Go Back to Where You Came From

Walking many miles in a refugee's shoes

Refugees and asylum seekers flood into stable – or at least more stable – countries in their millions every year. For some, like Kenya, whose northern border is home to Da Daab, the world’s largest refugee camp, the difficulty rests in supporting the hundreds of thousands of Somalis who have made the camp their permanent home. Ditto Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan with Syrian refugees. Ditto Thailand and Malaysia with those fleeing Myanmar.

There is, of course, a measure of political one-upmanship attributed to the refugee ‘problem’ in all these countries. But in a country like Malaysia, where there is undoubtedly deeply entrenched racism, what to ‘do’ about the influx of refugees is simply not used as a weighty political bargaining chip – even during the recent hotly contested and long-awaited election.

The way in which the issue is discussed mutates, it seems, when the recipient country is high income. All recipient states face the challenges of accounting and caring for people moving across their borders – but richer countries seem to emanate a more protectionist rhetoric.

In Australia, the politics of refugee problem – commonly referred to as ‘boat people’ – has risen to fever pitch. Elections may be won or lost based on who manages to control the influx. Derogatory terms such as ‘FOB’ (fresh off the boat) are thrown around; ‘Australia for Australians’ seems to be a rallying cry that has gained far more traction than similar ‘White Britain’ bombast in the UK.

The fact that people get in boats – from as far away as Pakistan and Somalia – in the hope of reaching Australian territory is certainly something to be discussed, and discussed seriously. But not for the reasons most people are giving. Australia is not running out of room – in 2011, less than 200 Somali refugees were granted the legal right to remain in Australia – from a country where one million are homeless and displaced by war and famine. Refugees are not bleeding the country dry –In fact, after 12 months in Australia, skilled immigrants boast an employment rate of at least 90%, while in a triumph of economics over prejudice, a full third of the Australian workforce is made up of unskilled migrants earning their keep.

The fact that getting into a safe country like Australia legally has been made so difficult that people are forced to clamber aboard disintegrating wooden ships, clutching their children, with barely even life jackets to protect them from the ferocity of the Indian and Pacific oceans, is a terrible stain upon the country. This is why ‘turning back the boats’ is a necessary discussion. Getting to Australia by boat shouldn’t have to be an option.

These arguments are brought into sharp and tragic relief by the Australian show, Go Back to Where You Came From. I’ve recently come across this and have started with the second series, in which 6 high profile Australians – both pro-and anti- refugees – are sent to meet ‘illegals’ residing in Australia, and then to the countries these people fled. The experiences on the show are punctuated with prior interviews with the participants – some expressing great concern for the plight of people arriving by boat and their heinous treatment in offshore processing facilities, others expressing their concern for Australian values and the fear that the public is being taken for a ride by foreign freeloaders.

What the show reveals is the near-total disintegration of the moral framework of the antis.

People who have spent their lives believing that Australians are being ‘gamed’ by people claiming to have a sob-story background and who simply want to take advantage of Australian benefits are confronted with the absolute morbid terror of life in Mogadishu and Kabul.

They find themselves quite unable to reconcile previous beliefs with the lived reality of situations which force people to attempt the journey to a better life. Persecuted ethnic Hazaras in Kabul open up to the Australians about the number of family members they have lost. They weep as they meet a Somali mother of four crying for joy upon being given a small tent in the windblown Ethiopian desert, having walked for four days and lost a baby on the way. They witness people they had formerly dismissed as fakers, illegals and chronically work-shy barely surviving day to day amidst the carcass of a country.

This show should not only be mandatory viewing – it should be mandatory in the making. Every politician who makes a decision based on the assumption that ‘refugee’ is simply another word for ‘benefit scrounger’ should confront the experiences of the world’s displaced and terrified. And this format doesn’t have to apply just to refugees. We could even go so far as to say that Iain Duncan Smith and George Osborne should be forced to live on the £53 per week they claim is so reasonable. The power of this shock-doc could have vast ramifications.

