ingvild

So, the Afghan fugitives hunger-striking against being sent back to Afghanistan outside Oslo Domkirke have now ended their strike. Reading the letters to the newspapers and listening to people being interviewed on television was very interesting during this time.

There were people who sympathized with the strikers, but I thought it was more interesting to look at the other people. Examples I can remember off the top of my head include:

- One who sympathized, but wondered if there weren't laws against setting up tents in the middle of Oslo
- One who thought these methods had no business being used
- One who wondered why these healthy, young men were going to get medical care for something self-inflicted while she waited for an operation, and why they couldn't go back to fight for their own country when young Norwegian men were fighting over in Afghanistan.

Hunger-strike is a form of civil disobedience which, like all forms of civil disobedience, depend on the attention of others to be successful. Breaking laws while not harming anyone is a part of this. Pitching a tent in a public city square can be annoying for others, but it doesn't hurt anyone.

It's a method with history: Another who used hunger-strike and gained a lot of sympathy for it was Mahatma Gandhi. I have yet to hear anyone express disdain towards him for using this method of civil disobedience, although I don't doubt that the people he was protesting against were rather disdainful at the time.

I doubt the strikers in Oslo did this just for fun. It can't be easy to decide that you're going to sit down and not eat for an unknown amount of time. One interview indicated that they were willing to die, because it would get a lot more attention if someone died in Norway while starving themselves to avoid being sent back to Afghanistan than if they were sent back and torn to pieces by a grenade. It was more than fear of being sent back. It was a way of making the world question what's going on in Afghanistan and how we treat fugitives.

But this doesn't matter to the people who didn't sympathize. Norwegians aren't happy when our worldview is questioned. It's much easier to blame the freaky foreigners than the system they meet when they come here.

It's okay to hunger-strike as long as it doesn't happen here, on our front porch. Please keep your freaky third-world tactics away from our happy-happy land of milk, honey and too-high taxes.