When you walk out bare-headed,
Bothered by bad
weather
I want to turn into the rain
So we can be together.
When you’re on the beach
Your jeans drawn up, discreet,
I want to be salt water
Rippling at your feet…
From Missing Miss Singh by Bachchoo
No day goes by in Britain without news and footage of the suffering of asylum seekers from Syria and Iraq attempting to enter Europe. Last week the footage covered the attempt by thousands of these men, women and children, living out in the open, reliant on government and charities for their food, to cross the barriers between Greece and Macedonia. Macedonia is not a member of the European Union and is not bound by any treaty to allow these refugees passage through its territories. They have erected barbed wire fences backed by border guards with tear gas to keep the exodus out.
A few hundred of these refugees uprooted street-lighting poles to use as battering rams to tear breaches in the fences, but were repulsed by baton-wielding border guards and tear gas. The international press is perpetually there, conveying the encounters, the misery and despair in vivid images. In another theatre of the same conflict, the French authorities set fire to the make-shift “jungle” of an asylum-seekers’ encampment on the outskirts of Calais. These refugees refuse to go into government-supplied and regulated camps where their claim to asylum can be assessed and processed. They want, by any means necessary, to get to Britain.
The canvas-tent settlement, and the make-shift shelters that the thousands of refugees had set up, were cleared by French demolition squads who burnt the tents and bulldozed the stronger structures. The previous night, when French squads invaded the camp to order its clearance, they met with stone-throwing resistance which was answered with tear gas and resulted in collateral damage on non-combatant children. The violent encounter killed resistance and the subsequent bulldozing was met only with jeers and cries of desperation.
The images in every news bulletin are of men and women from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Somalia who tell the cameras that their homes were destroyed in the civil wars, their families slaughtered or bombed, and that they had no choice but to seek refuge in the safety of Europe. This is true only to the extent that the alternative choice for them would be to live with a few million of their compatriots in the refugee camps in Jordan, Turkey, Lebanon and even on the Syrian border. Europe seems the safer and, certainly. the more permanent option.
The plea one constantly hears from those who are tear-gassed and beaten back from national boundaries and borders is “are we not human beings?... do we not have any humanitarian claim to compassion?”
Of course there is compassion in the populations of Europe for these refugees. But there is also the fear that the present exodus will be followed by overwhelming waves of others. How will Greece, already struggling from “austerity”, cope with a million or more foreigners dispersed in the country?
The British government has announced that it will take a tiny number of refugees, but not the ones that have made their way to Europe. They will allow entry to some of those in the camps of Syria, Turkey and Lebanon, those who the British population can be sure have been displaced by the war without hope of rehabilitation in a pacified Syria, if there is ever going to be such a place.
One radio commentator even said that since the National Health Service of Britain is short of 27,000 nurses, those refugees with nursing qualifications should be readily admitted. He was boastfully aware that Syria had good hospitals before the civil war began and now that these had been largely bombed, there must be displaced people with nursing skills available to come to Britain. He was being pragmatically compassionate.
Several callers to this radio host’s programme were overwhelmingly of the opinion that the war in Syria and Iraq and the consequent flow of refugees has nothing to do with Great Britain and that this country should get on with leaving the European Union, getting rid of all Muslims, building a wall around Dover, killing all the first-born… OK, I made the last three up, but you get the point.
The truth is that historical memories are shorter than microwaves. Britain had everything to do with the instability of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine in an even deeper sense than it had to do with the non-development and poverty of India during the Raj. The imperial stance was characterised by the ignorance of imperiousness. The great British hero and heroine of the early 20th century, immortalised in a film and several books,
T.E. Lawrence of Arabia and the adventurer Gertrude Bell, were largely responsible for establishing the instability. In 1921, Winston Churchill was the minister tasked with the division of the Arab lands whose control had fallen into British and French hands after their victory over the Ottoman Empire in the First World War. Bell and Lawrence induced him to draw the boundaries they recommended and install the rulers they favoured.
They were largely responsible for placing Faisal, a young Sunni on the throne of “Iraq” whose borders they drew around a majority of Shia tribes, of a portion of what could have been Kurdistan, of communities of Jews, Christians and Yazidis. Syria, by an earlier 1917 secret agreement with the French (the Sykes-Picot agreement) had its artificial borders drawn and a ruler of the Sharif Hussein of Mecca tribe established. The Meccan tribe’s claim to suzerainty of Arab lands was based on their descent from the Prophet.
That claim’s charm didn’t last. The subsequent turbulent history, over 95 years, of coups and challenged governments, has resulted in the mess, slaughter and threat to the world we see today — and that’s not even taking into account the George W. Bush-Tony Blair war on Iraq and Afghanistan.