I do not dispute the fact that refugees must go through an administrative process; I also agree that they should, as far as possible, make their way into their new country legally – to prevent them slipping through society’s security nets, more than anything. Without authorities knowing who and where they are, they cannot be properly protected.

But if they are fleeing torture, famine and war in a failed or failing state, how can they be expected to find themselves a passport before they hop on a nice Qantas flight to Melbourne? How can they pay for these legal avenues when they cannot feed their children?

Legal purists – and there are a few on the show – dismiss the experiences of boat people based on the ‘lack of respect’ inherent in their failure to arrive through the appropriate channels. The law is important – but so is understanding when to abandon it. And in the case of the vast majority of refugees, the lack of passport is simply not enough to send them away. 

An evening with a revolutionary

“To destroy abuses is not enough; habits must also be changed. The windmill has gone, but the wind is still there."
Victor Hugo

I shall be honest. Geneva as a city has yielded few of the secrets I had hoped for as I made my way here. Not because I haven’t looked, but because I don’t think it really has any. Everyone here moves on – after a few months, like me and the thousands of other interns who make their way through the system each year, or after a couple of years. No one really stays too long; there is then little investment in the life and soul of the place.

Neither has the United Nations proved too inspiring. An unwieldy, cumbersome megalith tethered to bureaucratic nonsense by paperwork and economics. To paraphrase a world-weary friend, ‘Gaza burns, Goma falls, but the UN stamps all its documents in triplicate’.

The life and soul for me, then, has been the people I have met here. The extraordinary, challenging, infuriating and loveable friends I have come across are the lifeblood of this place. And perhaps nothing represents both these people and their vitality and passion than the evening a lucky few of us spent listening to a story told by a revolutionary.

As I prepare to move on to pastures new, it would be hard to find something more inspiring than the story of the Egyptian revolution of 2011. A thirty-year dictatorship was overthrown in just eighteen days by peaceful protest. And while there is much still to be achieved, Lamiaa, a young Egyptian doctor who tended to the wounded of Tahrir Square, painted a picture of a country on the ascendant, given time and space to re-build.

Lamiaa was living in Cairo when the revolution began. The Egyptians watched Tunisia overthrow their own unwanted governors – and the death of Khaled Saed, beaten to death by police, was a rallying call for the young, the disaffected and the marginalised. Tens of thousands poured into Tahrir Square in spite of the desert cold of the Egyptian winter, lack of food and sanitation, and violent responses by police – and after a few false starts (Mubarak promising first reforms, then a hamstringing of his own power within office), the revolutionaries won.

She described the men of the neighbourhoods banding together to protect homes from looters (by prisoners released by the government to spread chaos – watch the Dark Knight Rises and you’ll get the picture); old men in their jilabayas, young men in their jeans, the doormen, the doctors, the dry cleaners, stood in the cold and defended their homes. She described the sheer togetherness as volunteer doctors fixed bones and handed out medicines; as she saw sick men take only what they needed even when in dire pain, aware that someone else might later need those painkillers more.

It’s a powerful image. I watched the news roll in as Mubarak finally stepped down, and saw the joyful images of celebration in Egyptian streets. I saw the names and images of those who died on my screen.

Now, I am admittedly still caught up in a misty-eyed post-Les Misérables fever. I am aware that revolutionaries who fall do not get up again when the camera stops rolling. And I am wary of rose-tinting life or death choices that I am grateful with every breath I have never had to make.

But the narrative of change is essential, and so wholly refreshing. It’s something I felt I had lost sight of a little during my time here – the UN is so vast, and its reach simultaneously so wide and so flawed, that transition seems impossible. I am not (officially) suggesting a violent revolution overthrowing the UN, nor indeed the UK for that matter. But I think that the spirit of these words, written by Upton Sinclair in the Preface to Hugo’s Les Misérables, is as necessary now as it always has been:

‘So long as there shall exist, by virtue of law and custom, decrees of damnation pronounced by society, artificially creating hells amid the civilisation of earth, and adding the element of human fate to divine destiny…so long as ignorance and poverty exist on earth, books of the nature of Les Misérables cannot fail to be of use.’

