Migrant Myths 2 : The "Flood" of migrants and refugees to the EU and UK - There isn't one, but if Syrian refugees continue to be left to starve there soon will be

Summary: While there is a lot of talk of a “flood” of refugees to the EU or a “migrant crisis” the numbers involved are pretty small compared to the population, size and wealth of the EU – around 0.6% of the existing EU population in 2015 for instance. (This figure includes all migrants estimated by the EU border force Frontex to have entered undetected, and of all nationalities). More a growing trickle than a flood.

The proportion of these coming to the UK is even smaller as the UK gets less than 5% of asylum applications to EU countries. Ninety-five per cent of Syrian refugees are in Syria and neighbouring countries.

The real crisis is for countries like Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Jordan, for instance, a country the size of Cornwall and much poorer than the UK , has about 1.2 million Syrians, an increase in its population since 2011 of 25%.

The widespread reports that the richer Arab Gulf states have taken in no Syrians are also false. In fact they have taken in about 1.3 million Syrians and in Saudi’s case given them rights to free education and healthcare, but as they are not signatories to the 1951 UN refugee convention, none are reported in UN statistics as refugees.

Since Saudi for instance has an extreme version of Sharia law, and oppresses non-Sunni Muslims, many Syrian refugees – who include Christians, Shia, Alawites and secular or moderate Sunnis, as well as non-Arab Kurds, will not want to live there either.

Many of the Syrian refugees in countries bordering Syria are receiving no food aid or medical treatment or education for their children, because wealthier countries have not donated enough to the UN to pay for this.

The £1.3 billion over 4 years that the British government boasts about having given to refugees is about £400 million a year out of annual public spending of around £700 billion. It is only “generous” compared to the even smaller amounts given by other countries. Its latest pledge only increases this to around £500 million a year (around 0.07% of the UK’s annual public spending).

Unless EU governments , the US and the Gulf states donate a lot more money to the UN to feed Syrian refugees , there really will be a flood of them into Europe soon – especially with the governments of countries neighbouring Syria having started deportations of Syrians, and the Turkish government’s restarting of its war with Turkish Kurdish separatists, which makes Turkey even less safe for Syrian Kurd refugees.

A flood of migrants and refugees to the EU and UK?

Only 5% of Syrian refugees have been taken in so far by countries outside the Middle East. The other 95% are in Syria itself (about 18 million internally displace people forced out of their homes but still somewhere in Syria) or refugees in refugee camps in neighbouring countries. The numbers granted refugee status in neighbouring countries are over 2.5 million granted refugee status in Turkey, over 1 million in Lebanon, about 600, 000 in Jordan , 250,000 in Iraq (which has a civil war itself) and 100,000 in Egypt (a military dictatorship) . However the total numbers of Syrian refugees in these countries are higher, as many have not been granted formal refugee status. Lebanon and Jordan are small and fairly poor countries. (1).

Lebanon alone has taken in probably more Syrian refugees than the entire EU combined at 1.1 million (or 1.2 million including those not granted refugee status), a 25% increase on its pre-Syrian civil war population of 4.3 million (which already included 450,000 Palestinian refugees).

The EU by comparison got asylum claims from a bit over 200,000 Syrians in 2015 – or just 0.04% of its 504 million population, or 270,000 total since 2011, around 0.05% of its 504.5 million population on the first day of 2011. Of course there were other migrants and asylum seekers from other countries too. The European border agency Frontex estimates the total number of migrants coming to the EU  illegally in 2015 was around 1.5 million, including those likely to have avoided border controls. The numbers who enter legally each year have been similar from 2010 at about 1.4 to 1.5 million a year. So for 2015 the total number of legal and illegal migrants would be around 3 million, or a 0.6% increase in the EU’s population if all were allowed to stay (which they will not be as, while applications may take a long time to process, many applications are rejected each year and around 40% of rejections result in deportation in the same year as they are rejected) (2) – (5).

Multiplying by 4 for the years since the Syrian civil war started in 2011 it would come to a 2.4% increase in population from all forms of immigration. (This will be a significant overestimate as there were more migrants and refugees in 2015 than in previous years)

These figures don’t include the number of non-EU nationals who leave the EU (emigrate from it) every year, from around 700,000 in 2010 to over 800,000 in 2013. That would make the overall growth of non-EU national population in the EU about 2.5 million in 2015, or 10 million over 4 years maximum or around 0.5% per year, or 2% over 4 years (again likely an over-estimate) (6).

