Discourse on ‘Refugees’

The image of Alan Kurdi, a three-year old Syrian refugee whose lifeless body was washed ashore a Turkish beach, spurred significant discussions on the status of refugees in the world. The refugee crisis came to be viewed as a crisis of humanity. However, this phenomenon of people fleeing their homeland, displaced by socio-political crises and turning into ‘refugees’ is nothing new and perhaps as old as civilization.  Apart from the severe humanitarian crises during the two World Wars, regional refugee crises have plagued the world and particularly the post-colonial societies in Asia in ‘peace’ times as well as after-effects of the policies and actions of the colonial regimes.

Partition displaced a massive number of people from their ancestral homelands in India in the period between 1947 and 1950. In Bengal alone by 1948, over 1.25 million people migrated from East Pakistan, which is presently Bangladesh. The number went up to 3.5 million by 1950. The influx of refugees from the East continued well into the post-Independence period. People in Bangladesh fleeing the ruthless persecution of the Pakistani government fled to India. Two more major refugee crises took place in Asia before the present crisis and both were largely due to policies pursued by Western colonial and neo-colonial powers. The creation of the State of Israel in 1948 and subsequent occupation of the West Bank and the Gaza strip in 1967 displaced more than half of the Arabs who lived in the region before the creation of Israel. Cumulatively, a total of 6 million Palestinian people have since then been displaced.  Those who try to offer solutions to the Israel-Palestine conflict, they cannot but focus on the problem of Palestinian refugees which has become the most fundamental concern in that geo-political region. This is because Israel’s ‘occupation’ of the territory that pushed such people out of their land thus making them into ‘refugees’, lies at the heart of the problem. 

Meanwhile in the Southeast, the years between 1969 and 1973 saw the effects of the Vietnamese and the Cambodian refugee crisis. The horrors of the Vietnam War and internal conflicts gave rise to the ‘boat people’. The term was initially used to describe people fleeing out of Cambodia and Vietnam on boats. Cambodia remained neutral during the Vietnam War but faced severe bombing.  In 1979, when the Communist government of Vietnam invaded Cambodia to topple the regime of Pol Pot it caused many to flee. Many refugees who fled to the USA experienced identity crises as it is common for a ‘refugee’ to lead a marginalized existence in the nation of exile. In order to be integrated into the foreign society such people are expected to shed the identity of ‘refugees’ and get assimilated into the culture of the host society. However, refugees deliberately hold on to their native identity as that often acts as their only link to their homeland which they had to abandon and flee from and yet remain nostalgic about. The refugees historically thus remain trapped in such dual identities that are often conflictual.

The discourse on refugees became more intense with the Vietnamese and Cambodian crisis that saw intellectuals like Michel Foucault argue in an interview conducted by H.Uno in 1979 that the migrations were symptoms of historical developments as they arise from practices of bordering that police us/them relations. Foucault argued,

“..post-colonial states have been created within arbitrary borders dating from the colonial period with the result that ethnic, linguistic and religious groups are mixed together. This leads to serious tensions. In these countries, hostilities within populations are liable to explode and lead to massive population displacements and collapse of the state apparatus.”

In a concluding statement, Foucault remarked that what was happening in Vietnam, “is not just a sequel of the past, but a presage of the future.”

Giorgio Agamben, an Italian philosopher locates the crisis of refugee reception and related tensions within the framework of the liberal, humanitarian discourse of citizenship. His arguement, premised on the application of bio-power, is about the dehumanization of the refugees through the politics of fear. This implies that the refugee is portrayed as an individual who inevitably threatens societal peace. The ‘refugee’ thus is constituted as the ‘Other’ around which a new ‘global imagining’ is shaped. The fact that the refugee always has to be ‘imagined’ shows the separation that is deliberately created from the point where one can ‘see’ the experience of the refugee. Thus, the first step towards a solution for the refugee crisis is to ensure the re-humanization of the refugees for which there has to be a critical questioning of the current framework of rights in order to create a more inclusive political community. This discourse must include the examination of border practices. Ranabir Samaddar, in an essay called ‘The Cruelty of Inside/Outside’, notes,

“Behind our neglect of the study of borders as an institution is our failure to consider the fact that borders create refugees and refugees reinforce borders.”

On the basis of this particular argument of Samaddar, it is perhaps possible to argue that the discourse surrounding the refugees cannot presume their victimhood and render them as passive objects of persecution. Instead there is need to recognize that they have their own agency and experiences which prevents the conceptualization of ‘refugees’ as a pre-existing category. For example, many women refugees assume certain roles in the refugee camps which are totally different from their role-playing back home. Again, many refugee households in the refugee camps are female headed, which is not really a common phenomenon globally.

As the world struggles to find solutions to a humanitarian crisis of this magnitude, it is imperative that the discourse surrounding the refugees is not constricted to the resolutions of the international organisations and it should also take note of the lived experiences of the refugees as that alone might aid a comprehensive understanding of the locus of a ‘refugee’.

Sujato Datta

Intern

AGA