Episkopi refugees on hunger strike

By Hamza Hendaw

MORE THAN half of the 68 illegal immigrants held by British military authorities in Cyprus since October began a hunger strike yesterday to protest against what they see as the delay in deciding their fate.

The immigrants, detained at the Episkopi military base, and a spokesman for the British bases in Cyprus said 39 of the mostly Arab and Kurdish refugees refused lunch and dinner yesterday. They include 12 children and four women, two of whom are pregnant, according to the refugees. The strike followed a 60-minute meeting between the detainees and British officials from the bases. The meeting was also attended by representatives of the UNHCR, the United Nations’ main refugee agency.

Held at the request of the detainees, the meeting ended on a negative note when the British officials refused to meet demands by the immigrants. These included a deadline for a decision on their asylum requests, that they be set free in a civilian area pending the resolution of their cases and for the United Nations to extend them legal aid.

“We understand their frustration, but they are illegal immigrants and all we can do is to treat them decently and humanely, which is what we are doing, until a decision is made on their case” said bases’ spokesman Captain Jon Brown. “We have medical services on stand-by in the case of an emergency resulting from the strike,” he told the Cyprus Mail.

Several detainees reached at Episkopi by telephone said they planned to continue the strike indefinitely, but that young children would have to be fed. The refugees were saved from what looked like a certain death when British troops last October plucked them from a ramshackle boat which had almost sunk off the British air base of Akrotiri. They had paid thousands of dollars to middlemen in Lebanon to be taken to Italy, but their boat developed mechanical problems less than two days after they sailed off the northern Lebanese port of Tripoli.

The Cyprus Mail is the only English-language daily newspaper published in Cyprus. It was established in 1945 and today, with its popular and widely-read website, the Cyprus Mail is among the most trusted news sites in Cyprus. The newspaper is not affiliated with any political parties and has always striven to maintain its independence. Over the past 70-plus years, the Cyprus Mail, with a small dedicated team, has covered momentous events in Cyprus’ modern history, chronicling the last gasps of British colonial rule, Cyprus’ truncated independence, the coup and Turkish invasion, and the decades of negotiations to stitch the divided island back together, plus a myriad of scandals, murders, and human interests stories that capture the island and its -people. Observers describe it as politically conservative.