So the total increase in the EU’s population from immigration from outside the EU is not so much the “flood” the media often talk of as a rapidly growing trickle relative to the size of the lake it’s flowing into.

And of course immigration and emigration aren’t the only factors affecting population growth. Birth and death rates also affect it. Looking at total population growth for all the countries that are now EU members since 1960  there has not been any significant increase in the rate of population growth. Birth rates have fallen significantly over that time, while people are also living longer due to improved living standards and medical care. The result is a growing population, but with a growing percentage of elderly people (7).

Without either immigration (with immigrants being younger on average) or other measures to increase the birth rate (e.g the 35 hour week tried in France), or both, we may end up with not enough people of working age to pay the taxes to fund healthcare and pensions for pensioners.

But ever increasing population results in increasing pollution, deforestation and environmental damage, including climate change. This is a difficult circle to square.

The rate of population growth in the EU has actually been falling for decades though and is considerably lower than it was in the 1960s.

Are the wealthiest Arab states refusing to take in any Syrian refugees?

The Gulf states – Sunni ‘monarchies’ (dictatorships) allied to the US and who are funding and arming many of the Syrian Jihadist Sunni rebels (including Al Nusrah, the Syrian wing of Al Qa’ida) are refusing to take in any Syrians as refugees, as they are not signatories to the 1951 Refugee convention.  However some Syrian refugees have been given residency permits to live in Saudi and granted free education and healthcare (the Saudi government claim over 100,000 though this is not an independently verified figure) (8) – (9).

World Bank figures gave the total for all the Gulf monarchies as over 1.3 million Syrians living in them in 2013 , 1 million in Saudi, but the UNHCR figure in 2015 was just 500,000, possibly due to definitions of who was being counted (10).

However even Saudi citizens have no real rights not to be imprisoned or executed without fair trial. Immigrants working in Saudi are exploited ruthlessly.

And Saudi Arabia has an extreme version of Sharia law based on the Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam. Syrian refugees include Christians, Alawites and Shia, all of who face persecution in Saudi, along with moderate and secular Muslims who do not want to live under Sharia law. So many refugees would rather avoid Saudi Arabia and other dictatorships with religious laws.

Is the UK taking more than its share of refugees coming to the EU? No, far less

The UK’s population has grown steadily too, around a 20% increase in the last 50 years. The rate of increase has gone up and down over that period, but is currently higher than at any point since the 1950s (11).

The UK, with over 10% of the EU’s population, and one of the richest countries in it, gets less than 5% of asylum applications for refugee status from people who are not citizens of any EU country. So the people at Calais are not a flood either, but an even smaller trickle. For instance in the second quarter of 2015 the UK got just 3.5% of applications to EU countries. In the  third quarter it got just 2.86% (12).

And that trickle is not higher than ever before either – the number of asylum applications in the UK in 2014 was about the same number as in 1990. And overall about 52% of asylum applications processed in 2014 in the UK were refused (13) – (14).

The UK actually gets very few asylum applications relative to it’s size and wealth – one of the lowest rates in the EU relative to our population.

Source : BBC News (15)

The UK, twice as wealthy as Lebanon in GDP per capita and a much larger country in terms of population and land area, had granted just 5,102 Syrians the right to remain as refugees by August 2015 and offered to take just 4,000 a year in future. (Total numbers will be higher as some will be waiting for applications to be heard, but still likely in the thousands compared to Lebanon’s millions)

Graphic : http://www.ifitweremyhome.com/compare/GB/LB

The real refugee crisis is in Syria’s neighbours, not the EU, but unless the EU provide more money to feed and house refugees, it may be an EU crisis soon

The EU and UK are not suffering a refugee “flood” or “crisis”, but manageable numbers both in terms of their exsiting population, their land area and their wealth. The real refugee crisis is in Syria and for its neighbours. But if the wealthier governments continue to fail to provide enough money to feed and house refugees in countries neighbouring Syria, there may soon be a real flood.

