Afghan translator who risked his life for Britain wins right to live here
Victory for Mail over abandoned interpreters
A FORMER Afghan translator and his family targeted by Taliban assassins have been granted sanctuary in Britain in a major victory for the Daily Mail’s Betrayal of the Brave campaign.
The 28-year- old interpreter known as Sam has been told that he should be allowed to come to the UK together with ten members of his family who are also threatened because of his work on the frontline for the British Army.
The unprecedented decision comes seven weeks after the Mail revealed how one of Sam’s brothers, 22-year-old Parwiz, who was also a translator for UK forces, was murdered by the Taliban on the doorstep of the family home.
The family moved to the Afghan capital Kabul but, two weeks later, Taliban gunmen tracked them down. Sam, who spent 18 months in Helmand with UK forces, was not at home so they tried to kidnap two more of his brothers at gunpoint. The pair, aged 17 and 14, escaped but were badly beaten, one needing eight stitches in a head wound.
Sam took his case to the spe- cially formed ‘intimidation unit’ in Kabul, which is examining claims made by more than 200 interpreters that their lives are in danger because of their work with British troops. He is the first to have his case recognised as requiring resettlement to the UK.
The Ministry of Defence has given the green light for him and his family to come to Britain.
A defence source said: ‘Investigations found Sam and his family to be under sufficient threat.’ The application has been sent to the Home Office for security checks and for final confirmation.
Last night former translators hailed the decision as a victory both for ‘decency’ and the Mail’s campaign, which highlighted the plight of interpreters claiming they have been abandoned to the Taliban by the UK Government.
One, a man called Rafi who was blown up in a blast which killed a British officer and has been fighting a legal battle in the UK courts to help his colleagues, said: ‘This is hugely significant and has come about because of the exceptional work done (by the Mail) in revealing the very real dangers faced by interpreters and their stories. The Government is recognising those dangers with their decision. Importantly, they also recognise the danger to extended families.’
Afghanistan veteran Major James Driscoll, whose petition calling for interpreters to be given a safe haven in Britain has attracted 174,000 signatures, said: ‘This case shows that they are admitting there is a clear threat to interpreters who have worked for the British Army.
‘This is not an isolated incident so now what about the rest? There is still a long way to go.’
The latest development – with its clear recognition of danger and the fact that Parwiz was murdered by insurgents – will also put new focus on the words of Armed Forces minister Penny Mordaunt, who was said to have told former Army chief Lord Dannatt that there were was ‘no major problem’ and that she was not aware of a single interpreter killed by the Taliban.
That conversation came two weeks after the Mail told how Taliban gunmen had gone to the house where Parwiz and Sam lived in Paktia province, near the border with Pakistan, in early August and shot Parwiz dead.
Ex-translators say the fact the first British officials knew of his death was when they read it in the Mail underlines the ‘lack of care’ by British authorities.
Sam has now been told that his wife and young son, five brothers, two sisters and mother will all be allowed to travel to the UK once medical and security checks have been carried out and passports obtained from Mail, August 29 Afghan authorities. Ironically, he has now been told not to talk to the media for ‘security reasons’. But he told a fellow translator: ‘I am thankful to the Daily Mail that told our story.
‘I believe it has helped to save our lives and this would not have happened without them. I will never forget what their journalists have done for us and my fellow interpreters. I thank the British Government too for its just decision.’
More than 100 former translators have their cases lodged with lawyers in Britain looking to challenge the UK’s policy that allows only those serving a full year with UK forces after December 2011 to come here.
British officials say the intimidation policy allows for all cases to be considered and that several ex-translators have received payments to move to other parts of the country deemed to be safer.
An MoD spokesman said: ‘We have had a permanent expert team based in Kabul since 2013 to thoroughly investigate claims of intimidation. They assist with relocations within Afghanistan and, where necessary, relocation to the UK.’
BETRAYAL OF THE BRAVE Taliban’s murder squads try to kill another translator Shot dead on his doorstep, Afghan translator who helped our troops
IT stands some three feet tall, has distinctive tufted ears and enormous paws, is exclusively carnivorous – needing several pounds of killed, bloody meat a day – and is at once elusive and elegant, loping and lethal. The last one in Scotland (to judge by one carbondated skull) met its end in about the middle of the 13th century.
And now there are very serious plans to restore the lynx, wild and free, to the Scottish countryside, in time up to 400 of them. The Scottish Wildlife Trust wants them back by 2065 at the latest.
Rewilding Britain, a group that wants to reintroduce lynx, bison, beavers and even wolves into Scotland – and the rest of the UK – recently announced it has appointed its first director.
Helen Meech joins from the National Trust, where she was assistant director for outdoors and nature engagement.
Rewilding Britain is also recruiting a Scotland-based director to ‘manage relationships with different stakeholders and opinion-formers to drive forward rewilding in Scotland’.
