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EEddiittoorrRupert Colville

FFrreenncchh EEddiittoorrCécile Pouilly

CCoonnttrriibbuuttoorrssFrancis Kpatindé, Judith Kumin, Jack Redden, Roland Schoenbauerand unhcr staff worldwide

EEddiittoorriiaall AAssssiissttaannttVirginia Zekrya

PPhhoottoo DDeeppaarrttmmeennttSuzy Hopper,Anne Kellner

DDeessiiggnnVincent Winter Associés, Paris

PPrroodduuccttiioonnFrançoise Jaccoud

DDiissttrriibbuuttiioonnJohn O’Connor, Frédéric Tissot

PPhhoottoo EEnnggrraavviinnggAloha Scan, Geneva

MMaappssunhcr Mapping Unit

HHiissttoorriiccaall ddooccuummeennttssunhcr archives

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CCoovveerr:: Newly arrived refugee familyfrom Darfur in Chad, July 2004.unhcr/h. caux/dp/tcd•2004

BBaacckk CCoovveerr:: Guatemalan refugees in Mexico.unhcr/v. valtierra/cs/mex•1997

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It is chilling to read that aEuropean politician, albeit one from aminor party, was recently in court for – among other grotesque statements –describing asylum seekers as “cockroaches.”

This was the term used by the infamousRwandan radio station, Radio Mille Collines,to describe the Tutsis in the run-up to thegenocide that killed more than 800,000people in 1994 – an event that will forevercast into doubt the old reassuring saying that

“sticks and stonesmay hurt my bones,but words will neverhurt me.”

Radio MilleCollines and otherforms of hate-medialaid the groundworkfor the genocide inRwanda, and sticks,stones and machetesdid the rest.

Even if it is humannature to be suspicious of “the other,” intol-erance of other races, religions, ethnicgroups and political systems should not betolerated beyond a certain point. There is anessential paradox here, which lies at theheart of all secular, democratic legal systems.There are lines that cannot be crossed if frictions, violence and ultimately a break-down in social order are to be avoided.

Refugees are victims of intolerance virtually by definition: it is usually some sortof political, social, religious or ethnic intolerance that forces them to leave theirown country for fear of persecution. Unfortunately, they are increasingly victimsof intolerance in asylum countries as well – in both the North and the South.

In recent years, a number of asylum seek-ers and refugees have been murdered insome of the richest, most developed indus-trialized societies. And for each one who ismurdered, hundreds are beaten up and thousands are verbally abused. Some of themurders and most savage assaults create astir. Some are barely noticed. The rest of thephysical and verbal abuse tends not to register on the general public. Sometimesintolerance manifests itself as simple indifference to the plight of others.

In an increasing number of countries, asy-lum seekers – and the refugees among them– have become a tool for political dema-gogues, or have been turned into facelessbogymen by an unscrupulous popular press.

Asylum seekers are easy to demonize.They are all foreigners, so an attractive targetfor those who are suspicious of, or activelydislike, foreigners or minorities with “foreign” origins. Asylum seekers are not a“race,” nor do they belong to a single religion.As a result, they are not protected undermost race-relations laws (in those countrieswhere such laws exist). This makes them easyprey for politicians and journalists who wishto pursue a wider anti-foreigner agenda.

There are two main underlying percep-tions that have corroded public and govern-mental support for refugees: the belief thatthey abuse the hospitality of their hosts, andthe belief that there are too many of them –with more on the way.

The systems designed to sort out whoamong the asylum seekers are refugees, and who are not, are often tortuous: over-complicated, under-staffed and slow. Ifwould-be immigrants are indeed abusing theinternational asylum system, they should bediscouraged from doing so and sent home.

Abusers or Abused?This is not always easy. But in essence it is amanagement issue, not an ideological one.

But it is easier to blame the asylum seekers for subverting the system, than it isto admit the management of the system has been at fault.

