With their refusal to repatriate about 30 Danish IS children from the Kurdish-controlled refugees / prison camps al-Roj and al-Hol in Syria, Justice Minister Nick Hækkerup and his colleague, Foreign Minister Jeppe Kofod, are not only violating the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which Denmark has signed, but they also play with national security.
Blind to rights
The official explanation for not repatriating the children is that their parents are a safety risk.
Furthermore, it is claimed that since the parents have turned their backs on Denmark and joined IS, the children have lost every right to protection from Denmark.
The fact that children alone have rights is ignored. The children did not turn their backs on Denmark, but now Denmark is turning its back on these Danish children.
Strategy based on hope
However, the Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) has concluded that the children are not a security risk. For their parents, of course, the security risk depends on how our legal institutions handle the individual cases. But in any case, Danish institutions and Danish society would be in the driver’s seat. This is a key point.
If we follow the so – called strategy of the Social Democratic government and leave the children (and parents) in the camps – as long as the Kurdish militia movement camps agree to do so and do not prioritize their already overloaded resources differently – the future will be harder to predict.
This is a strategy based on nothing but hope. It assumes that these former IS fighters, their wives and traumatized children will never be released and in that case will never return to Europe or Denmark.
It is essentially based on something over which Denmark has almost no influence. The assumption that none of these children would ever be able to return to Europe seems to be an unfounded assumption in an increasingly globalized world.
But is this a wise national security strategy?
Wrong on all levels
Experts agree that the camps are breeding grounds for radicalization, which is often analyzed at a societal level, a group level and an individual level.
At a societal level, the consequence of the Danish strategy will be that these children grow up in a camp environment and in a camp culture in strong opposition to the outside world.
At the group level, their upbringing will be left to primary caregivers who define themselves in aggressive and violent resistance to not only the regimes and countries in which they are currently located, but also Western and Western values in general.
On an individual level and on top of all this, we now also give these children strong psychological motivation.
Growing up with a grudge
It would be no surprise if some of these children grew up with the feeling that Denmark and easily identifiable individual government ministers had deliberately disappeared from them.
In my opinion, repatriation is not only the right decision from a humanitarian point of view, but also from a national security perspective, it is the most sensible thing to do in the long run.
Source: The Nordic Page
