World Refugee Day
Today is World Refugee Day, a day instituted to bring awareness to the plight of the millions of people displaced by racism, intolerance, war and persecution.
Go and check MDW, that has a poem by a 14 year old Sudanese refugee, of which the following is an extract:
The actual moment,
Of Exile,
Is like an illness.
You are ill,
With rage.To each family,
It means closing the door,
On friends, culture, your native country.
I do have mixed feelings about this day. On one hand, yes, by all mean raise awareness about the fact that 40 million people have lost their homes and their culture, and have been forced to flee just to be alive. On the other hand, it is taken too lightly by media and politics. What are those stateless people doing here, seems to be the world motto:
Given the role of the United States in creating this mess, these numbers should cause some hard thinking in Washington. The United States admitted a whopping 202 Iraqis for resettlement during 2006, and though plans are in place to take in 7,000 this year, compare that to the 850,000 Vietnamese who were given asylum in the U.S. during and after that war. It’s pretty weak.
as the FP says. But unlike what they say, the total figure is not 10 million – it is, officially, 33 million people, according to the report on from the UN Refugee Agency: this figure includes the refugees, the asylum seekers, the internally displaced persons, the returnees and the stateless persons. In 2006, the IDP number was driven by Iraq’s war: there are people doing their work to alleviate this:
Oftentimes we have senseless figures, like the three million IDP from Colombia, or the 2.2 million Iraqis that have been displaced thanks to this recent oil war. What does it mean for us? Seriously, how is the world changed to your eyes on that ongoing tragedy? No one is a refugee by choice:
In a world, whose focus has become security, the Refugee Highway has become even more challenging. The rights of refugees to seek protection can be subtly discouraged, disregarded even, by perception and process. Yet, they persevere. Hope lingers as their search for a durable solution, for a life lived in peace and productivity continues.
How to deal with the worst year on record for refugees? Antonio Gutierres, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees , said
Let’s be honest, in many cases their governments are part of the problem, and in many cases the international community does not have the capacity to help them.
How true.
Again with the Sudanese poet, I feel anger. Anger at the indifference, at the palliative phrases, at the empty “how sad” commentaries, all the pregnant silences after explaining loss and anger, all the impossible resignation to slowly losing identity, culture and family. The exile of a refugee is a slow, painful death fow which we al are responsible.
You could send a donation to the UN (tip of hat to devious diva).