refugee action blog

Chris Cleave reminds us to treat refugees with humanity:

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?