Europe insincere on the question of refugees from Africa and Asia
What you need to know:
- The public discourse in many European countries is dominated today by xenophobic and even racist diatribes against refugees.
One of the great tragedies of our time is the hundreds of people drowning and dying as they attempt to cross the Mediterranean Sea from Libya to Europe.
It is estimated that more than 1,800 people have died attempting to cross the Mediterranean in the first six months of 2015. And we have all seen the desperate images of weak, battered and emaciated people left adrift in the sea.
Worse, the European press and authorities insist on labelling those attempting to cross as migrants, rather than refugees. The vast majority of the people come from Syria, Yemen, Eritrea, Afghanistan and Somalia, all countries that are either engulfed in conflict or in severe crisis.
The European refusal to call them refugees is to avoid their international legal responsibility to host them. The 1951 Refugee Convention defines a refugee as someone who “owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” In other words, refugees are people forced to leave their country in order to escape war, persecution or natural disaster.
FALLING SHORT
On the other hand, a migrant is defined by choice: Someone who chooses to leave their country to work or live in another country. Today, this often relates to people migrating for the purpose of getting better jobs, or even simply a job.
It also applies to people choosing to move for family and emotional reasons. With migrants, states often have greater latitude in deciding to accept them or not, but with clear limits. A state cannot, for example render stateless someone who has migrated, and it must also comply with due process, proportionality and human rights.
So by referring to people clearly in fear of persecution from Syria, Yemen, Eritrea, and Somalia, as migrants rather than refugees, the Europeans are falling short of their legal obligations, and in the process revealing their xenophobia and racism.
For when tens of thousands of people fled the war in the former Yugoslavia for EU states, there was no fudging that they were refugees. When hundreds fled the former Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc before the fall of the Berlin Wall, they were welcomed with open arms and paraded as symbols of the attractiveness of the West over the East.
WEAK ARGUMENT
Today the response of the EU to these desperate people fleeing war, torture and violations is to focus on beefing up “maritime patrols in the Mediterranean, disrupt people trafficking networks and capture and destroy boats before migrants board them.”
They claim they can’t handle the surge of people wanting to come into the EU, but that is a weak argument especially considering that these are some of the richest countries in the world. Last year the UNHCR estimated that 200,000 people crossed the Mediterranean into Europe.
But compare this with much poorer countries. The UNHCR reported that last year, Turkey hosted the largest number of refugees — 1.59 million. Pakistan hosted 1.51 million; tiny Lebanon hosted 1.15 million; Iran 982,000 people; Ethiopia 659,500 and Jordan 654,100. Kenya follows Jordan as host to about 600,000 refugees.
It is not about space or wealth: it is about values and the EU approach to refugees from these counties speaks volumes. Indeed, today the public discourse in many European countries is dominated by xenophobic and even racist diatribes against “the other” and many governments are working to appease these sentiments.
Here in Kenya, despite the regime’s big talk of Africa first and Africa rising, its rhetoric and actions when it comes to Somali refugees is telling: They want to build a wall between Kenya and Somalia, forcibly close down the Dadaab refugee camp, and have used xenophobic colonial concentration camps against Somalis. Maybe deep down, they have more in common with European fascism than African values.
