By Paul McGeough
Washington: Pope Francis makes a plea on behalf of our "brothers and sisters … seeking a home where they can live without fear". But the privileged world - and shamefully Australia has become a leader in the field - now treats those fleeing the chaos of war as suspected criminals and terrorists.
The squalid conditions in which Australia detains undocumented arrivals at Manus Island and Nauru, with their hideous tales of violence and predatory sex, have become the Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo of the southern hemisphere. And when it didn't seem possible, Canberra recently sank to a new low – paying people smugglers to double-cross their hapless clients by turning around at sea, to head away from Australia.
Syrian refugees sleeping on a railroad track near the train station of Idomeni, in northern Greece, this week.Credit:AP
There is no easy solution. Hopes that smashing the smugglers' boats will turn back the miserable tide misses the enormity of the crisis of failed and failing states in the Middle East – some of the responsibility for which sits with the West – which force people to flee.
Council on Foreign Relations analyst Jeanne Park quotes Khalid Koser, deputy director of the Geneva Centre for Security: "We used to think of migration as a human security issue - protecting people and providing assistance; now we clearly perceive - or misperceive - migration as a national security issue."
A Syrian refugee carries a child as they arrive at a beach on the Greek island of Kos after crossing the Aegean Sea from Turkey on a dinghy.Credit:Reuters
In an online forum in The New York Times, Kathleen Newland, co-founder of the Washington-based Migration Policy Institute, lays out the Rubik's Cube nature of the challenge: "Criminal gangs thrive as lucrative smuggling opportunities appear. Commercial ships incur huge costs when diverted to rescue people in distress.
"Countries of first asylum are overwhelmed by the sudden arrivals on their shores. Governments asked to resettle refugees face domestic political pressure. Desperate refugees and migrants are shunted around or left adrift, as international co-operation degenerates into bickering about burden sharing."
We've been here before. Newland recalls a blueprint from the past that proved more effective than any of today's "fortress" policies. It was a decade of unprecedented global co-operation, even among adversaries, that led to international conferences and agreements to manage the Vietnamese "boat people" crisis, when as many as half of the refugees were dying at sea.
Click the photo below to follow the interactive story of Afaf's escape from Syria:
A boy walks past a torn poster that reads "You are neither refugees nor are you welcome" in Nauen, eastern Germany.Credit:AP
It was tough going. But regional governments agreed not to block the boats if other governments would agreed to resettle the people; commercial ships were guaranteed a fast turnaround in dropping those they rescued in safe ports; there was an anti-piracy program to protect people in flight; and Vietnam agreed to an orderly departure program, under which hundreds of thousands left safely – and it agreed to take back those found not to be refugees.
The United Nations has been attempting to gain traction on this issue for several years – but until refugees were camping in the streets of Rome, the problem remained "over there".
A Rohingya woman and her child pose for identification photographs in a temporary compound for refugees in Indonesia's Aceh Province in May.Credit:Reuters
A report in June by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that at the end of 2014, an unprecedented 59.5 million people were on the run from war and persecution – half were children; if seen as a population, they would be the 24th largest country in the world, between Italy and South Africa.
And in case anyone has forgotten, Jeff Crisp, a research fellow at the Refugee Studies Centre at the University of Oxford, quotes 15 words from Article 14 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: "Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution."
A fishing boat carrying Rohingya and Bangladeshi migrants is pulled to shore by Achenese fisherman in May.Credit:Reuters
Be mealy-mouthed if you want to be, but the meaning is clear – people at risk in their homeland are entitled to find refuge elsewhere. And Crisp takes time to rebuke politicians and journalists, who frame this as a "migrant crisis", saying: "That gives the international community licence to turn a blind eye to refugees, who [do] have a right to have their applications for asylum considered seriously."
Crisp writes: "This applies also to the large number of Syrians, Somalis and Eritreans coming to Europe by boat: there is a high likelihood that many are refugees, not 'migrants', because of the intense level of armed conflict and political repression in those countries."
A Syrian migrant in a park in the coastal town of Bodrum, Turkey, waiting for the chance to cross with boats to the nearby Greek island of Kos.Credit:AP
There is a grotesque, altered reality for these travellers. Not for them the retail luxury of airport malls and hotels that are the travel hubs of the privileged world. Instead they tramp over borders on foot and bounce around closer to terra firma, in buses and trains, an eye over their shoulder at all times. And for those emerging through Africa, there's the white-knuckle ride through Libya - where Britain and France intervened, with much fanfare and self-congratulation, to help topple a dictator before disappearing as the country descended into chaos.
Detested as they are, the people smugglers are performing a task that seemingly defies national and foreign governments. The Geneva-based Khalid Koser, who also heads a World Bank working group on migration and security, makes the point that the smugglers actually do get people out of harm's way.
Erika Feller, at the Canberra-based Australian Institute of International Affairs, argues that any global management strategy is doomed to fail unless boat arrivals are treated as a humanitarian concern.
Writing in The New York Times, she argues that more needs to be done to ameliorate refugee conditions in host countries, particularly those abutting the refugees' homelands – which account for more than 80 per cent of refugees; greater regional co-operation; and that obsessing about the need to punish the people smugglers is wasted energy in the absence of a system that offers genuine options to refugees.
Australia happily sends soldiers to foreign countries to kill people; but during the 2014 Ebola crisis in Africa, it refused to send its own health workers to save people. The Europeans will protect commercial cargoes from pirates off Somalia, but they quibble about rescuing human beings in the Mediterranean. Instead of protecting the Rohingyas in their homes and villages, the Burmese authorities lock them up in detention camps – obviously wishing them to flee.
An Italian refugee rescue program that cost $US10 million a month gets the axe, but the Iraq War, at maybe $US10 billion a month, was allowed to run and run. And when US President Barack Obama asked for $US1 billion to address the problems causing people to flee their homes in Latin America, the response was a one-fingered gesture from a Republican-dominated Congressional appropriations committee – just $US300 million.
We seem to have lost our humanity.
Click the photo below to follow Daniel from Eritrea to France:
Paul McGeough is chief foreign correspondent for the Sydney Morning Herald.