Those Syrians in refugee camps in the Middle East are not getting enough food, and often no medical treatment for illnesses and wounds, as donations from governments around the world have been too low. Syrian refugees in Turkey and Lebanon currently get under 50 cents or 35 pence worth of food a day, not nearly enough. The Turkish government has begun sending many back to Syria. Jordan has closed its border with Syria leaving thousands of refugees stranded in the desert. Lebanon has also begun deporting Syrian refugees . The governments of the three countries are saying they can’t take any more refugees
(16 )  – (19).

The UK’s supposedly “generous” aid to Syrian refugees in the Middle East comes to about £1.1 billion over 4 years since the Syrian civil war began, or a bit under £300 million a year, out of annual public spending of around £700 billion (thousand million) a year. The fact that other EU governments have given even less is nothing to boast about. Even Cameron’s latest pledge to increase it to around £510 million a year from the UK and ask other EU countries to increase similarly is far too little. It amounts to under 0.07% of the UK’s annual public spending of over £700 billion a year (20) – (22).

Sources

(1) = UNHCR 19 Jan 2016 ‘Syria Regional Refugee Response - Inter-agency Information Sharing Portal’, http://data.unhcr.org/syrianrefugees/regional.php

(2) = BBC News ‘Migrant crisis: Migration to Europe explained in graphics’
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34131911 (200,000 asylum applications from Syrians EU 2015; Frontex 1.5 million migrants estimate for 2015)

(3) = Al Jazeera 22 Dec 2015 ‘One million 'refugees and migrants' reached EU in 2015’, http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2015/12/million-refugees-migrants-reached-eu-2015-151222100045573.html (270,000 Syrians applied for asylum in EU countries since 2011)

(4) = BBC News 09 Sep 2015 ‘Migrant crisis: Who does the EU send back?’,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34190359 (only 39% of rejected asylum claimants deported from the EU in 2015)

(5) = BBC News 13 Aug 2015 ‘What happens to failed asylum seekers?’,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-33849593

(6) = Eurostat 10 Jun 2015 ‘Immigration in the EU’,
http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/home-affairs/e-library/docs/infographics/immigration/migration-in-eu-infographic_en.pdf

(7) = Eurostat Jul 2015 ‘Population and population change statistics’,
http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/Population_and_population_change_statistics

(8)= Huffington Post 23 Sep 2015 ‘Western Media's Miscount of Saudi Arabia's Syrian Refugees’,
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anhvinh-doanvo/europes-crisis-refugees_b_8175924.html

(9) = Guardian 12 Sep 2015 ‘Saudi Arabia says criticism of Syria refugee response 'false and misleading'’, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/12/saudi-arabia-says-reports-of-its-syrian-refugee-response-false-and-misleading

(10) = News Week 12 Apr 2015 ‘The Gulf States Are Taking Syrian Refugees’, http://europe.newsweek.com/gulf-states-are-taking-syrian-refugees-401131

(11) = ONS 26 Jun 2014 ‘Changes in UK population over the last 50 years’, http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/pop-estimate/population-estimates-for-uk--england-and-wales--scotland-and-northern-ireland/2013/sty-population-changes.html

(12) = Eurostat News Release 10 Dec 2015 ‘Asylum in the EU Member States More than 410 000 first time asylum seekers registered in the third quarter of 2015’, http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/documents/2995521/7105334/3-10122015-AP-EN.pdf/04886524-58f2-40e9-995d-d97520e62a0e

(13) = Migration Observatory , Oxford university, 13 Aug 2015, ‘Migration to the UK : Asylum’, In 2014, 59% of asylum applications were initially refused. 28% of appeals were eventually approved,
http://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/briefings/migration-uk-asylum

(14) = Migration Observatory , Oxford university, 13 Aug 2015, ‘Migration to the UK : Asylum’, Figure 1 - Asylum applications and estimated inflows, 1984-2014,
http://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/briefings/migration-uk-asylum

(15) = BBC News ‘Migrant crisis: Migration to Europe explained in graphics’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-34131911

 (16) = Observer 06 Sep 2015 ‘UN agencies 'broke and failing' in face of ever-growing refugee crisis’, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/06/refugee-crisis-un-agencies-broke-failing