The spirit of fighting injustice is alive and well – and I can think of no greater lesson to take with me as I move on from the turgidity of the United Nations in the hope of being part of something truly exciting. So it is why I am so grateful for this final inspiration to be gleaned from my time here - the opportunity to meet a person capable of flooding you with hope is to be grasped with both hands.

Noses and Fists

So, the debate over whether gay couples should be allowed to legally marry is (almost) over. The Commons have voted overwhelmingly in favour of extending this right to gay people, and all being well, this will be codified and passed in Parliament later this year. While some are asking whether this ought to be a priority for the movement (a very good argument describing the impact of the cuts on mental health services for gay teenagers can be found here), there is a general consensus that this is progress.

However, 175 MPs still voted against the draft. Some have made eloquent if misguided attempts to explain their nay saying (cue much ‘soul-searching’); I am going to use an example from Jim Dobbin, a Labour MP, to exemplify why the arguments against gay marriage are so weak:

‘We should be promoting equality, not uniformity, and be able to celebrate difference.'

While he manipulates the words 'equality' and 'difference' I'm not sure that Dobbin understands their meaning. There is to be an inherent contradiction in the way Dobbin uses the terms. Yes, difference surely is the proverbial spice of life, and must of course be celebrated and supported. But when a ‘celebration of difference’ becomes an excuse for discrimination, it crosses a line.

To understand this balance, we can turn to John Stuart Mill’s harm principle; we are free insofar as our freedom does not get in the way of anyone else’s, and vice versa, and freedom should only ever be limited to prevent harm to others. We are all party to and complicit in this concept every day of ours lives. Do you have freedom to drive on a road? Yes, but only insofar as your driving does not affect anyone else’s freedom to, well, live. Do you have freedom to drink? Of course, but the notion will posit that you should only be allowed to do so as long as it doesn’t affect another person’s freedom to get home safely without being attacked by an aggressive drunk. It makes logical and moral sense that your liberty to swing your fists ends where my nose begins.

Dobbin is free, of course, to pursue whatever ends he wants, including legal marriage to the woman of his choice; should his freedom extend to his right to bar other people from doing the same? Absolutely not. To legislate based on this notion would be to create a society in which legal demands and claims can be predicated upon a terrifying ‘might is right’ principle (this is not to say that our society doesn’t de facto work in this way – I only mean to say that at the very least, it is not legally mandated that those with the religious/cultural/social monopolies should have the last word in issues affecting the bodily or emotional integrity of another person).

Legal standards also create equality before the law, meaning that the same options must be open to everyone, at which point it becomes a personal choice as to how those are utilised or not. In this way, laws are written with the view in mind that, excluding obviously the legal right to harm another person, people may do as they please. Abortion is legal, but people are of course free to choose not to use that freedom. Gay marriage will be legal; those opposed are free to avoid it. Equality before the law is not uniformity; I doubt that Dobbin would argue against the right to representation in a court of law, nor that the equal right of every person to adequate housing, clothing or food has resulted in a society of bland, identikit automatons. 

It is certainly true that in the UK, civil partnerships, which have been legal since 2004, offer the same benefits as marriage, which is a major improvement on the laws in the US, where spouses are not allowed to visit their dying partner in hospital, nor receive the benefits of a pension to support them after the partner’s death, and a whole host of other despicable restrictions on love and dignity that heterosexual couples do not have to face.

In the light of this, many opponents to gay marriage, such as Sarah Teather, have been asking why gay movements seek the appellation of ‘marriage’ when their needs have already been provided for:

“Virtually no new protections are offered to same-sex couples on the basis of this legislation on marriage, and any that are could easily be dealt with by amending civil partnership legislation.”

Legally speaking, the two types of ceremony are very similar.

But think about what the word ‘marriage’ means. It is a deeply embedded cultural and social institution – religion has no monopoly on the word, and never has – and therefore culturally, socially, personally, the word has connotations and implications that are extremely significant above and beyond legal benefits. Equality before the law must then offer the choice to imbue one’s relationship with this meaning. Barring this choice on the grounds of personal preference is unacceptable; it is a nonsensical as saying that because one doesn’t believe in evolution, it shouldn’t be taught in schools. Welcome to the southern part of the United States.

