Why Shamima Begum Should Be Allowed Back To the UK

by Miranda Gent



The country has been torn by strong debate recently over the somewhat hasty decision made by the foreign secretary to prevent Shamima Begum, a woman of nineteen who fled to Syria to join Isis in 2015, from returning to Britain after her pleas to the media to return. 

Shamima contacted the media in early February, thinking it the best way to reach out to her family after a long period of no communication, in the hopes that she would be able to return to Britain and access the help of the NHS with her pregnancy, and to provide her unborn child with a bright and stable future. However, the home secretary, Sajid Javid, responded by stripping Shamima of her British citizenship.

As a result, Shamima has been left stranded in a Syrian camp and her child has died, just as her other two children did, due to poor living conditions, malnourishment and the lack of vital healthcare that she desired her child to receive.
In my opinion, this is completely wrong.

Firstly, I think that this is wrong because by banning Shamima from the country, refusing her medical help and leaving her nationless, the UK has breached the Universal Human Rights Act. Not just once, but multiple times.

Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Act clearly states;
“1: Everyone has the right to a nationality
2. No one should be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality”

The government and police attempted to avoid this article by pointing out that  Shamima could claim the right to a Bangladeshi nationality, due to her heritage, but Bangladesh have out rightly refused to allow her into their country either. Thus, Shamima has been left nationless, and by denying her of her nationality and leaving her stateless, the home secretary and the entirety of the British government has violated the rights of a nineteen –year old British girl. Moreover, they have violated a greater number of rights than one, and as a result not just one, but three British children have died.
Not only have the British government cast aside Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Act in the case of Shamima Begum, but also Articles 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11, which articulate everyone’s right to equality before the law, right to effective judiciary, right to ban on arbitrary detention, right to public hearing and the right to the presumption of innocence until proved guilty by a fair trial. Thus, a total of six Human Rights have been denied to Shamima Begum, by her own country and the very people who are supposed to support and monitor her, and evidently failed momentously at both these tasks.

Therefore, legally, Shamima has every right to return to the country and be tried fairly in a British court as a result of her actions and to receive any future healthcare that she and any children of hers need, as are the rights of a British citizen.

Secondly, I would argue that when Shamima travelled to Syria with two other schoolgirls of similar ages in 2015 she was only fifteen; a minor. Therefore, I believe that we should indeed, “re-evaluate” her situation, as she requested, and show her some sympathy.

The group of three girls, of which Shamima was one, were known as, “The Bethnal Green Girls”. It is thought that their escapade was aided, or orchestrated, by a woman from Glasgow who joined Isis in 2013 and has communicated with the girls electronically. As well as this, we know that the girls were groomed online by Isis members prior to their departure. Fifteen is a youthful and vulnerable age and I am under the impression that these girls were manipulated and brainwashed by proper gander into believing that joining Isis would be a good thing for them, which is a sickening thought. As Shamima said in an interview, “I thought that it was the right thing to do”.

Personally, I think that the recruitment of these girls is really the most significant part of the issue and that the police should be investigating and focusing on how this situation was able to arise and how it can be prevented in future, so that other girls and women do not suffer the same fate as Shamima. As her father said, ““My daughter was a little child, she made a mistake, she didn’t properly understand”.
Certainly, Shamima certainly did seem to be just a child, as the group of three girls were all described as being ordinary, intelligent, young school-girls and Shamima herself has been described as, “A straight As student”. So, I think that the matter we need to be exploring is why did these three young and intelligent girls feel the need to leave their country and join a terrorist group? Surely we need to be reflecting on ourselves as a country and culture, as to why this was made possible to happen?
After the disappearance of the girls, their families travelled to Turkey in pursuit of them, finding investigations by the police inadequate, but were not able to locate their daughters.
We now know that Shamima had joined a woman’s centre in Syria, where she stated that she would like to be married, and Isis arranged the marriage for her. Yago Riedijk, who is now Shamima’s husband, says that he was initially not interested in Shamima because of her age, as at the time she was fifteen and he was twenty-three. However, they married 10 days after meeting and Yago adopts a very casual attitude to what, in Britain, would’ve been classified as underage marriage, saying that it was, “her choice”. Furthermore, they certainly seem to have a loving relationship, as both speak highly of each other regularly and, in a recent interview, Yago said, “Tell her that I love her”, as the interviewer was going on to meet Shamima later.