Meanwhile Donnie Broad, from Aberfeldy in Perthshire, runs an estate with a great many deer, wild horses and assorted exotics (moose, mouflon and bison), all within its electrically fenced 720 acres. Now he wants to try a few lynx.
‘We have badgers, foxes, otters, red squirrels, pine marten, hares, rats and small mammals as well as game, so we could find exactly what lynx do predate, and learn from it. Frankly, the system’s screwed without a top predator. There has to be more balance.’
Those big beasts of yore – the wolf, the bear, and the lynx – all survive on the Continent. In the British Isles, we harried them to extirpation long ago, the last bears perishing just before the Norman Conquest and the last wolves in the 18th century.
Man is understandably loathe to share his environment with wild animals that are not only a threat to his livestock but a threat to him. As late as 1580, a Highland clergyman noted of the Isle of Harris, as an obvious selling point, that ‘there are no wolves there.’ And killing something particularly fanged and clawed has always been thought rather dashing.
Today, the politics of returning serious carnivores to rural Scotland are, understandably, fraught – not least when one is dealing with Scottish Natural Heritage and when most of us are soft suburban types with little real knowledge of the countryside.
CERTAINLY, bringing back the bear is unthinkable: these are dangerous animals, slaying dozens of people worldwide every year. Restoration of the wolf would be most sensible – the European wolf has a very deep fear of man and in the entire northern hemisphere, through the past 500 years, only 17 people have been killed by one.
Paul Lister, heir to the MFI fortune, owns 28,000 acre Allendale Estate in Sutherland and thinks wolves would fit right in.
And improbably, Carolyn Leckie, ex the Scottish Socialist Party, is pro wolf, but her backing may be more about depriving big landowners of their shooting estates than promoting things lupine.
Anway the poor old wolf comes with such vast PR baggage: eerie howling from invisible packs; Little Red Riding Hood; the Three Little Pigs…
The European lynx arouses no such primal fear because few of us have ever seen the animal or know what it looks like. We think of it, if at all, as an outsized marmalade cat.
Its habits, besides, bolster the case f or a comeback. It is immensely shy and instinctively melts into the shadows if people approach. And its preferred environment is forest; the lynx does not care for open countryside without ready cover.
Accordingly, it would pose little threat to farmers’ livestock. Better still, its ideal prey – the roe deer – is, like all species of deer in Scotland, now in the wild in such numbers and so out of control as to be a seri- ous pest, not just in the destruction of forest but as the cause of many road accidents.
Indeed, if you tallied up the number of people killed or seriously injured in such incidents, deer are easily the most dangerous animals in Britain. Full-on attacks are not unknown; Kate Stone, 44, was fortunate late in 2013 – and only after emergency surgery – to survive a stag’s charge near Fort William.
And, by like statistical measure, domestic cattle remain a significant killer, crushing or trampling to death several people in Britain every year. All this rather puts the wolf and the lynx in perspective. Some actually argue that we owe them.
‘With climate change ruled out as a cause for the lynx’s extinction,’ insists Dr David Hetherington of the Cairngorms National Park Authority, ‘and forest clearance and persecution implicated instead, the Eurasian lynx now qualifies ethically for reintroduction.
‘Having the lynx may restore natural ecological processes to Britain’s forests missing since large carnivores were driven to extinction several centuries ago.’
The Highlands, Dr Hetherington enthuses, with so much modern afforestation and populations of deer quite out of control, ‘have created suitable conditions for a viable lynx population’.
He proposes two separate Scottish programmes; a major reintroduction in the heart of the Highlands, and a smaller scheme in eastern Dumfries and Galloway. One would start with 30 – but in time, he says, Scotland could support around 400 lynx. The Scottish Wildlife Trust has given its blessing and in 2013 a new charity, the Lynx UK Trust, was established.
It is already in talks with SNH about a tiny pilot scheme; two breeding pairs of Eurasian lynx, fitted with GPS tracking collars, would be released in ‘ an area of remote, heavily forested land on the West Coast of Scotland’ and monitored round the clock.
The collars could even be rigged to inject the animals with sedative i f they stray dangerously near livestock or a major road, says Dr Paul O’Donoghue, a Scottish wildcat expert now central to the plan.
‘If they go to places we don’t want them to go, we can sedate them remotely,’ he soothes. ‘It is possible to set up “geofences” – virtual fences defined by GPS – so we can make sure they stay in a defined area.’
But, as always in Scotland’s countryside, there are assorted interest groups who will need serious persuasion before a sleek, stealthy, muscled predator roughly the size of a Labrador is unleashed in the
glens. Eminent among these are farmers, crofters, the Countryside Alliance and the Scottish Gamekeepers Association. ‘Particular concerns would be the safety of livestock,’ says Diane Mitchell of the National Farmers Union, ‘ and t he increased stress levels in livestock resulting from these predators as well as any impact on local wildlife and biodiversity.’