Many who oppose access to this powerful institution do not seem to have made up their minds which excuse to go for: that gay couples marrying will destroy the social fabric of the country (to which a nice facetious answer gives that gays would never destroy any kind of fabric); that it ruins a religious sacrament; or that allowing gay marriage will lead us into some dreadful grey Orwellian marital conformity, as Dobbin implies.

Well, which is it? It doesn’t really matter – none of these answers are increasingly archaic; neither, too, are they a) true or b) good enough excuses to limit equality of opportunity.

I am not arguing that all gay people– or all straight people, for that matter – should get married. Not all of them will. There have and always will be people who don’t chose that path – and as Simon Jenkins points out, given the way in which clergymen and legislators have always craved to bring society’s sexual mores under church or state control, ‘It is perhaps odd that gay people should want to associate themselves with so overt a symbol of that control’, and I certainly know some people who wouldn’t want to align themselves with it. I don’t think I want to align myself with it.

But the difference is that I have always had the choice available to me to go one way or the other. For Dobbin to talk about celebration of difference and equality, this choice has to be on offer. I am arguing that for the celebration of difference to be meaningful, there has to be a choice. Within an absolute, equal standard of rights on offer, people, with all their glorious, multifaceted quirks, will always celebrate difference. The differences that Dubbin advocates are not differences but restrictions. The celebration should not and must not be an excuse allowing fists to go swinging into the noses of the celebration of love.

International Impotence

'If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal'

Emma Goldman

Oh, les Nations Unites. How I am flummoxed by your (un)hallowed halls.

A few years ago while in India, I went to Wagah. This is the point on the India/Pakistan border where every evening at sunset since independence, soldiers from both sides have marched at each other in full military regalia, affecting an extremely threatening goose-step (which, admittedly, occasionally tipped across into Ministry of Silly Walks), opened the gates, closed the gates, opened the gates, closed the gates ad nauseam, and then everyone had a party.

A very astute friend I was travelling with turned to me during this palaver and said, ‘it’s everything I’ve ever learned about international relations conveniently portrayed through the medium of dance’.

I didn’t really know what he meant at the time. I’ve just been repeating the line ever since.

Perhaps I understand a little better now? Who knows. But I’ve been working in Geneva for a month now and the Human Rights Council is almost identical to that summer evening in 2007. Minus the dancing. Which is a shame.

The 21^st Session of the Council has been held over the last few weeks. I’ve been very much in an observer role, as my organisation is officially a monitor, which helps to demystify the UN for anyone who needs to access it for justice, lobbying, or throwing eggs at Syria (I was dangerously, dangerously close to this actually occurring: more on this at a later point).

During these sessions, draft resolutions are discussed by interested states, with a view to their being enshrined in INTERNATIONAL LAW (imagine said in X-Factor bloke’s voice). I covered a really great one on how best to protect journalists in conflict zones, as well as how to prevent states from smushing said journalists if they say anything ‘not in the national interest’ (i.e. calling a spade a spade when the government behave like cretins).

The conversation in these sessions was at point fairly informal (the Austrian and German ambassadors at one point started joking about the latest football match won by Germany); and at other points extremely tense, when thinly veiled insults were thrown from ‘my honourable colleague from Russia’ to ‘my learned friend from the United States’. For ‘honourable’ and ‘learned’, read ‘jackass’ and ‘muncus’.

Russia basically wanted to be able to legally harass journalists. The US said that would be ridiculous. China said that objectivity should be part of the resolution. The UK said that this allusion to neutrality would be used as a pre-requisite for protection of journalists – that is, that if a journalist was *gasp* critical about their government and not wholly neutral about something like the senseless slaughter of a thousand innocent ducklings or summat, they would no longer be entitled to protection under this resolution.

Ultimately, the resolution went through, and the objectivity clause was kept out. There is sense and reason in the world! Many times huzzah.

And then. Oh.

Russia happened again.

