We must help refugees
Written by Juan Andres Cuervo, Communications & Campaigns Assistant at Birkbeck Students' Union
The crisis of refugees have been exacerbated in the last decades. War, gender violence or climate change are among the main causes that force people to leave their countries to save their lives.
A refugee is someone who is at serious risk of persecution in their home country. This is not about economic betterment; it is fundamentally about life and liberty. For that reason, men, women and children risk their lives trying to get to safety in Europe.
Thus, we must help all the refugees, no matter their country of origin, ethnicity, religion or culture. That means we must embrace people who are seeking support, and hence a detention centre should be an oxymoron in a so-called liberal democracy.
And yet, detention is used much more extensively in the UK’s asylum system than in other EU countries. Those countries also have time limits on how long a person may be detained under immigration powers, whereas the UK has no time limit. This is perfectly portraid in 'Silence Heard Loud', a film released during the Human Rights Watch Film Festival which tell the stories of seven individuals from six countries who journeyed to the UK in search of safety. The testimonies of the refugees about the cruelty of the detention centres is clear. Having participated in the 'Compass Project' at Birkbeck and studied at the College, their stories will go a long way to challenge the inequal treatment received by people who leave their countries searching a safe place.
Invaders: how imperalism destroys the world
The concept of imperialism is defined in Britannica as the "state policy, practice, or advocacy of extending power and dominion, especially by direct territorial acquisition or by gaining political and economic control of other areas", and it "always involves the use of power."
Currently, the 3 countries with more number of refugees over the world are Syria, Ukraine and Afghanistan. The three of them have been devastated by war. In Syria, the conflict started in 2011, and people are at risk of bombardment and violence from all sides. This includes barrel bombing and gas attacks.
In countries like Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen or Ukraine, the flux of refugees has been provoked by a foreign intervention. In that sense, the 2003 US invasion and supported by Western powers like the UK and Spain displaced approximately 1 in 25 Iraqis, and in 2020, there were 9.2 million Iraqis are internally displaced or refugees abroad.
Recently, the invasion perpetrated by Russia had caused more than 8 million people from Ukraine to flee, and over 4,000 civilian deaths.
Another country destroyed by war is Afghanistan. In the last 40 years, they have been invaded by the USSR and the United States. The imperialist intervention has created a current of conflict, natural disasters, chronic poverty and food insecurity. And the legacy of violence still persists in 2022. In fact, the CIA funded the mujahedeen, many of whom would eventually went on to become members of either the Taliban or al Qaeda, with the most famous of all being Osama bin Laden.
Yemen is another case of a country beign systematically attacked with a huge role played by the Western powers. Seven years ago, it started the onslaught by a coalition of countries, headed by Saudi Arabia against Yemen and its people. Countries like the UK, the USA and several EU nations are directly complicit in the ongoing war.
Nowadays, over half of the military aircraft used by Saudi Arabia in the assault being supplied by Britain alone. According to the research of Campaign Against Arms Trade (CAAT), BAE systems has sold £17.6bn worth of arms and military services to the Saudi dictatorship since 2015. Why is this not known to the public? As Owen Jones puts it, "most of our media show little interest in scrutinising our government for slaughter that it is directly complicit in."
The UN has estimated that the war in Yemen had killed 377,000 people by the end of 2021, through direct and indirect causes. Over 150,000 of these deaths were the direct result of the armed conflict, while far more have died due to hunger and disease as a result of the humanitarian crisis caused by the war. Nearly 15,000 civilians have been killed by direct military action, most of them in air strikes by the Saudi-led Coalition.
Similarly, Palestine is being oppresed by a powerful force allied with the Western powers. Across Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Palestinians are systematically deprived of their rights. For that reason, Amnesty International had denounced this situation as an apartheid.
For over 73 years, Israel has forcibly displaced entire Palestinian communities and demolished hundreds of thousands of Palestinians’ homes, causing terrible trauma and suffering. Today, over 6 million Palestinians are refugees, and at least another 150,000 are at real risk of losing their homes.
Refugees and the media
According to the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR), there are 84 million forcibly displaced people worlwide. The estimates suggest that there are more than 40 million environmental refugees. This means that eather-related events triggered an average of 21.5 million new displacements each year. To put in context, this is more than twice as many as displacements caused by conflict and violence. With the recent warnings from climate scientists, this number will only continue to grow.
You can read our previous article about global warming here
Despite the rhetoric employed by the mainstream media against non-European refugees, at the end of 2018, the European countries were taken less refugees than expected. In mid 2021, the country hosting the most refugees was Turkey (3.7 million). Other significant host countries for refugees were Colombia (1.7 million) Uganda (1.5 million) Pakistan (1.4 million) and Germany (1.1 million). Countries like Sudan, Iran and Lebanon also take a huge number of refugees. This means that developing countries host 85% of the world’s refugees.
Therefore, the hate rhetoric used by people like Donald Trump, Matteo Salvini, Marine Le Pen, Santiago Abascal or Viktor Orban is not just morally distateful, but it is not based in evidence. The narrative of a supposed invasion of foreigners was originated to spread fear into the population, to acquire electoral benefits by those politicians, and to demonise refugees to as a smokescreen to hide the real problem of the world: that is capitalism, rooted in imperialism and colonialism, the main cause of the collapse of the planet and its beings.
Unfortunately, blaming on foreigners about the consequences of the globalisation have provided electoral success for the far-right parties. Since 1990, those extremists' organisations in Europe have tripled their vote, and their discourses based on xenophobia and racism, blaming on foreigners and feminism, and attacking LGTBQ+ communities have became a worlwide trend.
In the UK, Nigel Farage emerged as the winner during the Brexit Referendum in spite or because of his hate rhetoric. The infamous anti-migrant poster was reported to the police. And yet, it probably helped Farage to accomplish its goal, as he admitted.
Trump became president in 2016, almost won in 2020 and seems determined to try to reach the White House in 2024. Salvini became PM in Italy and Orban has recently won his fourth consecutive election. Le Pen reached the second round in 2017 and may become the next French President, while Abascal has launched Vox to become the third Political Party in the Spanish Parliament.
The threat is within our societies. So our answer must be to denounce war, to embrace people, to protect the planet, and to respect everybody. People from Afghanistan, Ukraine, Iraq, Syria, Sudan and any other country of the world must receive help whenever they need it. Human Rights must be our torch to enligthen a world which seems dangerously falling into the darkest abyss.