(17) = BBC 15 Jan 2016 ‘Turkey 'acting illegally' over Syria refugees deportations’ http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-35135810

(18) = Independent 22 Jan 2016 ‘Jordan blocks Syria border leaving thousands of refugees in the desert - including hundreds of pregnant women’, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/jordan-blocks-syrian-border-to-leave-thousands-of-refugees-trapped-in-the-desert-including-hundreds-a6828471.html

(19) = CBS/AP 07 Feb 2016 ‘Turkey: We're at end of "capacity to absorb" refugees’,
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/turkey-has-reached-the-end-of-its-capacity-to-absorb-refugees/

(20) = DFID Syria Crisis Response, https://www.gov.uk/government/world/organisations/dfid-syria-crisis-response

(21) = http://www.ukpublicspending.co.uk/total_spending_2015UKbn

(22) = www.theguardian.com 04 Feb 2016 ‘David Cameron calls for billions more in international aid for Syrian refugees’, http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/03/david-cameron-calls-for-billions-more-in-international-aid-for-syrian-refugees

Thatcher’s Falklands War got hundreds killed due either to incompetence or cynical manipulation – Callaghan avoided a war in identical circumstances 5 years earlier by sending a small fleet to the South Atlantic

The attempt to present Margaret Thatcher as a great war leader based on the Falklands War, with 800 members of the military to be present at her funeral, is bizarre once you know the historical facts.

When the Argentinians began talking of taking the Falklands in 1977, Labour Prime Minister Jim Callaghan and Foreign Secretary David Owen were persuaded by military chiefs to send a Royal Navy fleet to the South Atlantic to signal Britain would fight any invasion. In a similar situation in 1982 Thatcher’s government withdrew the last Royal Navy ship – the HMS Endurance - from the area during spending cuts, leading the Argentine military junta to believe Britain would not fight for the islands (1) – (2). They invaded – and then Thatcher declared war. Hundreds died as a result.

Some suggest that Thatcher, then the most unpopular Prime Minister in British history to that point, after increasing unemployment by over 50% to over 3 million after promising to reduce it during the 1979 election campaign, wanted a war to restore her popularity (3).

It’s impossible to know whether the decision to recall HMS Endurance was the result of blind ideology in imposing spending cuts and incompetence in not caring where they were made;  or whether Thatcher wanted the Argentinians to believe Britain wouldn’t fight in order to get a war to restore her political fortunes. If the latter she was betraying members of the British armed forces just as much as Blair with Iraq. Either way she was responsible for an easily avoidable war and all the deaths in it. By any rational standard she should be condemned for not preventing war as simply and easily as Callaghan did rather than lauded for winning a war against an inferior military that could have been avoided.

In the case of the 1990-1991 Gulf War against Iraq, which Thatcher committed British troops to shortly before her party got her to resign over the poll tax, there is no such doubt. The Bush (senior) administration and the Kuwaiti monarchy duped Saddam into war with the US over Kuwait. Bush and his advisers sought to repeat Thatcher’s feat of going from unpopularity on domestic unemployment and recession to election victory on a tide of war fuelled nationalism ; they failed.

(1) = BBC News 01 Jun 2005 ‘Secret Falklands fleet revealed’, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4597581.stm

(2) = Freedman, Lawrence (2005) ‘Official History of the Falklands Campaign Volume 1’, Routledge, 2005, chapters 8 – 9

(3) = Lenman, B. P. (1992) The Eclipse of Parliament: Appearance and Reality in British Politics since 1914 (London: Edward Arnold)

The Other Nine (Thousand) Oil Spills – BP and the Gulf Spill and Exxon, Chevron and Shell in Nigeria

Women in the Niger Delta beside an oil spill in 2009, which began in 2004 (source - Kadir van Lohuizen/NOOR via an Amnesty International report on oil pollution in the Niger Delta = (1))

Americans have suffered from the BP spill – but only a fraction of what Nigerians have suffered for decades – and continue to suffer today. The problem isn’t one bad company – BP is no worse than any other oil firm - the problem is that big firms have been allowed to buy influence with governments leading to poor regulation; coupled with experimental drilling at depths never attempted before in order to try to maintain an oil based society and economy. Unless all governments regulate all oil companies better, this is going to happen over and over again.