Abuse of the asylum system is a hot topicamong industrialized nations, especially inthe European Union. But abuse of asylumseekers is not. The EU, the Council of Europeand the UN have between them assembled animpressive array of bodies devoted toresearching and making recommendationsabout how to deal with the wider issues ofracism and xenophobia. But these discussionshave to date been drowned out by otherpolitical debates – border controls againstterrorism, the failure to manage integration insome multicultural societies, freedom ofspeech versus respect of religions, and apoca-lyptic talk about a clash of civilizations.

Numbers are the other main driving force.Countries with huge refugee populations thatstay for decades – like Iran, Pakistan and Tanzania – can, quite understandably, growtired. The hostile debate in Germany in theearly 1990s took place at a time when Germany received a million asylum seekers injust three years, mostly from the Balkans. Butin some other countries, where the numbersare far less spectacular – both in real termsand per capita – the debate has been equally,if not more, vitriolic. Yet the numbers, bothof refugees and of asylum seekers, are inmany countries at their lowest for decades.

Most industrialized countries now havethe time and the space to take a more ratio-nal approach to the management of asylum,and to make a concerted effort to dispelsome of the hysteria surrounding the issue.

A similar opportunity to reassess theapproach to asylum on the one hand, andeconomic migration on the other, has arisen

for some developing countries like Iran andPakistan, from where more than 3.5 millionAfghan refugees have gone home over thepast four years.

In international and national law, cleandistinctions are made between refugees, asylum seekers, legal and illegal economicmigrants, minority citizens, travellers andothers. These are vital distinctions but, oncethe moral bonds are loosened, these distinc-tions do not mean much down among thethugs on the street. A foreigner – especially aforeigner with a different skin colour – is theprey, the enemy, the cockroach that needs tobe crushed.

In some countries, deliberate attempts todehumanize asylum seekers are continuing:always presenting them as menacing statis-tics, as criminals and bringers of disease, or assome other form of generalized abstractaberration that is easy to hate. History tells usthat fomenting hatred of “foreigners” is adangerous path for any society to follow. Atthe far end of that path lie the horrors thatcreate refugees in the first place. As they discovered in former Yugoslavia in the 1990s,the far end is sometimes closer than we think.

Our efforts to combat the intolerant attitudes that threaten asylum – and I recognize that there are many such effortsunderway, especially at grassroots local lev-els – have been too hesitant and fragmented.I believe it is time for all concerned to make ajoint stand against irrational suspicions andthe clamour for exclusion, and that this is a matter of great urgency – for refugees, butalso for states and peoples who believe inthe importance of law and order.

Tolerance is not the mark of any specificcivilization, but of civilization itself. Ratherthan bow to populist opinion, we must holdfast to universal values and principles –including protecting those in need.

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6Asylum seekers and refugeesare increasingly being subjectedto physical and verbal abuse.Governments, the public andthe media have tended to blamethe victims, instead of seekingto protect them better.

14 W O R D S A N D I M AG E SAn analysis of derogatory andinflationary language used todistort the asylum debate inAustralia and the uk.

18 TA C K L I N G A L P I N EA S Y L U M M Y T H S

In 2003, a poster war broke outin Switzerland. Across the Alpsin Austria, unhcr resorted toprovocative images to counterasylum myths.

20 B E L G I U M B U C K S T H E T R E N D

A newspaper invites asylumseekers to Christmas dinnerwith 100 Belgian families; and aCongolese comedian useshumour to dispel the racialdivide.

22 “ T I R E D O F R E F U G E E S ”Some African countries’support for refugees seems to bewaning, but generosity andtolerance can still be foundacross the continent.

26 V I C T I M S O FG E N O C I D E

A glimpse of the full horrorwhen intolerance drives asociety over the edge.

28 T H E L E G A C Y O F T H EC O N Q U I S TA D O R E S

Pockets of slavery, racialprejudice and violence againstindigenous peoples continue toreflect some of the dark periodsin Latin America’s history.