They put forward a resolution entitled ‘Using Traditional Values to Promote Human Rights’. It was essentially a two-finger salute to countries which have condemned the incarceration of Pussy Riot. No prizes for guessing which countries though this was a great idea. Don’t get me wrong, I am not an interventionist, and I think that Western states jumping on the universalist bandwagon can be extremely damaging; I also believe that there are traditional customs, beliefs and diversities which must be protected at all costs (for example, Pon Farr. Or is that Vulcan?). But I don’t care who you are or where you’re from: killing a journalist because they say something bad about your government is wrong.

And read in conjunction with Russia’s reservations about the resolution on journalists (‘in Soviet Russia, freedom expresses YOU’), this is kind of what they want to be able to do. Cutting a child’s clitoris out with a blunt piece of glass is NOT OK. Neither are a whole host of other things that might be included in the guise of ‘traditional values’, from child marriage to the killing of gay people, which, insofar as one can belief in objective right and wrong, are objectively wrong.

Anyhoo, this notwithstanding, Russia’s resolution was passed. There is very clear bloc voting going on in the Council, and Latin America, Asia and Africa pretty much thought this was a great idea, outweighing the nay-sayers by around 30 votes.

It’s a good thing the UN can’t enforce a bean’s worth of this resolution.

This does mean, however, that it can’t enforce the protection of journalists either.

The problem is that the traditional values resolution represents a much larger step than the journalists’ resolution. It’s just that (in my opinion) it’s very much a step in the wrong direction. The latter shows rhetorical consensus on the need for the protection of media freedoms, when in reality, it’s much easier for states to keep doing exactly what they’re doing, and given that resolutions aren’t even legally binding, there’s really little incentive for them to change. 

The former, on the other hand, presents really quite a lot of incentive for states to force further repression on whichever groups they see fit, and sadly, this might well be what happens as a result of the vote. They can hardly be prosecuted for contravening a law that doesn’t exist when prosecution for laws that do exist is so utterly flimsy in the first place.

I left the Council that day feeling simultaneously thrilled and devastated that the UN represents little more than a dance between a bunch of really stubborn, wordy, sarcastic peacocks.

Ah, merde. 

The Legacy of the MegaEvent

 (I wanted to title this post ‘The Dark Side of Eurovision’, but considering the misadventures of Humperdinck and Jedward in Baku last week, that seems perhaps a little obvious.)

And on the pedestal these words appear:
“My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Ozymandias, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Euro 2012. Eurovision 2012. The Olympics 2012. A magnificent spectacle of sportsmanship, fair play, and beautiful people in little shorts (and a few grannies in headscarves if that floats your boat). A chance to show support for your country, have a few beers, paint your face an alluring and slightly terrifying array of red, white and blue, and to admire said beautiful people in little shorts (we all do it). I’m not a sports fan per se but have always rather enjoyed the benign mass hysteria that sporting and musical events offer.

Except that they are no longer benign; a worrying trend has begun across the world in preparation for massive sporting events and the consequential influx of extra millions into countries poorly equipped to deal with such occasions. Azerbaijan and the Ukraine this summer alone have elucidated the fact that a country’s human rights record is not reeeeaaallly considered before ‘awarding’ it the honour of hosting such a spectacle.

In India a few years ago (yes, on my gap yah, get over it), I came across thousands of flyers in Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile, declaring how wonderful it was that the upcoming Olympics were being held in Beijing – ‘finally,’ they cried, ‘China will be forced to answer for their crimes against humanity in Tibet; the eyes of the world upon them will hold them to account.’

Nope. What it really meant was that China had been accepted into the international community once and for all. It was beginning to cost too much not to. And now that China is amongst the world’s largest economies, it is becoming more and more difficult to critique them for even the smallest digression. Recently, a British citizen with severe learning difficulties was executed in China for carrying heroin. Despite the fact that he had been unwittingly trafficked by Eastern European smugglers (which elsewhere in the world, if proven, carries a greatly reduced sentence), and despite his disability (which according to numerous human rights treaties, makes execution of that individual illegal), China carried out the execution. The UK/China convo went something like this:

UK: Um, can we have our bloke back, please?