BP certainly bear responsibility for the disastrous oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and for using toxic chemical dispersants even worse than the slick itself.

However the idea that BP is a uniquely bad oil company, while American oil companies are more responsible, is nonsense.

Exxon-Mobil, Chevron and other oil companies based everywhere from the US to France, Italy and the UK have created thousands of oil spills both on and offshore in the Niger Delta in Nigeria for decades – and right up to present.

There have been 2,400 oil spills in the Niger Delta in the last 4 years, many involving Exxon-Mobil. Between 1970 and 2000 the Nigerian government’s figure was 7,000 oil spills, with more independent analysts putting the figure higher, at around 300 every year. The amount spilled by 2006 was estimated at at least 1.5 million tonnes (2) – (4).

When people there who are drinking polluted water and who can’t catch fish or birds to survive because the delta and marshes they live in are polluted by oil spills complain their government doesn’t fine the oil companies and demand they do something about it, as it has in the US (5).

Instead any opposition or complaint from the locals has resulted in oil companies calling in the Nigerian military who have been killing their opponents – peaceful or armed - for decades, often partly paid by and equipped by the oil companies – and transported on helicopters provided by the oil companies. This has resulted in armed rebellions, hijackings of oil rigs and kidnapping of oil company staff, both by rebels and by armed gangs.

Some oil companies, including Shell and Chevron, have even supplied the Nigerian military and police with weapons and helicopters with which to kill their opponents – whether armed rebels or peaceful campaigners like Ken Saro Wiwa, notoriously executed by the Nigerian government for campaigning against pollution, with Shell lawyers refusing to call for clemency when the decision was being made (6).

Ken Saro-Wiwa, a peaceful campaigner for the Ogoni people against oil pollution by Shell, was executed by the Nigerian military - Shell lawyers refused to ask for clemency

The only way many of the people of the, now grossly polluted, Niger Delta can survive is to cut into oil pipelines and drain off oil for sale or barter, or else join armed gangs extorting money for kidnapped hostages. They often die in explosions in the process. On 18th October 1999 300 people burned alive near the town of Jesse , due to such an explosion and the spread of fires to nearby villages. This was one of the largest death tolls, but not unusual.

Gas flaring in the Niger Delta - source - Chidi Anyaeche - Nigeria Village Square

The Ogoni , Ijaw and other peoples of the Niger Delta have had their agricultural land made infertile and their fishing grounds destroyed by pollution from oil pipelines for decades. They have been forced out of their villages by threats and attacks by the Nigerian military to make way for these pipelines. These attacks are routinely described by the Nigerian military as ‘inter-tribal disputes’ (7) - (8).  Hundreds of them “disappear”every year after military and police raids.

On May 25th 1998 one-hundred and twenty one student activists from 42 delta communities carried out a peaceful occupation of an offshore Chevron oil facility in protest against environmental destruction. They were promised a meeting with a Chevron officials at the end of May to discuss their grievances. On May 28th Chevron helicopters ferried Nigerian soldiers to the platform. These soldiers proceeded to gun down two activists, wounded others and removed the rest. On January 4th 1999 Nigerian police and soldiers equipped with a Chevron helicopter and Chevron boats attacked and burned the Ijaw villages of Opiah and Ikenyan in Delta state , killing at least 4 people and wounding others (9) – (10).

Amnesty International reported that during 2009 “The Security forces, including the military, continued to commit human rights violations in the Niger Delta including extra-judicial executions, torture and...the destruction of homes.......the Joint Task Force (JTF) which combines troops of the army, navy, air force and...police, frequently raided communities. Such raids often followed clashes between the JTF and militants, often resulting in the death of bystanders.” (11)

The conflict is often reported as involving “kidnappers” trying to extort money from oil firms, just as there’s much crowing every time a Somalian pirate is shot by the US or Russian navy, or by Israeli security guards on private shipping, without much reflection on the causes of the piracy – a civil war resulting from a dictatorship backed by both the US and USSR throughout the Cold War; US , French and British backing for an Ethiopian invasion of Somalia when one side in the civil war seemed to have one; illegal fishing by trawlers from all over the world in Somalian waters; and illegal dumping of nuclear waste and other pollutants by firms based in the “developed”.