31 P E O P L E A N D P L A C E S

C O V E R S T O R Yby ANTÓNIO GUTERRES,UN High Commissioner for Refugees

“Tolerance is not the mark of any specific civilization, but of civilization itself.”

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The corpse of a would-be migrant or refugeeon a Mediterraneanbeach – one of some6,000 similar deaths recorded in Europe over the past 12 years.

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O n Au gust 18 l ast year, a 45-year-old refugee from Turk-menistan, Mahmum Tahirov, was enjoying an early eveningstroll in the park, with his wifeTarana and ten-year-old son

Araz, in the northern English city of Leeds. As theyturned to go home, they were confronted by a localman walking his three dogs.

Without any apparent provocation, the man – whoallegedly had verbally abused Tarana Tahirova onprevious occasions – unleashed the dogs, shouting“Go, go, go.”

The attack continued for several minutes. Ac-cording to the Tahirovs, the man stood watching withhis arms crossed, making no attempt to intervene un-til he eventually called off his dogs and walked away,leaving all three Tahirovs bleeding on the ground.

As the police launched a public appeal to find theattacker, Mahmum Tahirov described the family’s ordeal to a local paper. “It was a very frightening experience,” he said. “… I think the man must haterefugees.”

On the east coast of England, a judge gave longprison sentences to two men who deliberatelymowed down an Iraqi asylum seeker with their car,catapulting him through the air “like a rag doll.” Oneof them later commented to his girlfriend “Theyshould all die.” And on the south coast, three menarmed with iron bars burst into a house and batteredan Iraqi man whom they believed to be an asylumseeker and a rapist. He was neither.

Refugees are created by intolerance: persecutedfor reasons of race, religion, ethnicity, political opin-ion or membership of a particular “social group;” orelse fleeing wars, anarchy or generalized violence. Itis usually intolerance of some sort that in the enddrives them to take the drastic step of fleeing theircountry to seek asylum in another land.

Unfortunately, all too often, they are greetedwith intolerance there as well. In some countries,the connotations surrounding the words ‘asylumseeker’ and ‘refugee’ have mutated from evoking sym-pathy and respect to evoking distrust and scorn, andthe asylum system has become a convenient targetfor those who wish to expound racist or xenophobicviews.

“We should all recognize theperil to our rights when anyoneis dehumanized because of thecolour of their skin... And weshould all recognize the greatpower of intolerance to fomentviolence and generate theconditions that can abet ethniccleansing, genocide andterrorism.”

—Kofi Annan

British NationalParty leaderscelebrate theiracquittal on sixcharges and thejury’s failure toreach a verdict onsix others –including onerelated to callingasylum seekers“cockroaches.”

The Perfect Scapegoat

8 9R E F U G E E SR E F U G E E S

that aim to prevent racial hatred alone, or racial and reli-gious hatred. Some have very specific legislation againstthose who deny the Holocaust. Others legislate againstassaults on national symbols such as the country’s flag.

But you can – and many people do – say pretty muchanything you like about asylum seekers, both in generaland as individuals. Hardly any country has legislation that contains a clear-cut prohibition against vilifying asylum seekers. They do not belong to one race, nor dothey belong to one religion. Indeed, the British NationalParty leaders used a defence similar to this against thecockroach charge.

People involved in the Nazi media propaganda machine in the 1930s, and the radio and print outputduring the genocide in Rwanda in the 1990s, were con-victed in international courts. However, the convictionswere for incitement to commit crimes against human-ity or genocide, not incitement to racial hatred per se.

Take it one notch down, and prosecution and con-viction become much more difficult. In the context ofRwanda, calling the Tutsis “cockroaches” was seen as aclear invitation to crush them. But more direct calls to kill were also made by presenters on the notorious

Rwandan radio station, Radio Mille Collines. The British National Party leaders are able to argue

they never made any direct calls to kill anybody – unlikeAbu Hamza al-Masri (which is why he got a seven-yearjail sentence and they did not). Yet what impulse do mostpeople feel when they see or think of a cockroach?