Jamie Stewart, in charge of the Countryside Alliance in Scotland, i s no enthusiast either.
‘There are some concerns surrounding lynx as they do predominantly take ground birds and small mammals,’ Mr Stewart points out. ‘Scottish wildcat numbers are already struggling, so I think we should be concentrating on improving the numbers of those rather than trying to reintroduce a new predator to the environment.’
Behind such widespread unease is a palpable – though rarely voiced – distrust of SNH, responsible in law for allowing and controlling the reintroduction of past native species and whom many who know wild Scotland best wouldn’t send out to buy a loaf.
SNH have been severely criticised for what many see as mismanaged European beaver programmes i n Argyll and Perthshire – at one point its minions were releasing beavers in a Highland redoubt even as t hey were r o unding up others in Tayside – and, on the face of it, still more incompetent efforts to save the wildcat (some fear the number of true purebreds surviving may be as low as three dozen).
And then, of course, there is its sustained war on Uist hedgehogs, a sharp reminder that, in too many areas of Scotland, there have been too many irresponsible introductions.
Some nasties have ended up in our wilds by genuine accident, notably the North American signal crayfish, a wicked-looking sort of freshwater lobster that was released in England in the 1970s (for food) and has since scrabbled into Scotland, menacing the biodiversity of our rivers and especially our wild salmon systems.
So loathed is the signal crayfish by the powers-that-be that you are instructed to kill it on sight and it is a criminal offence to be caught in possession of a live one.
Others are a consequence of failed commercial ventures – notably feral North American mink, which proved better at escaping from 1950s fur-farms than these proved at turning a profit. Mink proved particularly calamitous on Lewis and Harris and only since 2001, and with welcome public funding, has a sustained eradication programme now reached the brink of success.
Some animals were brought in by foolish landlords, such as Herbert Woods of Raasay, who brought in crates of wild rabbits to an island hitherto wholly free of them, with devastating impact on crofters’ crops.
Today, there is more concern about the damage rabbits are doing to the unique coastal ‘machair’, shell-sand links most vulnerable to burrowing and erosion. And, then, there is no allowing for sheer stupidity. The fox released by one buffoon on Harris in the 1970s was quickly caught; the moles some settler brought up from his English redoubt to his holidayhome in northern Skye never were.
‘I thought the walled garden would keep them in,’ he later huffed; they are now an established pest.
Assorted incomers have established hedgehog populations on various islands, and their averred predation on the eggs of ground-nesting birds panicked SNH into a sustained cull in the Uists from 2002. This soon had to be modified to catch-and-mainland-release terms after the inevitable outcry and, over a decade later and after much public expense, numbers of the birds so threatened have continued, embarrassingly, to fall.
Even official reintroductions are not without risk. Whatever the occasional bluster from SNH and its surrogates, there is no doubt that the whitetailed sea eagle (successfully re- established from the early 1970s) does occasionally take a crofter’s lamb. So, for that matter, does the golden eagle. As long as the crofters are compensated, rather than met with bland denial, that has to be set against the undoubted beauty of these birds and the many visitors they draw.
The beavers of Knapdale are an even more interesting example because to the layman’s eye their impact (and they have been back in these Argyllshire wilds only since 2009) seems wholly destructive.
‘ There i s change afoot,’ panted writer Richard Rowe, visiting the area in 2010. ‘ All around, branches have been expertly lopped, trees felled, a footpath flooded and a lochan has almost doubled in size. For anyone wondering how much one family of beavers can alter a small patch of Scottish landscape, the answer is clear: rather a lot.’
THEY are a ‘keystone species’, points out Simon Jones, ‘creating conditions where many others can flourish. It is well studied overseas that the associated creation of ponds, the coppicing of woodland and mosaic edge of wetland and woodland are all hugely important for other wildlife.’ As for all that seemingly mangled woodland, trees and shrubs ‘ change shape, sprout up and keep growing in another f orm that creates niches for all sorts of life’.
The trial is ended; a final decision on beavers now rests with Scottish Government ministers. But what of the lynx?
Coming out in favour of its return, at year’s end, Jonny Hughes – chief executive of the Scottish Wildlife Trust – boomed: ‘It is important that we all understand the potential benefits of bringing back the lynx to our woodland ecosystems, but also to our forestry and tourism industries. At the same time we should understand the challenges that this beautiful once-native cat will bring with it.’
The biggest, perhaps, would be public nervousness. Inevitably there would be occasional human contact – cue outcry, Twitterstorm, rent- a- quote politicians, farmers brandishing shotguns…
Against that, how safe, virtuous, controlled and dull our increasingly risk-averse little Scotland is; how tempting the opportunity.
For rather than endless evergreen forestry, we may regain a little of t he wonder and enchantment that often seems missing in modern- day Britain.