It has hardly escaped anyone in Sweden that there is an ongoing genocide against Yazidis and other indigenous peoples in Iraq and Syria. In the wake of it and its aftermath, the Swedish Migration Agency continues to try to deport Yazidis.
Journalists and activists are trying to help children who have been kidnapped by IS for almost five years to be identified and returned to their surviving relatives, and the cameras of the world are aimed at Yazidis who are affected by a genocide. At the same time, the authorities in Sweden continue to deny them asylum.
So I turn directly to ministers Margot Wallström and Morgan Johansson, and I ask you: Stop this! I am aware that ministers should not interfere with the work of the authorities, but in this case you can, with the help of the Government and Parliament, put an end to these historically wrong decisions.
Svensk version av texten: Låt yazidierna få stanna i Sverige!
I and many people with me have been asking for this for almost a decade. When the atrocities against the aforementioned ethnic group and others such as the Assyrians, Syriacs, Chaldeans, and Mandaeans were only called "ethno-religious cleansing," when their temples and churches were blown up, many times during service, we asked for the deportations to be stopped. But they continued. When the persecution during the summer of 2014 developed into a full-scale genocide, we again asked that you stop the deportations - but we weren't heard.
In the past few days I have read new rejections. The migration authorities, along with the police, have tried to enforce the deportations of a number of Syrian-Yazidi families to Armenia. I know of four of these families. Sven Hammarberg at the investigation bureau Revilio in Kristianstad, Sweden, is among those who have tried to help Yazidis with their asylum cases. He is upset and exhausted. "Sweden is trying to deport Syrian citizens to Armenia, it's more than crazy and completely wrong," he told me on the phone, while we went over the asylum cases together.
They have also tried to get Georgia and Turkey to receive them. Syria, the country they come from, is almost the only conceivable country that they haven't tried to deport them to, as there is a decision that Syrians should stay in Sweden, at least temporarily.
The new decision, which came on March 18 this year for one family that has been here for six years, is largely based on Sprakab's language analyses. The Swedish Migration Agency chooses to completely disregard the criticism for lack of quality that this company has received both in Sweden and in the UK, for example.
The Swedish Migration Agency believes that the family which consists of parents and two small children have not been able to make their identity known because they don't have IDs. The family says that they originate from the al-Hasakah area in northern Syria. According to the Migration Agency's own land information (LIFOS) "Thematic note Syria: Identity documents and passports," there were over 300,000 stateless persons in the al-Hasakah province in 2008, among them many Yazidis.
When the two adults in the family were language tested, the language analyst concluded that "the speaker's linguistic background is Armenia," a result allegedly reached with "very high certainty." This statement is completely rejected by several language experts.
When the Swedish authorities repeatedly turned to Armenia to get the deportation executed, they have each time received the answer that the family does not come from there, have never lived there or are in any other way connected to the country. Armenia has a well-developed population register with, among other things, facial recognition systems.
Johannson and Wallström, what do you have to say?
Nuri Kino, journalist, author and founder of human rights organization A Demand for Action (ADFA)
