The following essay was published in two parts by Wasafiri Journal of International Literature this year.
In the last two years, as the humanitarian refugee
crisis has grown, I have been struck by the perversity of the ‘debate’ on
asylum seekers. Rationality has lost out to fear of difference and fear of
change. Mainstream political and media messages are out of step with both the
facts about asylum and refuge and with asylum seekers’ lived reality.
I began doing outreach work with refugees and asylum
seekers three and a half years ago, before what we now refer to as the refugee
crisis, the greatest humanitarian emergency of the current era. Then, the women
and men I worked with were from Uganda, Cameroon, the Congo, Rwanda, Malawi and
many other central and southern African countries, as well as a significant
minority who came from Iran, Iraq and Libya. We worked together in the unheated
training room of an extremely effective but woefully underfunded major charity
whose last two annual reports had warned of a bleak future despite the
organisation’s necessary and specialised work.
The government, then the Tory-Lib Dem coalition, had
begun implementing severe economic cuts which seemed to punish those who were
already in need. They slashed – and continue to slash – funding to vital
services which helped those requiring housing, early years family support,
legal representation, rape crisis provision, disability assistance, protection
from domestic violence, trauma counselling, support after being trafficked and
prostituted, access to training, education and employment. It constituted a
wholesale attack on the third sector, encompassing social services and
innumerable charities, including many which were a vital lifeline for asylum
seekers and a flimsy barrier against outright destitution. Those protections
are no longer there and everyone in need, not just asylum seekers, is feeling
the effects. Since the Conservatives’ victory in the 2015 elections, both the
policies and the rhetoric have become even more inhumane and aggressive.
The charity I worked with, and others I’ve visited
since, had a unique atmosphere of acceptance and industry. They were places
where asylum seekers were believed and helped with a practical and
unquestioning immediacy. It’s a very different experience from the brutal Home
Office asylum system of denial, detention, disbelief and obfuscation, one which
combines physical incarceration and control with the psychological
terrorisation: asylum seekers have regular scheduled meetings with the Home
Office. The system is designed to wear people down so that they give up. I have
met asylum seekers who had been highly regarded political activists (or came
from politically active families) who bore the marks of torture on their
bodies, who were told they were lying. I have met asylum seekers fleeing
utterly endemic male sexual violence, with perpetrators being from the
government, rebels, militias and peacekeeping forces alike, who were told they
were lying. I have met asylum seekers who were forced to strip to be searched or
use the toilet with two guards standing on either side of them. I met a
traumatised woman from Eritrea who was told by a detention centre nurse, ‘If
you don’t stop crying and carrying on, I’m going to tell them you’re mental,
and we’re going to lock you up in a mental hospital.’ The sexual and other
abuse of women detained at Yarls Wood is now notorious. Cases like these
demonstrate the sick cruelty of those in authority who will, for their own
sadistic pleasure, abuse those who are clearly in extreme distress. Sadly,
these cases and this behaviour are the norm, not the exception. They are
actively supported by many governments’ funding, policies and rhetoric.
Recently, there has been an international increase in
state-sponsored sadism towards those with nothing, who are fleeing everything
and willing to risk everything for survival. The collateral damage is these millions
of refugees who have witnessed the destruction of stable civil society,
political accountability, urban and rural infrastructure including electricity
and water lines, access to quality education, healthcare and employment. They
have lived with surveillance, detention, torture, sexual violence. They have
recognised that there is no future for themselves or their children, and so
they have packed one bag and left. Instead of culpability, humanity and welcome
they are encountering hostility, militarisation, suspicion and punishment. While
some states, like Germany, have taken in asylum seekers with no fuss, others (especially
England) have made their anti-asylum rhetoric ever louder and more xenophobic,
inflaming panic about ‘marauders’ and ‘hordes’ of incomers, talking about
putting up security walls and conflating asylum issues with other prejudices
against migrants, foreign students, Islam and, ultimately, against the whole
idea of multiculturalism. States including Greece and Cyprus have militarised
against refugees, using army personnel, tear gas, incarceration in sports
stadiums in the burning sun and other inhumane and abusive tactics. Hungary has
acted shamelessly, like a racist nightclub bouncer protecting the rest of
Europe, closing down its main rail stations and forcibly diverting trains to
refugee camps.