The relationship between politicians, public and media is notoriously difficult to unravel, but when thecircle involving all three turns vicious, the downward spiral towards anarchy and violence can be devastatinglysudden.

This was demonstrated all too clearly in Côte d’Ivoirein 2002, when a nation that had traditionally been ex-tremely open to foreigners suddenly exploded in an orgyof xenophobic violence. Refugees and migrants alike were chased from their homes, which were then burntto the ground. It is not known how many refugees werekilled. However, it is virtually a certainty that somewere, according to UNHCR officials.

And in Yugoslavia – in many ways the most emanci-pated of the former Eastern bloc countries, with hundreds of thousands of citizens in mixed marriages or with mixed parentage – it only took a few demagogues

And instead of confronting this problem head-on (or even acknowledging its existence) govern-ments, the public and the media have tended to blame the victims.

In some industrialized countries, the anti-asylumlobby has been considerably aided by external factors likethe spectacular terrorist actions of Al Qaeda-affiliatedgroups in New York, Bali, Madrid and London; the be-headings of hostages in Iraq; the riots and attacks onembassies in the Middle East; and the rantings of ex-tremist preachers within European countries themselves.

Extremists on both sides treat the other culture’s extremists as the norm, and use that to justify their ownbehaviour.

FREEDOM TO VILIFYDrawing the line between what is acceptable and what is not, in terms of freedom of speech, is ex-tremely difficult, as was shown by a coincidental chainof three trials that occurred within days of each otherin February of this year.

First of all, two British National Party leaders, whowere filmed delivering a string of vicious commentsabout Muslims and Asians, as well as branding asylum

seekers as “cockroaches,” were acquitted on half of the12 charges of inciting racial hatred, with the jury failingto agree verdicts on the remaining charges.

A few days later, the notorious London-based preacherAbu Hamza al-Masri was jailed after being convicted ofinciting murder (a seven-year sentence) and incitingracial hatred (three 21-month sentences). A couple ofweeks after that, in Austria, the academic David Irvingreceived a three-year sentence for denying the Holocaustin a speech 17 years earlier.

During the same period, a huge global controversy involving freedom ofspeech – and a wave ofviolent protestsacross the Middle East – was ignited by the publicationof Danish cartoons that many Muslims found extraordi-narily insulting to their religion.

Does freedom of speech encompass freedom to distort,defame, lie or vilify? Up to a point. Can you say anythingyou like about anyone or anything? The answer clearlyis no.

No two countries are quite alike in what they permitand what they do not. Some countries have legislationthat permits individual lawsuits for defamation of char-acter – laws against libel and slander. Others have laws

Many societies have a strong hospitality ethic… But most societies also have a built-in mistrust or fearof the foreigner in their midst. If the latter gains ascendancy over the former, refugees are in trouble.

ThePerfectScapegoat

Simmering tensionsin Australian coastalsuburbs explodedlast December, withviolent race-basedassaults carried outby local youths ofdifferent origins.

Youths attackingan asylum centre inRostock after it wasset on fire by right-wing extremists –one of a string ofsuch incidents inGermany in the1990s. Millions ofGermanssubsequently tookto the streets todemonstrateagainst racism andxenophobia.

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In Iraq, Palestinian refugees have also suffered ‘pay-back’ for their relatively good treatment during SaddamHussein’s time, and several are reported to have been killed.

And in South Africa, in August 2005, members of acrowd demonstrating against the local authorities in Both-aville, Free State Province, turned their attention to a smallcommunity of Somali refugees and asylum seekers,looting ten of their businesses and burning two of them.

Also in South Africa, three Ukrainian sailors werecharged with murder after allegedly hauling seven stowaways out of their hiding places in large pipes andforcing them overboard, just before the ship arrived inthe port of Durban. Two of the seven Tanzanian stow-aways are believed to have drowned while five others managed to swim to safety. Police believe the sailors forced

the stowaways overboard because ship owners are re-quired to pay for the repatriation of illegal immigrants.

