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Title: The Politics of Bigotry Author: Nick S. Date: September 18, 1999 Language: en Topics: migration, refugees, civil war, former Yugoslavia, totalitarian state, the State, Freedom Source: Scanned from FREEDOM vol. 60, #18, September 18, 1999, page 1
On the weekend of 14-15th August, after months of provocations by the
local media, small groups of local residents in Dover clashed with
asylum-seekers at a funfair. The Dover Express had been telling locals
for so long that their town was over-run with immigrants that someone
was bound to bite eventually. Home Office minister Lord Bassan
immediately asserted that the town was indeed 'overcrowded' and that New
Labour's draconian powers of dispersal (under the proposed Asylum and
Immigration Bill) were—entirely coincidentally—the only solution! Never
mind that Dover has a population of over 30,000 and that the refugee
population's access to local resources is minimal. Immigrants, as ever,
provide a convenient scapegoat. Dover's economy has been wrecked by the
closure of the Kent coal mines, redundancies on the ferries and the loss
of construction jobs on the completion of the Channel Tunnel. Blaming
asylum-seekers for the flight of capital from the area is an easy means
of deflecting local anger away from those directly to blame.
Not content with the victimisation of those forced to flee NATO's
destruction of the Balkans, Home Secretary Jack Straw cast around for a
new target, and used an interview with BBC Radio West Midlands to attack
travellers. "Many of these so-called travellers seem to think that it's
perfectly okay for them to cause mayhem in an area, to go burgling,
thieving, breaking into vehicles, causing all kinds of trouble,
including defecating in the doorways of firms and so on and getting away
with it.” Straw's comments were combined with moves to introduce visa
restrictions for Czech nationals, and were clearly intended to generate
racist hysteria aimed at Roma asylum-seekers. Czech gypsies endure 70%
unemployment in their homeland, as a direct result of workplace racism.
Over twenty Roma have been murdered by far right groups in
Czechoslovakia since 1990. According to Straw, though, they're 'bogus
asylum-seekers'. Gypsies have been used by the Czech government as
scapegoats for crime, housing shortages and cuts in benefits. Trying to
find sanctuary, they're destined to serve the same ends here.
In 1993 the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR)
described refugees as "the symptom of the ills of an age.” An average of
nearly ten thousand people each day are forced to become refugees. In a
world population of 5.5 billion, roughly one in every 130 people on
earth has been forced into flight. For all the talk within Europe of an
'asylum crisis', some 24 million people are displaced within the borders
of their own countries and, as the UNHCR makes clear, the vast majority
of refugees sought and found sanctuary in neighbouring third world
countries, and returned home when conditions permitted.
In 1993 a UNHCR report states simply: "What sets refugees apart from
other people in need of humanitarian aid is their need for international
protection. Most people can look to their own governments and state
institutions to protect their rights and physical security, even if
imperfectly. Refugees cannot. In many cases they are fleeing in terror
from abuses perpetrated by the state." All this is absented from any
discussion in the media about the 'asylum crisis.’ New Labour has chosen
to provide tax breaks for big business rather than allocate increased
resources to public spending. When classroom numbers increase, hospital
waiting lists are fiddled and benefits cut, some kind of smokescreen is
inevitably needed to deflect popular anger from the real culprits. New
Labour has chosen to do what every other Labour government has done—it
has played the race card. The end result is that people who are fleeing
for their lives may well end up paying with their lives because the only
'conviction politics' Blair's 'Christian' government has left is the
politics of bigotry.
The UNHCR has described the "impulse to provide refuge to strangers in
need" as "one of the most basic expressions of human solidarity.” In
practice, what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares as
"the right to seek and enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution"
(Article 14 [1]) is in practice subject to the ideological twists of
governments committed not to 'human solidarity' but to avarice and the
preservation of privilege. In 1918 fifteen thousand White Russian
refugees were allowed into Britain while Jews and Armenians were
deliberately excluded. During the Cold War the West condemned Eastern
European states for their denial of freedom of movement to their
populations. The Hungarian government was pressured to open its borders
with Austria in 1989, creating a route for East Germans into the West.
The steady haemorrhage to the West was then used to undermine the
stability of the East European states. During 1989 alone some 1.2
million people left the Warsaw Pact area. Once the destabilisation of
the state capitalist regimes was underway, the attitude of the Western
states to the right of freedom of movement of Eastern European citizens
was redefined—Italy deployed troops to deter Albanian asylum-seekers,
while Austria used its army to keep out Roma gypsies.
In their magnificent history of global refugee movements, Refugees in an
Age of Genocide (Frank Cass, 1999), Tony Kushner and Katherine Knox note
that "it is all the more remarkable, and one cause for qualified
optimism, that popular attachment to the concept of asylum has in the
last years of the century remained strong in spite of the atmosphere
created by successive governments and the popular press.” In 1991 The
Sun carried out a survey of its readers, and found out (doubtless to its
horror) that half of the sample stated that they did not want the
government to "turn its back on our tradition of giving haven to
refugees.” In a more detailed survey carried out in 1997 by the
Institute of Public Policy Research, three-quarters agreed that "most
refugees in Britain are in need of our help and support.”
Those of us committed to a world based on what Bakunin called the "real
union of free peoples" need to be in the forefront of the defence of the
right to asylum, and the physical defence of those seeking refuge. The
UNHCR, though, notes that "global migration proceeds across a spectrum
of motivation, ranging from those who flee from persecution to those who
flee from serious danger, those who are trying to escape from misery and
those who wish to leave behind a lack of opportunity.” The World Bank,
the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and General Agreement of Tariffs
and Trade (GATT) exist ostensibly to help developing countries, but in
reality do no more than facilitate the freedom of capital to exploit
labour and natural resources across the globe. Free movement of labour,
though, is denounced as 'bogus' (the spectre of the exploited beginning
to exploit the exploiter?) and those seeking a new life are criminalised
for not knowing their place. As a German refugee group, Die Karawane,
note: "This contradiction is most apparent at the USMexico border or at
the eastern frontiers of the EU, where the military clampdown on illegal
migration ensures that reserve pools of cheap labour are preserved on
the edges of affluent US and Europe" (CARF no. 51, Aug/Sept 1999).
In 1652 the Digger activist Gerard Winstanley raised the call for the
battle to "take the earth to be a common treasury.” That battle still
remains to be won. If we are to rebuild a movement fit for the task, we
have to defend the right of freedom of movement of labour—for all people
to seek opportunity where they can. Racism is, in part, an ideological
prop of the ruling class which is used to set those with least to gain
in this society against each other. It is, further, the cultural trace
of the determination of capital that we should all know our place in
this world—and that place shall be defined by borders drawn up by those
who see us as no more than cheap labour, a resource to be exhausted like
every other resource. As A. Sivanandan observed in 1990, "today the
colour line is the poverty line is the power line ... that is why you
cannot fight racism without also fighting imperialism. You cannot fight
for the cause of black people without fighting for the cause of working
people. You cannot, in the final analysis, fight oppression without at
the same time fighting exploitation" (Communities of Resistance, Verso,
1990).
In The Origins of Totalitarianism (Allen & Unwin, 1958), Hannah Arendt
is drawn to comment that "contemporary history has created a new kind of
human being—the kind that are put in concentration camps by their foes
and internment camps by their friends.” For us, then, our attempts to
make a different history have to begin with the need to save the
refugees of today from the internment camps which the likes of Jack
Straw would have as their fate again.