To seek asylum is to ask for sanctuary, a haven, a
safe place. It’s only the very first stage in regularising one’s existence and
creating a new life in a different place. A refrain which I keep hearing
amongst the asylum seekers I work with is, ‘I came to you for help and you
treat me like a criminal.’
Seeking asylum is a human right enshrined in
international law, and the reasons for doing so include war, the breakdown of
society, political persecution and torture. Currently, extreme poverty is not a
grounds for seeking asylum, although I think it should be made one. Many people
in the global south are also fleeing the effects of climate change, whose
catastrophic and wide-ranging effects have decimated animal ecosystems, crop
growth, waterways and harvests and made rearing animals or planting enough
crops to generate a liveable income or ensure a stable existence impossible. The
land is now simply too hot or dry, too wet or too flooded, or too unpredictable,
for anyone to survive. That too is not yet classed as a good reason to become a
refugee.
Sometimes I think the accepted reasons for asylum are
only those which an elite westerner can imagine happening to themselves –
military action, civil war, political persecution. If climate change is
happening to ‘foreign’, different or other people, of another colour, speaking
another language, possibly of another religion, in another country, it’s as
though it is not real, not serious and not imaginable. The same goes for
extreme poverty. Westerners can’t imagine what it’s like not to be able to feed
your children, have water or electricity or provide your family with a roof
that doesn’t leak or a school room that has blackboards, books and chairs. They
negatively class people fleeing such conditions as ‘economic migrants’ as if
these people are being greedy, when of course the reality is that nobody takes
their children, their savings and one bag and risks death, drowning and
detention unless they’re desperate. In a cruel underlying irony, many of the
conflicts that asylum seekers are fleeing in southern Africa and the Middle
East are due to instability, illegitimate governments, corruption, poverty and
dictatorships which were a direct result of colonial (especially English and
French) exploitation and meddling a century ago in the wake of the fall of the
Ottoman empire. The chickens are coming home to roost and geopolitical karma is
having its way; refugees are the collateral damage.
The daily existence of the asylum seekers I do
outreach work with is a thousand miles away – a telling phrase – from the
narratives so commonly peddled in the more conservative quarters of the media.
While some had certainly fled war zones, many had abandoned their home
countries decades after conflict. They had experienced the long aftermath of
war and witnessed the emergence of fragile states ruled either by dictators
propped up by corrupt bureaucracies and untrustworthy police and army
hierarchies, or by armed militia, vigilante gangs, local thugs who have assumed
power in the wake of a total breakdown of law and order. They had been
tortured, raped (and I consider rape to be a kind of torture, including in
peacetime) and threatened, and had witnessed such things being done to their
own relatives.
In seeking asylum, legally they sought only to be
recognised as refugees. At a human level, however, they sought protection,
safety and the basic tools to restart life with dignity. That’s all. Asylum is,
moreover, a completely distinct issue from migration, where people move –
rightly and understandably – for work, for education, to strengthen family ties
and to improve their lives. White Westerners do this too, all the time, but
when they do so they call it being an expat or an international. A little over
a century ago, they did it all over the world, shamelessly, proudly, exploitatively,
arrogantly, with a view to taking whatever they could from it in terms of money
and labour and land and profits and items to trade; and we call that
colonialism.
Europe has failed to do its most basic humanitarian
duty in accepting asylum seekers and housing them in places that are safe, dignified
and fit for human beings and do not resemble punitive facilities for convicted
criminals. In 2014, the UK government received around 30,000 asylum
applications, of which it accepted less than half. More than 85% of refugees
have been displaced to developing countries. Even given the current refugee
crisis, with people escaping from countries including Syria, sub-Saharan
Africa, Afghanistan, Somalia and Eritrea, the overall number of individuals coming
to Europe is less than 0.5% of the EU’s total population. These are just a few
of the facts, all available on the UNHCR web site and the sites of countless
charities like Asylum Aid and the Refugee Council. But nobody seems to care
about the facts of asylum and refuge when the hateful, fearful rhetoric is so loud
that it drowns out everything, including basic decency.