China: No.

UK: Pretty please?

China: We’ll stop making shit for you.

UK: Ok. We’ll take four millions iPhones, then, please.

The life of just one man would cost too much to fight for; Tibet will never be free.

During the build-up to the Games themselves, Beijing, rather than using the opportunity to increase transparency as promised when awarded the event in 2001, instead extended arbitrary detention periods and arrested anyone who they thought might disrupt the harmonious image of China they wanted the world to see. Journalists, activists and protestors were kept under lock and key.

What were they protesting? The forcible removal of street children and the homeless from their families, for one thing. This ‘beautification’ is a particularly hideous practice and has happened and is happening everywhere from South Africa to Russia to Brazil. It fails to provide for the people it removes, who are often taken without any consideration for their families who might be nearby, without compensation and without adequate protection wherever they end up. It is a quick fix for a problem which is not quickly fixable. It solves none of the issues which result in chronic homelessness and can cause profound psychological distress and more deeply entrenches poverty as those displaced are ostracised and left with nothing.

And Londoners thought that having to use a different tube line was just about the WORST THING EVER.

Brazil is another country on the up, and it has two shiny upcoming events to prove it. The Rio World Cup of 2014 and Olympics of 2016 have provided the impetus for massive and accelerated development. Development! Mass employment and greater living standards for all! Hurrah!

Erm, no. What it means is the forced eviction of hundreds of thousands of the city’s poorest from their homes. The slums of Rio, the favelas, are huge, sprawling, makeshift communities, and are now being razed to the ground to make way for roads and car parks. People are forced out at a moment’s notice, given no compensation or any claim to the land which may have been theirs for hundreds of years, and given no adequate replacement housing. Considering the billions being poured into development and industry, a bit of cash to put a roof over children’s heads doesn’t seem too much to ask.

Another example is Qatar, and its ongoing building projects for the 2020 World Cup, which is resulting in the chronic exploitation of the Bangladeshi workforce, whose passports are taken away on arrival. Who are paid the below the minimum wage, and far below what was promised when they left home. Whose vital remittance money sent home to their families leaves them with nothing to live on. Who are forced into squalid living conditions and treacherously long working hours.

Another example is Sochi, Russia, where the Winter Olympics of 2014 have already resulted in the arrest of journalists writing about Russian violations.

Another is London, during whose Games illegal prostitution and sex trafficking is expected to rise by two thirds.

Another is Saudi Arabia and its refusal to allow women to participate in this year’s Games, despite Afghanistan’s exclusion from the last three Olympics for precisely that reason. No prizes for guessing why women’s rights have fallen by the wayside in this particular example.

And still the international community smiles upon these countries. It is a fixed and insincere smile – these practices do not go totally unnoticed – but a State's ego does not recognise the difference, and even if it does, it doesn’t really care. These emerging super-economies can afford not to. And at the end, all that will be left are a few giant buildings that will jar painfully with the human desolation that surrounds them.

I don’t mean to ruin everyone’s fun (all evidence to the contrary; I do apologise). These events can showcase human achievements in the most positive light; who can forget Tommie Smith’s iconic black salute, or Jesse Owens soundly trouncing every member of Hitler’s Ubermensch? Sport is pure achievement, classless, raceless, and testament to hard work (although I’m fairly sure I’ll never be an Olympic hurdler, come hell or high water). But they come, apparently inevitably, with an unpleasant undercurrent. The world of realpolitik and foreign policy (in my opinion, shorthand for ‘we’re going to ignore everything naughty that so-and-so does because if we have a go they might not let us build our bomb/spaceship/Lord of the Rings theme park next door’) is used to being the centre of attention, and to a certain extent I can appreciate the difficulty of squaring human rights concerns with economic policy, geopolitical alliances and very sensitive international relationships; but I’m personally not sure a singing competition should be included in that already very broad definition. Just sayin’.

PS. Lord of the Rings theme park? Hellooooo Frodo.

PPS. This video says it much better than I ever could; do give it a watch.