Letter from Iceland #40
The "three women give the government a spanking" edition
Halló!
I know it’s only been a day (did you miss me?) but I so wanted to share this story because it’s the most badass metal thing I have heard in months and I have so much admiration and respect for these three women: Bergþóra Snæbjörnsdóttir, Kristín Eiríksdóttir and María Lilja Þrastardóttir, for what they did.
It was too long to write, so you get spoken word this evening!
(The story is 12 minutes long)
Warning: If hearing of unconditional support for the people of Gaza bothers you, I recommend you skip this one.
Ceasefire now! ✌️🇵🇸
Transcript
(Slightly edited for clarity)
Hi, it's Alda here.
I just wanted to jump in really quickly and share with you a story of something that I just think is so cool. Something that happened here that I just heard about last night. And so, just a bit of context. I, like many other Icelanders and people all around the world, am absolutely horrified and shocked and appalled at what is happening in the Middle East. And specifically what I mean is the Israeli bombing of Gaza. And we have many Palestinians living in Iceland, well, many … a number. And some of those have come as asylum seekers and been granted asylum in the last couple of years. And some of those have their families still in Gaza and have applied to have them brought to Iceland. I mean, I think people can generally apply to have their families come if they are children or if they are aged parents over the age of 67.
And so these people have obviously applied to have their families brought from Gaza, to be unified with their families again. And there's been a major push here among the general population, and of course the Palestinians living here and their supporters, for the government to actually, actively do something about getting these people who have already been approved for asylum in Iceland, out of Gaza, off of the besieged territories, and to be brought here. And the government has been dithering and lying and saying that it's an impossibility, and they can't do it now. And they have to, you know, formulate new policies.
Just yesterday, Bjarni Bendiktsson, who many of you will know is the head of the Independence Party, was minister of finance and was disgraced and forced to step down, which for him actually meant switching ministries. So he is now minister of foreign affairs. And he was on television just yesterday talking about this vast impossibility of helping people to get out of Gaza. Anyway, it's been a very contentious issue and the government has been heavily criticized. There were people camping out in front of the parliament buildings for a month in the freezing cold, they literally slept in tents there. And I'm talking about these are Palestinian citizens who have their children and their their families in Gaza, and are understandably, completely nonsensical with worry about their nearest and dearest because as we know, people are being killed by the thousands.
So anyway, Bjarni Bendiktsson, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, criticized these people sleeping in tents, he didn't want to see them there, he didn't want to look at them when he was going to work in the morning, whatnot. Anyway, they removed the tents. But they have a lot of support among the civilian population.
Right.
Cut to something else.
Which is that I am a member of the Writers Union here in Iceland. And I have been working with a couple of other writers to formulate a statement on behalf of many of the writers in the Writers Union, not actually the union itself, because the union doesn't take part in political lobbying, so we've been doing it ourselves, the members of the Writers Union. And it's basically to petition the government to apply themselves for a ceasefire in Gaza, to give all Palestinians who are currently in Iceland automatic refuge here, and to help with the unification of these families.
So, I have been working to assemble this list of names, and one of the women who has been working on this with me, Kristín Eiríksdóttir, sent me a message yesterday saying “I think we have all the names we’re going to get, are you able to send this to the media today, I’m travelling so I can’t do it”.
I don't know Kristín very well, we're friends on facebook but that's about it, so long story short myself and another woman got on the case and the list went out today. (That's just a little side note here.)
So last night on the news I see that three Icelandic women traveled to Egypt and were able to get out the family of a Palestinian man who is here and who has been very actively trying to petition for help to get his wife and three children out of Gaza, I mean these three boys, so incredibly sweet and lovely. So it turns out that this is the trip that Kristín was on. She and another writer called Bergþóra Snæbjörnsdóttir and a journalist called María Lilja Þrastardóttir … they just went down there! They were just like, “the government's not going to do anything we will just go.” So they went down there and managed to get this family out, the family is now in Egypt, in Cairo, waiting to fly to Iceland to be with their father and husband.
And this was just such a fantastic thing, such a statement, I mean, I cannot imagine a better protest against the government than this. They're just like, fuck this, nobody's going to do anything, we will get on it. We'll just do it. So they just got on an airplane, went down there, did what they needed to do, and got the families out—of course with the help of their Palestinian friends who are here in Iceland and who were helping to coordinate and sort out interpreters and that kind of thing. And they said it was just the most incredible, rewarding thing ever to be able to receive these three little boys who are so tired, and their mother, who has obviously been through hell.
That, of course, is the main thing, to get these people out … it's only four people out of thousands, but still. But it is also just showing up the government for their absolute … I'm not even going to say incompetence, because this goes beyond incompetence. It's just that they don't want to do anything. They just cannot be bothered.
And all these words about “it's impossible, it's so complicated, none of the other countries are doing it”—which is a lie. And that's what our Minister of Justice, who is this lady … she, or they, have been telling lies, have had excuses, the Prime Minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir, and of course Bjarni Benediktsson, going on and on about how it's just an absolute impossibility to get these people out. And these three women go down there and do the impossible. And of course, I'm saying impossible with big quotation marks, because obviously, what they [government] deem to be impossible they simply don't want to do. And so, they [these women] are saying that the impossible was not impossible at all. If three women can get on a plane, go down to the border with Gaza in Egypt, and get out a family, why is it so difficult to send one diplomat from the Ministry for Foreign Affairs to go down there? And by the way, a diplomat, a representative of the Icelandic government, would be able to do this in no time. They would be much quicker than these three women who had to wait three days because they had to go through all the red tape and all that kind of thing. A diplomat would just walk right in there and just get the people out.
So what this does is it goes to show just how little incentive, how little the government cares, how much they've been blatantly lying. Because as I mentioned, they also said none of the other countries … none of the other Nordics, that was their first excuse, none of the other Nordic countries are doing this. So we're not going to do it because we can't do what nobody else is doing.
They go down there, these three ladies, and it turns out that there are countries from all over the world working there actively to get people out. So, another blatant lie. And it's not like they went down there screaming. I mean, they just went down without basically telling anybody. It wasn't a big deal. We just heard about it after the fact.
And just by that simple act, they expose the true nature of Iceland's government, where their sympathies are, their hypocrisy, their two-facedness, and their dishonesty. They're down there now, and they're hoping to get more people out. There is an association here called Solaris, which helps refugees and their families. They have launched a fundraiser to just help to get these, I think it's 128 people, out of Gaza, 128 people that have received this family unification approval. And it's going to cost 50 million Icelandic kronur, but they're going to get them out no matter what.
So, it’s just, like, yes you go!