However, there is no footage of the couple together, so the quality and healthiness of their relationship still remains ambiguous, and personally their relationship is definitely something that concerns me because of the significant age gap between them and Shamima’s youth and vulnerability, particularly at the start of their relationship. In fact, in the UK, it considered to be rape for an adult to have sex with a child under the age of sixteen, so one could definitely question the morality of Yago’s actions and Shamima’s true contentment with her situation.

After marrying Yago, Shamima lived as a house-wife, caring for her husband and the two children that she had during their time together before they were separated when her husband was taken by Syrian forces; they are both now held at separate camps in Syria.

During the time while Shamima and Yago were living together she witnessed mainly acts of violence, such as beheadings, as attendance is expected by both men and women who are part of Isis, and has told the media that she was, “Ok with it”. Her justification for this was, “Because, you know, I started becoming religious just before I left. From what I heard Islamically that is all allowed. So I was Ok with it”. This is one of the main quotes that has been used against Shamima, evoking reactions of horror to her story and desire to return to Britain, but what I would like to emphasise is that Shamima uses the past tense, and is referring to the point in time when she was still living out her vision of creating her own family and living as a wife and mother, before she began to regret her decisions, which she says that she did later on.

Additionally, I would like to emphasise that the quotations used above are taken from an interview just hours after Shamima gave birth, which makes me seriously question the appropriateness of the behaviour from the British journalists and media teams involved in this situation, and the respect that they have demonstrated to Shamima. Moreover, I would view the media’s behaviour as aggressive and violating, as they evidently invaded the privacy of someone in sensitive situation, as she was sure to be both physically and emotionally drained after giving birth to her third child, at just the age of nineteen.

Although Shamima says that she didn’t initially regret joining Isis, “Only at the end after my son died. I realised I had to get out for the sake of my children”.

Despite this, she claims that being part of Isis made her, “A stronger, tougher person”, which I assume means that she feels as if she has gained personally from witnessing all the horrors that she must have seen. Thus, all of these quotes give me the impression that Shamima has been indoctrinated to believe that these experiences are positive ones, and I believe that they allude to the kind of thinking that the terrorists nurture and develop, and there is strong evidence that Isis enforce this way of thinking in a very violent and merciless manner. In fact one can infer that members of Isis, such as Shamima and her husband once were, live in fear of their leaders and peers just as much as their enemies do.

One can infer such a concept as Yago himself expressed this sentiment exactly in an interview with the press, in which he described himself as a, ”victim” saying that he, “lived in fear” and was imprisoned and tortured by other Isis members when he renounced his allegiance to the group. 

Furthermore, when describing some of the aggression that he witnessed as part of the Islamic State he spoke of a woman he watched being stoned because of fornication.

Furthermore, a lawyer representing Kadiza Sultana, one of the other girls from the, ”Bethnal Green Trio”, who is now believed to be dead, told ITV that Kadiza had been thinking of attempting to flee Isis, but was too afraid after another girl, named Samara Kesinovic, was beaten to death for trying to escape.

This gives us an insight into the life that Shamima lived for four years, and conveniences me that Shamima is a victim of her own reckless and blindly optimistic decision, not an enemy to the UK. After all, Shamima was only fifteen when she left the country; she was just a child. Personally, I am horrified by the nation’s reaction to the pleas for safety from a young woman who ran away as a child in the hope of starting a family, perhaps enthralled by the proper gander she was shown and excited at the thought of doing something so radical as to leave the country without a warning and running into a warzone. Perhaps she thought it would be liberating, but the reality that she found was very different.

Although Shamima’s true motives when joining Isis are unknown, her main attraction to the Islamic state group appears to have mainly been the notion of starting a family, “At first it was nice, it was like how they showed it in the videos, like, “come, make a family together”. However, her vision of perfect family life did not last long, as her first daughter died from malnutrition, then her son died  and then her husband was taken by Syrian forces and now faces a six year jail sentence for his involvement with Isis if he returns to his country; Holland, which he hopes to, along with Shamima.
To conclude, I believe that it is our job as a country to account for our citizens and their actions and that we should allow Shamima to return and give her a fair trial before any allegations are made against her. Furthermore, I believe that her citizenship should be fully restored, should she still wish to return to Britain, and that she should receive a formal apology and compensation for her treatment.



Comments

  1. We should be giving apologies and compensation to someone who has been confirmed as a high terror suspect, and left the UK to go and join a terrorist group? Really?

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