Standing in a Danish cornfield last week, a young Iraqi interpreter described to me what it feels like to be branded as a collaborator: the menacing stares, the neighbours who shun you in the street and spit as you pass, the threatening notes pushed under the door at midnight promising death to traitors, the isolation and the terror.

Like many university-educated Iraqis, this man began working as a translator for the coalition forces soon after the invasion of Iraq, and ended up on the payroll of the Danish Army. When the Danes pulled out last month, they took him with them, along with some 200 other Iraqis and their families who would otherwise face death at the hands of insurgent murder squads.

“Collaboration” is one of the most morally freighted words in modern European history. It instantly recalls the Fascist sympathisers hanging from lampposts, Parisian women with their heads shaven in revenge for consorting with the enemy, Lord Haw-Haw, Vidkun Quisling and countless lesser collaborators. The grim wartime question of who cooperated with the enemy still cannot be asked in parts of former Occupied Europe.

Of course, we do not see the brave men and women who have helped the Armed Forces in Iraq as collaborators, any more than we regard the armed cowards who kidnap, torture and murder them as resistance fighters. Yet that is how, increasingly, they are seen in Iraq.

Hundreds of Iraq interpreters rebuffed by UK

Nearly half of applications to settle in Britain have been rejected by the MoD already despite safety fears

BACKGROUND

• Story of brothers who worked for the British

• I’ve no regrets, says interpreter

• What’s Arabic for ‘we’ll stand by you’?

• Abandoned: the 91 Iraqis who risked all

Barely four years ago, the interpreters who agreed to help the Americans and British were hailed by Iraqis (and saw themselves) as part of a civilian army of liberation. It is a measure of how far even moderate Iraqi opinion has been alienated there that they are now widely seen as opportunists, at best, and at worse condemned as traitors.

“You are either with us or against us,” cautioned George W. Bush. The Iraqi interpreters made that choice emphatically, and regardless of the rights and wrongs of the war itself, Britain and the US now have an overwhelming moral obligation to honour that deal by granting them asylum and a safe haven.

It is appropriate that Denmark should take the lead in this, for it understands intimately the moral confusion that comes with occupation and collaboration. Denmark was overrun by the Nazis in just a few hours in 1940, and then comfortably accommodated the invaders for most of the war. Thousands of Danes helped to smuggle most of the country’s Jews to safety in Sweden, but the taint of collaboration still lingers. Two years ago, the Danish Prime Minister apologised for Denmark’s wartime acquiescence to Nazi rule.

Collaboration, resistance, recrimination and reprisal form the backdrop to every invasion in history. The accounting for who did, and who did not, cooperate with the invader is often unfair and haphazard, complicated by local vendetta and private feud, leaving a poisonous legacy and stigma of association that can last for generations. French people from the area of northern France that came under German occupation during the First World War suffered years of discrimination, referred to contemptuously as les Boches du Nord, simply because they had been forced to live alongside the invaders.

Charles de Gaulle sought to erase the memory of French collaboration in the Second World War by elevating the myths of the Resistance. It was not until 1995 that President Chirac broke with tradition by officially recognising French collaboration under Nazi occupation as a “collective fault”.

Yet the men and women who came forward to help the US and British troops in 2003 could not be farther removed from the criminal chancers and Fascist ideologues who collaborated with evil during the Second World War. The Iraqi interpreters I spoke to genuinely believed that they were helping to overthrow a tyrant; their pain and bafflement at what has unfolded since is heart breaking.

The only way to demonstrate to ordinary Iraqis that the interpreters are not enemy collaborators but patriots, is to stand by them, to protect them while we remain in Iraq, and to offer them shelter when we go. If they are left to the mercies of the insurgents, that will simply confirm in the minds of many Iraqis that this was always a cynical grab for oil and power, in which the lives of Iraqis mattered little.

The precedents are clear, and horrible. When France finally pulled out of Algeria in 1962, some 90,000 Arabs who had worked with the French managed to escape along with the former colonists of European origin. Of the pro-French Algerians who remained behind, it is estimated that between 50,000 and 150,000 were killed by lynch mobs.

In Vietnam, America made no effective plans to evacuate the thousands of Vietnamese who had worked with it. One of the most chilling images of military defeat are the photographs of desperate Vietnamese clinging to the helicopters as they lifted off from the US Embassy in Saigon for the last time.

Britain has yet to decide whether to grant asylum to the interpreters, drivers, guards and other Iraqis who supported our troops. This may amount to as many as 15,000 people – a small number when one considers that Sweden, which is not a member of the coalition, will admit 25,000 Iraqi refugees this year alone.

A failure to protect our closest friends in Iraq would be politically foolish, historically ignorant and morally indefensible.

The exiled interpreters I spoke to have no desire to spend their lives in an alien Danish cornfield (or in Britain, for that matter), however safe and comfortable it may be. Four years ago, they volunteered to help to create a free Iraq, in which they could live at peace. We may not be able to salvage that aspiration, but we can save them.

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