Sir, - Denis Staunton's report (February 16th) of the harrowing death of an Algerian asylum-seeker, Omar Ben Noui, after being hunted through the streets of an Eastern German village should serve as a warning to us in Ireland. Racism among Irish people can be quite virulent as evidenced, to our shame, by both refugees and asylum seekers.
Asylum seekers and refugees have not voluntarily left their homes to come to Ireland, no more than Irish people left their homes voluntarily in the past to escape famine or repression. We are working to eliminate the causes which have forced people like Omar Ben Noui to leave their beloved homeland of Algeria. Yet the international community refuses to act on Algeria. Our own Minister for Foreign Affairs, David Andrews, is no different. He claims to have a personal interest in Algeria, yet in his UN General Assembly speech, while mentioning areas of the world where human rights violations are occurring he did not mention Algeria. While the Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, was in Ireland, the only way we drew the Secretary General's attention to Algeria was to picket Iveagh House on his arrival there.
The Commission of Human Rights is due to meet in Geneva in March and Algeria is significantly missing from its agenda. Yet massive human rights violations continue in Algeria, with the result that more and more people have to flee from the repression, and when they reach European shores they receive not only a cold response but in the case of Omar Ben Noui a brutal death. -Yours, etc.,
Brendan Butler, Ireland-Algeria Solidarity Group, Upper Camden Street, Dublin 2.