Although Nigeria has had an elected government since 1998 the close relationship between oil and arms companies and the Nigerian military and government remains.

The fact that American firms are responsible for massive oil spills in Nigeria hasn’t stopped American Senators loudly announcing that Halliburton and Exxon-Mobil have told them that they would never be as irresponsible as BP though – Halliburton and it’s subsidiaries of course being so responsible that they were found to have repeatedly grossly over-charged the US military for fuel and supplies in Iraq on a scale that might make the Afghan government blush – and even to have tried to cover up the gang rape of one of it’s employees. That’s not to mention the fact that Halliburton was contracted by BP to seal the oil well which then caused the spill in the Gulf (12) – (15).

The truth is that this is not a case of one uniquely bad company. BP is no better or worse than other oil companies. It, like them, is the product of a system which allows it to buy political influence and deregulation of it’s industry. It’s a case of poor regulation by governments as a result of oil companies buying political influence – and of the risks of drilling for oil at greater depths than has ever been done before, using experimental technology, to try to meet ever increasing demand for oil. Until governments and the public face up to that and people demand much stricter regulation of all oil companies, plus more investment in other energy technologies and reduction in waste of energy, nothing will change.

It’s also the truth that however bad many people in Florida and other states affected by the spill have it, they don’t have it nearly as bad as Nigerians have it – often at the hands of American based oil firms. So it’s no good pretending this is a problem with one company or with foreigners.

The one good side-effect of the Gulf of Mexico spill is that it’s started to raise some questions about these wider issues and the suffering of Nigerians, Colombians and others.

Forming a posse to lynch the furreners and cheer on the good ol’ American oil giants seems to be popular in America right now. It’s not going to stop it happening all over again though.

(1) = Amnesty International 30 Jun 2009 'Oil industry has brought poverty and pollution to Niger Delta' http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/news/oil-industry-has-brought-poverty-and-pollution-to-niger-delta-20090630#

(2) = Reuters 15 Jun 2010 'Nigeria cautions Exxon Mobil on offshore oil spills', http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSLDE65E22C20100615

(3) = BBC News 15 Jun 2010 ‘Nigeria: 'World oil pollution capital'’,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10313107

(4) = Independent 26 Oct 2006 'Niger Delta bears brunt after 50 years of oil spills', http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/africa/niger-delta-bears-brunt-after-50-years-of-oil-spills-421634.html

(5) = See (1) above

(6) = Human Rights Watch The Price of Oil HRW , New York & London , 1999;especially p174-5,http://www.hrw.org/en/news/1999/02/23/oil-companies-complicit-nigerian-abuses

(7) = Human Rights Watch The Price of Oil HRW , New York & London , 1999, http://www.hrw.org/reports/1999/nigeria/index.htm#TopOfPage

(8) = Catma Productions The Drilling Fields Channel 4 (London) , 23rd May 1994,http://www.journeyman.tv/?lid=59043; full transcript at http://www.ratical.org/corporations/DrillFields.html

(9) = PACIFICA RADIO/Democracy Now 21 Jun 2001  ‘Drilling and Killing: Chevron and Nigeria's Oil Dictatorship’,http://www.democracynow.org/2001/8/27/drilling_and_killing_chevron_and_nigerias

(10) =  Human Rights Watch press release Oil Companies complicit in Nigerian abuses Lagos ,Feb 23rd , 1999, http://www.hrw.org/en/news/1999/02/23/oil-companies-complicit-nigerian-abuses

(11) = Amnesty International annual report 2010 – Country Report – Nigeria, http://report2010.amnesty.org/sites/default/files/AIR2010_AZ_EN.pdf#page=193

(12) = BBC News 13 Dec 2003 ‘Bush warns 'oil overcharge' firm’,http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/3312015.stm

(13) = Observer 22 Feb 2004 ‘Of Halliburton and the mis-spent millions’,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2004/feb/22/uselections2004.usnews1

(14) = ABC News 10 Dec 2007 ‘Victim: Gang-Rape Cover-Up by U.S., Halliburton/KBR’,
http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/story?id=3977702&page=1

(15) = BBC News 13 Jun 2010 ‘Halliburton profits up despite oil spill’,http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10688301