Closing borders a delusional fantasy
Western governments need to study the root causes of the refugee crisis, writes HESTER MOORE, a Christ church woman working in Cairo with the UN Refugee Agency.
Around halfway through last year, as the world’s attention was gradually shifting to the sinister stretch of water between Africa and Europe, a young Chadian refugee approached me in a Cairo street.
He’d recognised me as belonging to an organisation that worked with urban refugees, and wanted to seek advice regarding the security challenges he was facing in Egypt. If I can’t find relief, he told me determinedly, I’m going to Libya to find a boat that will take me to Europe.
At the time, the flow of people across the Mediterranean— and the corresponding amount of deaths— was reaching record levels. Municipal coastguards, on both the Italian and Libyan shores, were scrambling to pluck desperate survivors from the wreckage of flimsy boats.
The anti-immigration debate in Europe was rising in crescendo. As stale politicians bleated in the immunity of the moot hall, thousands of asylum seekers poured into neighbouring territories from countries like Syria, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, and Eritrea.
These people squeezed into the already bloated asylum systems of— predominantly— Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt. These governments, in collaboration with the United Nations Refugee Agency, afforded many of those fleeing persecution a legal status couched in a grandiose promise. These people were granted international protection.
The enforceability of this status, however, extends only as far as international partners are willing to afford.
The doctrine of protection is not something that the UN Refugee Agency can unilaterally enforce.
It is a concept propped up by the financial and legal support of governments, and bolstered by robust and uniform policies at national, regional, and international levels. It involves a high degree of co-operation, strong leadership, and solid planning; ingredients that have been critically missing from the international political cauldron.
The New Zealand government’s commitment to resettle an additional 600 Syrian refugees over two years is symptomatic of this malaise. It is merely a band aid; one that seeks not to heal a haemorrhaging international system, but instead provides a temporary solution to a crisis that will continue as long as politicians ignore the driving factors behind it. Armed conflict, disappearing resources, weak governance, and economic disparity all play significant roles.
A fundamentally overlooked reality, however, is the one played out in the camps and suburban ghettoes of countries of asylum. These are places where the international community’s anaemic response is felt most acutely.
In Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, and Egypt, refugee communities fester in an unbearable limbo. Poor access to services, daily harassment and discrimination, abject poverty, and precarious security environments are compounded by the international community’s lethargic response. Among these usually tenacious communities, hopelessness grows.
It is becoming clearer that western governments will not awaken to those caught in the tranches of displacement. A small, fortunate number are resettled. For the vast majority, however, that dream is too distant and uncertain.
The young Chadian man, and countless others like him, are realising that entrapment in a legal, social and economic morass is worse than the dangers that await them on the way to Europe. After all, resettlement is a privilege offered to only one per cent of refugees; further, the social environments of countries of asylum curtail many prospects for local integration. The choice to leave boils down to a very simple human desire – freedom.
When a person’s control over their fundamental freedoms is stripped away by a despotic power, they flee to the most convenient place of safety. Because countries of asylum are often rife with their own internal struggles, this safety frequently goes unfulfilled.
Confronted by the difficulties of asylum in under resourced and overstretched environments – those which purport to offer safety and protection – refugees and asylum seekers seek out alternative solutions. For a second time, they flee; this time not escaping the persecution of their own countries, but the impotence of a system that cannot promise them the safety which they so basically need. Somewhere, along the inhospitable route to Europe, lies the resumption of individual freedom.
The international response to these displaced masses fails to recognise this reality. The refugee crisis has devolved into a political crisis, overridden by egoism and marred by a lack of consensus and leadership.
As Europe seals off its borders, other countries are looking at fortifying themselves against what is being treated not as a humanitarian crisis, but as an enemy offensive. Governments continue to play out the increasingly delusional fantasy that unilateral action will suffice to stop the flow of people arriving at their borders.
The rest of the West reels at the magnitude of the movement— only because it no longer hides benignly in distant lands, but sits tangibly at its doorstep. If anything positive is to spring from all of this, it will be the realisation that Western governments can no longer feign ignorance to fundamental breaches of rights in politically inconvenient countries.
Collective action to tackle the root causes of forced migration. Strong leadership structures. Greater international support for refugee communities languishing in countries of asylum. These are the way forward.
The Government’s relaxing of its refugee policies is promising, but it is not a potent enough message to feel in the swamps pockmarking the Turkish/ Syrian border, or in the labyrinths of She gerab and Zaatari refugee camps— where people no longer wait for the sporadic and uncertain mercy of Western governments, but the more tangible hand of a smuggler as it points them towards the sea.
Christchurch woman Hester Moore works for Refuge Point, an organisation serving refugees throughout Africa. She is currently seconded to the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees in Nairobi, Kenya. The views expressed in this article are her own and do not represent those of either Refuge Point or UNHCR.