Refugee Week 2009 > Inspiration > Chris Cleave's blog

Chris Cleave's blog

See this blog and much more on Chris Cleave's website

FRIDAY 19th June 2009

It?s Friday, so I?m not going to ask any difficult questions today. According to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, there are currently around eight million refugees in the world and over twenty million internally displaced people ? refugees within their own countries. By no means all of these people seek refuge in the UK. Each year, between 20,000 and 40,000 people seek asylum here. Many are accepted; many more are rejected. But to put these numbers in context, 577,000 people immigrated to the UK in 2007 alone (the last year for which I can find Office of National Statistics data). Asylum seekers, therefore, represent a tiny fraction of total immigration. It?s not a flood, it?s not a plague, it?s a relatively small stream of people who, as I?ve already mentioned, could easily be seen as an asset rather than a liability. My final question for Refugee Week, then, is a very simple one: to how many of these people should we grant refuge? And what would you say to those, if any, you?d turn away?

This video shows a tour of the huge immigration detention centre currently under construction on Christmas Island in Australia. Something very like this is coming to the UK soon. The UK Border Agency is increasing its detention estate by 60% by 2012

THURSDAY 18th June 2009

When I was a teenager in the 1980s, we thought of asylum seekers as heroes. The hundreds who died while trying to cross the Berlin Wall, for example, were mourned. Those who made it into the West were greeted with joyful cheers and assistance, and often became celebrities. Likewise the pilots, performers and scientists who defected from the Soviet Union.

We also had heroes from previous generations - Sigmund Freud, who fled to London to escape the Nazis, or Anne Frank, who could not flee far enough. Albert Einstein, Karl Marx, Joseph Conrad - all of them refugees ? I could go on and on. When horror and darkness descend, asylum seekers are the ones who get away. They are typically above average in terms of intellectual gifts, far-sightedness, motivation and resilience. These are the people you want to have on your side. It will be a monument to our hubris if we allow ourselves to start thinking of them as a burden.

And yet, there seems to have been a reversal in the public perception of refugees, since I was a teenager. So this is my fourth question for Refugee Week: why do you think that refugees have gone from being heroes to being villains in the public mind?

This video shows East German citizens making attempts to escape into West Berlin, in the years before the Berlin Wall came down

WEDNESDAY 17th June 2009

We are often told that we live in a globalised world, and the statement is repeated so often that it's sometimes hard to remember it isn't true. At best it's half true - money can move freely across national borders, but people can't. Human beings are often denied asylum, but money always has a safe refuge - I believe it's called Switzerland. The fact that money transcends borders has given us a financial crisis that is indisputably global. The fact that people cannot move freely has given us the refugee crisis. (If we didn't mind it when people moved, it wouldn't be called a crisis).

It is possible to imagine a world where money is restricted to its country of origin, but where people can move to where the work is. That?s an alternate interpretation of globalisation that would solve one set of problems, and create another. Before we dismiss it out of hand, we should consider what such a world would look like. Personally, I suspect I'd rather live there.

We should also ask ourselves whether we have a right to insist that such a world must not come about. In the South Africa of the second half of the 20th Century, 'Blacks' were denied citizenship rights and made to live in self-governing enclaves, or 'Bantustans'. Apartheid fell and is now almost universally condemned. And yet it could be argued that the consequence of our restricted form of globalisation is a global apartheid in which the largely white Western civilisation has the whip hand.

Imagine for a moment that, in our small world, the movement restrictions between the "developed world" and the "developing world" are as arbitrary and cruel as the boundary between greater South Africa and Transkei. Or, if the boundary is not arbitrary, then I must ask my third question for Refugee Week: what, then, is the basis on which we deny a life in the West to those who would seek refuge in it?

This video is The Specials singing "Nelson Mandela" in 1984.
Mandela was released in 1990

TUESDAY 16th June 2009

Writers from Thomas Moore to William Morris have imagined utopias, and leaders such as Ghandi and Mandela have demanded changes in society that must, at the time, have seemed utopian. Mandela was and is inspiring for his unshakable conviction that our human journey can take us from a bad place to a good place; that we can evolve as a species in terms of our attitudes and behaviours. Indeed, the highest ideal of humanity is to escape our bonds, to reform our institutions, and to achieve, as the American Constitution puts it, "a more perfect union."

Individually and collectively, we need to work out how to live on this planet. Any human being who imagines a better tomorrow becomes a refugee from the present, longing to arrive at a more beautiful future. This is the pulse that beats in our blood as human beings. The primal drive to set out for a place of security: this was the howl of the wind in Odysseus's sails and the creak of the timber in Noah?s ark. It was the crunch of the gravel under the sandals of Moses' followers as they crossed the dry bed of the Red Sea.

Those sounds are no quieter today for the fact that our modern journey to refuge as a species must be led by scientists and social reformers rather than by bearded men with ocean-parting powers. We are all the offspring of refugees. We are the biological descendents of those who fled from danger, and thus survived. We are an adaptable species, and our survival comes from our ability to imagine a condition of refuge, and to set out for it. We are all, as I'm sure Noah once remarked, in the same boat.

So my second question during Refugee Week is this: why do we in the Western countries so often treat refugees from the troubled areas of the world as if they represented the worst, rather than the best, in humanity?

This video features the Refugee All Stars, from Sierra Leone. More info here)

MONDAY 15th June 2009

The first thing many refugees realise when they arrive in the UK is that this place is far from a perfect refuge. I once asked a Nigerian refugee what he missed most, now that he lived in England. "Democracy," he replied with a twinkle in his eye, going on to remind me that his President had been elected, while my Prime Minister had not.

Refugees can be refreshingly satirical about these islands, and it behoves us to remember when considering refugees that we ourselves have not yet reached the pinnacle of perfect statehood. Nor are we at peace with all other nations or the fanatical elements within them. Until such a time as we are, then the potential exists, through war or terrorist strike, for a rapid reversal of our status as a refuge of relative peace and security.

A refugee is not someone we look down on from a great height. He or she is someone we meet eye-to-eye, as two citizens of imperfect states, one of whom has simply been luckier than the other. It?s good to remember that luck can change, and to imagine the situation reversed. Refuge is a relative concept that only becomes concrete when something is threatening your survival and you must find a safer place to be.

We in Britain should not imagine that own peace could never disintegrate. If we are lucky, our nation will not be attacked. But even then, as happened to large populations in Germany in the 1930s, or in the Balkans in the 1990s, it is possible that we, too, through tyranny, might become refugees in our lifetimes. If that day comes then we might hope that the people of Africa, for example, will be more understanding when considering our applications for asylum than we have been when considering theirs. It will certainly be hard for us to argue that we helped Africa as much as we could while times were good for us.

So, my first question during Refugee Week is this: to which country would you go to seek refuge, if you and your family suddenly had to leave the UK? And how would you persuade them that you deserved it?

This video is an excerpt from 'Threads', a 1984 BBC television play depicting a nuclear warhead strike on the British city of Sheffield.

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