Refugees. The danger of benevolence
Ruba Salih, School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.
In October 2016, a few dozen unaccompanied minors arrived in the UK from the former refugee camp of Calais, also evocatively known as “the Jungle”. The scheme had been supported by former Member of Parliament, Lord Dubs, who between 1938 and 1940 was one of the thousands of Jewish children saved from Nazi persecution and brought to Great Britain thanks to the Kindertransport.
The children’s arrival to the UK caused unrest in the media and in the public. “White Lives Matter” banners were displayed by local right-wing groups in protest. The children did not correspond to the idea that we had in mind. They did not look like the ones whose images we are endlessly exposed to in appeals for aid: small, starved, fragile, unprotected. These children did not seem innocent enough. So they have been made to seem sinister, labeled as corrupt, as liars. Some politicians asked for dental tests to assess their real age.
It did not occur to the accusers that these children have been deprived of their innocence, forced to grow up quickly, surely much faster than other children who live much safer lives. When your childhood experience is war, death, fear, no secure refuge and the loss of your family, then it should not be surprising if you look older than your age. Certainly, you are already older that most adults you’ll encounter in Europe.
The suggestion to carry out pervasive body checks on the Calais children also caused a wave of indignation. Many in the public called for a more benevolent spirit, for compassion and recognition of the common humanity we belong to. “Choose humanity”, “Refugees are human”, “We can all afford to be human” are some of the mottos we hear every day in the solidarity and humanitarian appeals for refugees.
I am a scholar, but I am also the daughter of Palestinian refugees who lost their homes, their possessions, their properties and their right to live in their country forever in 1948, when Israel was created after a violent war. Like hundreds of thousands of other Palestinians, my parents found themselves stranded, not knowing where to go, not having the right to stay anywhere permanently. What changed our lives forever and what made me a fully-fledged human being is something else. I received a passport and, with it, I had access to rights. The right to move, right to stay, right to be different, right to decide about my future. The right to participate to the funeral of my grandmother, or to see my dying uncle, when none of my other relatives scattered around the globe had a passport or the right passport to do so. My passport and my rights allowed me to be and feel human, to be different from the majority without fear, to assert myself, to raise my voice. My passport made me able to become an activist as a young woman, and an academic passionate about researching and writing on those less privileged than me today.
Let me take you to a picture. You surely remember the image of the little body of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old child washed to the shore after trying to cross the Mediterranean sea, who — like so many — died by drowning. The picture of this little child lying lifeless on the shores of Turkey provoked shock, outrage and then aroused our compassion. Aylan’s picture brought to light the human dimension of the dramatic journey from war to death of thousands of people, it humanised the aseptic definition of a “refugee crisis”.
Stories of our solidarity filled the media for several weeks after the tragic picture of Aylan reached our screens. We heard of Europeans opening their houses to host refugees, of hundreds of volunteers leaving their studies, jobs and families to rescue shipwrecked human beings in Lesvos, Athens or Lampedusa. People raced to bring solidarity and aid to the shores, or even simply to be there to “hug” refugees. This was crucial. It was an awakening. Their crisis was now our crisis.
It is estimated that at least 3,000 people died by drowning in the Mediterranean Sea trying to reach our shores since 2015, but the real number is unknown. On average 24 people are forced to leave their homes every minute because of dramatic and violent events. More than 65 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. More than 20 million are officially registered refugees. Europe hosts a mere 6% of this massive number.
Having spent the last few years researching refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere, I find myself at odds with the self-complacent stories of solidarity we tell ourselves. Four-and-a-half million Syrians found shelter in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and other countries across the region, sometimes in new camps built for them, but more often just embraced into existing and saturated poor camps, like Chatila or Burj el Barajneh in Beirut. People with little more than nothing, refugees from another time and war, took in hundreds of thousands of displaced people, but we, in wealthy and affluent Europe, are made to believe everyday, that beyond a few thousand, our system will collapse. So “welcome refugees! But not too many, 6%, just enough to satisfy our benevolence.”
Benevolence and compassion are ambivalent.
Benevolence for me, as a Palestinian and daughter of refugees, was crucial, but it often meant erasure, reduction and estrangement. Throughout my career, and as an activist, I have often been asked to speak “as a Palestinian refugee”. The organizers want my story, they want to feel compassion for my people, but they are not as interested in my research, as if these two parts of me could not go together. As an academic, I could not possibly also be a refugee or a daughter of refugees. I did not need humanitarian relief, I did not live in a shelter in a refugee camp, and I spoke the language rather well. The lesson I learned early on is that to be a refugee you have to look shredded, needy, and you should not sound eloquent. You need to look fragile and convey suspension from another place, another life. Your body, your mind, your whole self should convey your invisibility, your temporariness, your rightless-ness.
As a Palestinian and daughter of refugees who spent their lives in exile, I learned long ago that benevolence is not only insufficient, it can be also dangerous. It is insufficient because it is more about us than about them. It makes us merely help the survivors, or those lucky enough to be seen by us, while allowing a collective amnesia about the millions who cannot make it to our shores. It is dangerous because it blinds us towards the consequences of immoral border policies and treaties, whose main aim is to secure us in a fortress.
A human deprived of rights, suspended from law, is just a bare body, who at most can hope to receive compassion, a shelter and relief from suffering, and at worse can be left to die. For a human to be such, benevolence should be the beginning of the story, the end must be rights.
Ruba Salih is a social anthropologist and a Reader in Gender Studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London. Her research interests and writing cover transnational migration and gender across Europe and the MENA region, the Palestine question and Palestinian refugees. She is a trustee of the Arab Council for the Social Sciences and a founder of its sub-committee for academic freedom in the Arab region. Her forthcoming publications include a book titled: Palestinian Refugees. The politics of exile and the politics of return (with Sophie Richter-Devroe) (Cambridge University Press), in 2017, and a special issue on “Palestine and Self-determination beyond National Frames: Emerging Politics, Cultures, and Claims” for the journal South Atlantic Quarterly, which will be out in 2018.
