In observations made at a side-meeting of the 87th session of the Committee for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD),[1] the IRR’s director warned that Europe’s mishandling of the refugee crisis is fuelling racism.
I want to talk about the immediate institutional crisis in the EU, as hostility grows towards a modest plan by the European Commission to relocate a little over 32,000 asylum seekers from Greece and Italy. The failure of the member states to rise to the humanitarian challenge posed by the boat people arriving via the Mediterranean Sea, the mean-spirited and positively hostile response of some governments, both national and regional, and the breakdown of solidarity between the receiving countries and their richer neighbours, has had consequences. These consequences need to be discussed in terms of cause and effect, in order to fully grasp the intersection between the breakdown of a humanitarian approach to asylum and the growth of racism.
But I would first like to frame my points by making two short observations. First, failures in the institutional response should not blind us to the absolute heroism of ordinary people and over-stretched civil society actors such as Refugees Welcome (Germany), Caritas (Austria) and Migszol (Hungary) who are feeding, clothing and welcoming the new arrivals. Second, we must recognise that the current lack of political leadership, and the failure to find adequate and secure accommodation, is not something new. What I will describe serves merely as the top layer of an existing situation. Europe has fallen far short of providing a safe haven for displaced people, and deaths of migrants do not just occur in tragic circumstances at Europe’s borders. The fact that deaths inside accommodation or removal centres, or as the result of enforced destitution, are met with official indifference, suggests continuity with the moral inertia towards border deaths [2]. The Institute of Race Relations recently published an audit of 160 asylum-and immigration-related deaths within EU States between 2010 and 2015, 46 per cent of which were by suicide, as desperation reached epidemic proportions.
Scaremongering in the media
Continue reading “Institute of Race Relations: When solidarity fails”
