On 26 June, 28-year-old Sudanese asylum seeker Badreddin Abadlla Adam was shot dead by armed Police Scotland officers, dozens of whom stormed the Park Inn Hotel, after he used a knife to stab and injure six people, including three asylum seekers and a police officer. Police representatives were quickly on the scene to confirm the fatality and injuries, assuring the press and public of their safety and that the police ‘are not routinely armed’ despite having to ‘deal with these types of scenarios’. SNP First Minister Nicola Sturgeon and other politicians rushed to praise the bravery and professionalism of the police, while away from the cameras traumatised asylum seekers were handcuffed and left on the streets for hours without access to water, food or clothes. DOMINIC MULGREW reports.
False and demonising media headlines of ‘three people stabbed to death’ and ‘crazed knife fiend’ blurred the facts of what had actually happened; this dehumanising being used to defend the racist state and its immigration system, while placating any public concern over the proportionality of the police response. With the police now claiming to have used a taser which failed to disable Badreddin before he was lethally shot, it will be up to anti-racists to oppose and expose ruling class attempts to bury the blame for what happened, through lies and racism, ‘independent investigations’, long drawn-out inquiries and legal trickery. As we have seen in the US, in a racist society it is only when people rebel on the streets that Black Lives truly matter.
Badreddin Abadlla Adam
On 1 July FRFI supporters joined the Stand Up To Racism demonstration outside the Home Office centre on Brand Street to demand an end to hotel detention and justice for asylum seekers. Surrounded by police, a Sudanese woman asylum seeker bravely addressed the crowd:
‘I’m just holding my rage… you can feel it, I am shivering at the moment because I’m so angry for the system. I am so angry, and my rage is valid and I’m not apologising about it. What happened on Friday, it’s a crime. There is no justification whatsoever for the police to use an excessive force… Knife attack is a normality…in Glasgow…but we never heard about police shooting in 50 years in Scotland! [Badreddin was killed] …because he was BLACK, he was BLACK…if you’re black your life is in jeopardy!
‘[Badreddin was] from Darfur and he fled the war there but now he came and he finally got killed here. He went through Libya, who knows about Libya and what’s happening there? Badreddin went through everything, exploitation, human trafficking, you know that, you can just name it, every human rights violation he went through it and he finally came here and no proper assessment or whatsoever has been done to see what he needs, instead they just locked him in that prison, it is detention, they locked him there…’
Badreddin was one of up to 500 asylum seekers in Glasgow who, since the beginning of April, had been forcibly moved out of safe accommodation and into cramped hotels where social distancing is impossible and prison like conditions are being enforced. Some were given less than an hour’s notice to leave the flats they were being accommodated in by Home Office sub-contractor, MEARS Group plc. The company has been in charge of housing asylum seekers in Scotland, the north of Ireland and parts of England since September 2019, having been awarded ten-year government contracts worth £1bn.
He was not the first person to lose his life. On 5 May, a Syrian man Adnan Olbeh died in McLays Hotel; his death is being treated as ‘unexplained’ by Police Scotland. Like Badreddin, in the weeks and days before his death Adnan had complained about the oppressive conditions in the hotel. According to friends and fellow asylum seekers both men had shown signs of a serious deterioration in their mental health, but despite concerns being raised nothing was done. At the start of June more than 20 asylum seekers began to refuse the inedible food being served to them, and on 17 June a protest took place in George Square in support of their demands, which included ‘an immediate change to food in the hotel’, ‘reinstatement of weekly financial support’ and ‘end hotel detention – provide safe accommodation’.
The state’s response was indifference and contempt, along with threats of deportation if people continued to complain. Police Scotland allowed the protest to be attacked by hundreds of loyalists and the Scottish Police Federation subsequently blamed both sides for ‘disorder’, claiming that ‘non-compliance with the coronavirus restrictions is a serious issue’ and that those who gather to protest are ‘breaking the law pure and simple’.
On 5 July, Glasgow’s SNP council announced it had agreed with the Home Office a ‘temporary ban’ on taking in new asylum seekers, in order to ‘ease pressures’ in the city. In doing so, the SNP council laid the blame for the hotel detention crisis and the subsequent deaths and injuries onto the victims of all these things, the asylum seekers who have fled imperialist wars and persecution, while deflecting it away from the racist Home Office and its money-grabbing private contractors.
The only way forward is resistance and it is up to all of us to take up this fight. No amount of appeals to the ruling class, or their racist system, or their paid politicians, for ‘fairness’ or ‘humanity’ will secure justice. It is only when people take to the streets and confront the ruling class, their racist police and politicians, that any real justice can be won. This is one of the greatest lessons of the US Black Lives Matter protests which have forced the arrest and charging of the killers of George Floyd. Asylum seekers on the frontline of the struggle against the British state, who have seen the reality of imperialism on both sides of the water, know this only too well and we must unite with their resistance in order to defend the interests of the whole working class in this country.
