In this booklet, John Dardis SJ brings together a set of essays on the complex realities of migration in the world today, urging Irish people to welcome those who come to this land in their hour of need.
48 pp, Messenger Publications, 2004. To purchase this book online, go to www.messenger.ie.
CONTENTS
Part I: The larger picture
1. There is another way (John Dardis SJ)
2. Beyond border controls (John Dardis SJ)
Part II: What it’s like
3. Merciful refuge (Antanas Saulaitis SJ)
4. My story as a refugee (Nsengiyumva Ibrahim)
5. A city of pain (Lena Barrett)
6. Never go back (Egide Dhala)
Part III: The Irish scene
7. A place for the outsider (Joan Roddy DMJ)
8. Ireland of welcomes (Anne Horgan RSC)
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CHAPTER 1: There is another way
My first memory of hearing about refugees was as a small child living in Dublin in the mid-1960s. A family lived near us who had fled from Hungary in the 1950s. I remember being aware of how unusual it was having foreigners living down the road from us; it was seen as something novel, different, unique. Only later did I understand the reasons for their flight.
A more extended contact with refugees began for me in the late 1980s when I was working with refugees from Laos in Southeast Asia who had come to the United States. The father had sided with the Americans in the Vietnam war, and after the collapse of the regime in South Vietnam, the family had fled to the US. The father had lost a leg in the war and they were struggling with life in the US and with the huge cultural adjustment it brought. We had to speak through an interpreter.
A local woman, who was working for refugees who had come to that particular town, had introduced me to the family. Their story shows all the issues about being a refugee. Persecution and fear of death or torture are often reasons for people fleeing their own country. People may be wounded or suffering a disability. They have a huge cultural adaptation to make, and local people can make a huge difference by the welcome they give.
Refugee status was officially established by the Geneva Convention of 1951. It was framed to help people who fled after World War II, and applied to events up to 1951. In 1967, the Convention was extended to cover situations that arose after that date.
In essence it means that if you are fleeing persecution, are outside your own country and need protection, the international community pledges to give you that protection. In the last fifty years, millions of people have received international protection by being given refugee status. At the start of 2002 the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees was caring for about twenty million people, scattered around the world as follows:
Asia 8,820,700
Europe 4,855,400
Africa 4,173,500
North America 1,086,800
Latin America and Caribbean 765,400
Oceania 81,300
TOTAL 19,783,100
It is important to note that the status of refugee is only given if you are fleeing very specific forms of persecution. There are five explicit grounds. It has to be persecution for reason of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or because of your political opinions. People fleeing war, for example, are not refugees in the strict sense, since they are fleeing a generalised situation of violence rather than specific persecution.
Unlike when I was growing up, in most towns in Ireland today, the presence of foreigners is almost taken for granted. Our attitudes have been mixed. Sometimes we have welcomed them with open arms, as for example, in our response to those who came from Kosovo. At other times, there has been a reaction of suspicion, and we have wondered if they are genuine refugees. And sometimes, perhaps most times, we have been somewhere in between, with a reaction of confusion, not knowing what we think or feel. Thirty years ago, the issue of Vietnamese refugees seemed a straightforward issue. For refugee situations today, we don’t seem so sure.
The truth is that the concept of ‘refugee’ is not a straightforward one. Even governments interpret the Geneva Convention differently and people who qualify for refugee status in one country would be rejected in other countries. Many say, ‘We want to help refugees but economic migrants should go home’. But, even if you accept this approach, the question is how to distinguish between refugees and economic migrants. The dividing line is not as clear as you would think. If you flee to avoid starving to death, are you a refugee or an economic migrant?
From 1965 to 1997 President Mobutu of Zaire, now Congo, robbed his country blind, and his personal fortune was estimated conservatively at US$5 billion, according to a report on CNN in April 1997. His wine collection in a castle in Portugal was estimated at over US$2 million (World News Digest).
This, along with a host of wars in Congo, has taken its toll and now, in Kinshasa, the capital, 50% of the population have only one meal per day, and 25% have one meal every two days, according to the Norwegian Council for Africa. Annual income in Congo is about US$210, i.e. about 57 cents per day. This is despite the fact that the country is one of the wealthiest in the world in terms of natural resources.
In Eastern Congo, largely because of war, there were 1.7 million deaths between September 1998 and May 2000, and 34% of the victims were children younger than five years old. That means over 570,000 children under five died in less than two years. If you flee this kind of situation, are you a refugee or an economic migrant?
Trafficking in human beings’ is big business today, bigger even than the drug trade. You’ve seen the images of bodies lifted from containers after suffocating to death, or washed ashore having failed to reach safety. That is happening daily in Europe, and now we are so used to it that it is no longer news.
If you survive and make it to the ‘promised land’, you can be a virtual slave, the women forced to work in prostitution and the men forced to work long hours on construction sites to payoff their ‘debt’ to the Mafia who control this kind of operation. Failure to pay means brutal beatings or even death. Life is cheap, the trafficking business is lucrative, and nothing gets in the way of profits. If you are a victim of trafficking and in fear of your life from the Mafia, isn’t this a kind of persecution? Shouldn’t you qualify for refugee status?
Even victims of war may not, strictly speaking, be refugees under the Geneva Convention, yet surely they are entitled to special protection? We have an innate sense of who deserves protection and who deserves to be given the status of refugee, and we are often surprised when we hear people’s story and then realise they do not qualify for refugee status. The challenge for us as Christians is not to go along slavishly with Government decisions about who deserves help and protection, but to work out our own ideas on the basis of what is just and right.
The Catholic Church has taken a lead in this already. Vatican documents speak of de facto refugees, because they want to broaden the refugee category. They want to include in it people who flee their countries because of wrong economic policy, as well as victims of armed conflicts and natural disasters (Pontifical Council for Migrants, 1992).
What the Church is saying is that there is this large ‘grey area’ between those who are, strictly speaking, Geneva Convention refugees at one end of the spectrum and those who are clearly fleeing to better their lives at the other. And so it speaks of de facto refugees. Governments in Europe increasingly want to deny that this grey area exists, as they harden their policies towards asylum seekers. But it clearly does exist.
What about people who abuse the system and who claim asylum when really they have no basis for this? The Vatican document is helpful on this issue, saying:
‘In the case of so-called economic migrants, justice and equity demand that appropriate distinctions be made. Those who flee economic conditions that threaten their lives and physical safety must be treated differently from those who emigrate simply to improve their position.’
