you want to hire me, I have many, many ideas. If you have a kind word, I could use one. But above all, please keep reading.

-Adrian Brune, 13 March 2023

To think of the people…

on boats coming to the West from places like Iraq, Turkey, North Africa and other regions that are undergoing economic or conflict crises as nobodies — poor, unemployable, unskilled people who would land in an EU country, seek asylum and try to build a life, while taking government resources from citizens — is not only wrong, it is the exact thing leaders like Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Home Secretary Suella Braverman want their contingency to think. It’s incredibly easy — and lazy — to assume that migrants will be exploit money, housing and education, that natural-born citizens need, then bankrupt the government. Just as zero thought was given by the English and French coast guards to the 27 Iraqi lives that went down with their boat in the English Channel in November 2021, not much more is bestowed on the people who died off the coast of Calabria on 26 February 2023 — except how to get rid of them.

But considering anybody on a boat coming to safe harbor in this regard is not only inhumane, it’s also literally, dead wrong.

Torpekai Amarkhel spent her life as a journalist in Afghanistan, first as a reporter, and then as a presenter for National Radio Television Afghanistan (RTA) for four years. When the U.S. invaded Afghanistan in 2001, she eventually went to work for the Public Relations Department of the United Nations Assistance Mission (UNAMA) as a translator and then for UNAMA News, which made her a mark when the Taliban returned to power in 2021. Before leaving for Turkey — the second stop in a journey to Rotterdam to join her sister — Amarkhel documented the situation of women in Afghanistan in photos, which is prohibited by the Taliban. In that act, she practically sealed her arrest, torture and likely execution warrant from the new government in Kabul.

Despite years at the UN agency, UNAMA did not evacuate her and her family to a safe country — neither did the UK or the US, allies in the War on Terror. “Torpekai was really a hardworking girl. She was friendly to all her colleagues,” said her friend, Yasmin Yarmal, a former employee of RTA who now lives abroad. “She had been trying to not only become a successful anchor, but also to have skills in dubbing, and editing. She used to pay all the expenses of her family.”

Former UN contractor, Torpekai Amarkhel (right) with (from left) her cousin Basira and Basira's two children, Ayesha, 9, and Osman, 5. All four died in the boat accident off the coast of Calabria on 26 February.

Therefore, on 25 February, Amarkhel, her cousin Basira, and Basira’s 35-year-old husband Samiullah, their nine-year-old daughter Ayesha, and their five-year-old son Osman boarded a wooden boat off Turkey’s coast and nearly arrived at its destination: Italy. But the wooden boat crashed in Cutro, near Crotone, off the island of Calabria. On board were 250 migrants — around 80 of which were Afghan nationals. More than 40 people are still missing.

Earlier this week, Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman unveiled yet another plan to deal with the small boats crisis plaguing England and the EU. Sunak’s proposal involves legislation that will ban anyone who arrives in the UK via an “irregular route” from seeking asylum. It’s a version of the same distinction instituted by the Nationality and Borders Act last year, yet the small boats only increase, with 45,756 people arriving in the UK in 2022 and 2,950 people landing in Dover so far this year. 

UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak introducing the Illegal Migration Bill, which would severely narrow any pathway to asylum in the UK, last week.

Sunak and Braverman (nicknamed by some as “Cruella”) are both high-achieving children of immigrants (Braverman’s parents were Indians who emigrated to Britain in the 1960s from Mauritius and Kenya; Sunak’s were from similar backgrounds, except his mother came from Tanzania). And they have enveloped the debate as a decision of “criminal gangs,” not the government, allowing desperate people into the country. “Those illegally crossing the Channel are not directly fleeing a war-torn country… or persecution… or an imminent threat to life,” Sunak said in his speech to introduce the “Stop the Boats” bill. “They have travelled through safe, European countries. They are paying people smugglers huge sums to make this dangerous, and sometimes tragic, journey.

“The reason that criminal gangs continue to bring small boats over here is because they know that our system can be exploited…”

Sadly, the criminal gangs are not the first to exploit migrants and refugees.  During the subsequent invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. and its allies, including the UN, used people like Amarkhel for their acumen and took advantage of their desire to change the countries they called home. A recent documentary Retrograde by National Geographic shows the last few months of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan, including the final scenes of families who worked for the U.S. Armed Forces begging troops to allow them on planes, holding up certified papers, visas and passports — or any other kind of proof that they supported the occupation. If these people don’t remain in their countries under genocidal theocracy, they wind up in teeming refugee camps in Pakistan and Iran, such as Makaki Camp. At worst, armed fighters in or near the camps shoot and kill children, as they did last November in Makaki. At best, the Afghans there face food shortages, little, if any, health or psychological care, idleness, price gouging by camp store owners and no way out. 

The Hassan Sham IDP camp in Northern Iraq, which houses 6,000 people, including many children of ISIS fighters. Life is bleak in Hassan Sham, named after the village destroyed by ISIS next to the camp. Nothing gets in and nothing gets out, and in an attempt to push people out, aid is cut daily.

It’s a grim turn of events — one likely to convince anyone to risk their lives for something better or potentially take their own lives from misery and hopelessness. 

A year ago, I met a young man in Northern Iraq named Reband Hussein, Hussein, 29, was a mountaineer, musician and somewhat of a Renaissance man in Choman, near the border of Iran. He came from a good family and had an otherwise decent life, but the infrastructure didn’t exist for Reband to pursue his goals of leading expeditions, despite its vast mountains, and didn’t offer the training he wanted. Hussein felt hopeless and so he left for better horizons, making it to Italy where he nearly boarded a boat for the UK. The border police stopped Hussein in Austria and turned him back. He called his cousin, Omar, who had worked for countless Western news outlets and military outfits during the Iraqi occupation, from Baghdad with nowhere to go and not a cent to his name, having spent all of his money to get to the West. Today, Reband is back in Northern Iraq, seeking another way to achieve his dreams — much like Amarkhel. He is alive; she is now dead. 

So far, neither the United Nations nor the European Commission on Human Rights — the one that Sunak has seriously contemplated leaving to enact his “boat ban” — have made any kind of statement on the loss of Amarkhel or her family. It’s a serious omission for a former employee who contributed so much to its mission. But the UN is often loathe to acknowledge its human errors, just as the EU and UK in November 2021. Yet Google “UN and Amarkhel” and a long list of press releases and articles detail her work toward the West’s failed mission in Afghanistan. It is an online grave reminding us all of our governments’ failure to live up to its diplomatic promises and reminder of the redemption we owe people like Amarkhel, yet continue to refuse them.