And continuing south, in Australia, a resettled Sudanese refugee in Toowoomba, west of Brisbane, tolda reporter “The Aborigines here, they bash me up… forsome reason.”

EU’S “MIXED MESSAGES”Ac c o r d i n g t o a E u r o p e a n U n i o n b o d y, the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xeno-phobia (EUMC), “Racist violence… remains unfortunatelya common and persistent problem in most Member States of the European Union.” An EUMC study ofnational findings on racist violence points out that thecountries with the best data collection systems also have

a few years to destroy the fabric of mutual respect andtolerance necessary to keep society from falling apart.Once they took it to a certain point, the descent into barbarity and genocide was precipitous. People were forced to choose sides.

RACISM WITHOUT BORDERSThere is an old Middle Eastern saying whichruns as follows: “I against my brother; my brother and Iagainst my cousin; my cousin and I against the world.” Unfortunately, that saying is probably as true today as itwas when it was first coined.

The potential for racism exists in all societies. Tensions between groups – religious or political groups and, above all, ethnic groups, or ones that are in some way“foreign” – are all too easy to arouse. They are the famous“other.” Many societies have a strong hospitality ethic –which is of great benefit to refugees. But most societiesalso have a built-in mistrust or fear of the foreigner in theirmidst. If the latter gains ascendancy over the former,refugees are in trouble.

A staggering 58 percent of male Afghan asylum seekers interviewed in a 2002 UNHCR-commissionedsurvey in Moscow said they had been the victim of a racist attack in the previous 12 months. Some 27 percentsaid they were hospitalized, and the period spent in hospital averaged 22 days – an indication of the serious-ness of the injuries sustained. In 79 percent of cases, theattackers used “crude weapons, including most comm-only metal chains, bats, gas cylinders and beer bottles.” A similar study a year earlier showed that an evenhigher percentage of African men in Moscow – 77 percent – said they had been attacked because of their race during the previous month.

It is a similar story in Ukraine, where a Rwandan doctor was beaten to death on his way home in Vinnysya, south of Kyiv, after celebrating the founding of a local refugee NGO, of which he was the chairman.Dozens of other assaults on refugees and asylum seekershave been reported to Ukrainian police in recent years.But not a single case has been solved.

In Croatia, an extremist fanzine has been inviting readers to look for “gay bars and clubs, Serbian Orthodoxcommunities, Chinese restaurants, ice-cream parloursand various other shops run by foreigners.” Prizes for thosewho send in addresses of such places include an originalwhite Ku Klux Klan hood, a Molotov cocktail and a baseball bat. The fanzine’s other content makes it clearthis is not an attempt at satire.

In Malta, an Eritrean was followed by a white car.Two men jumped out and asked him for a lighter. Thenthey smashed him in the face, causing multiple fractures of the jaw. The Eritrean ran towards the policestation. The white car cut him off. He ducked as a bottle

was hurled at his head, then hid between two parked cars. The men continued hunting up and down the roadfor him, but eventually gave up.

Across the Mediterranean, sub-Saharan migrants and refugees – including Sudanese in Egypt, and WestAfricans in other North African countries – frequentlyreport assaults, abuse, discrimination and exploitation atthe hands of the local population. These factors mayhave played a role in the chain of events that led up to theDecember 2005 confrontation in Cairo between Egypt-ian police and Sudanese protesters that turned violentand left several people dead. Many Sudanese in Egypt citetheir treatment by the local population as one of the rea-sons why they think they should be resettled in othercountries – which is what the demonstration was all about.

ThePerfectScapegoat

From the starting point of numbers (too many), and negative labels (bogus, criminal, fraud),it is an easy step to begin the dehumanization and myth-making processes.

Part of the ‘Torchesfor Tolerance’campaign on theopening day of the2001 WorldConference againstRacism, heldin Durban, SouthAfrica.

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the highest figures forracist violence and tend tobe seen as those experi-encing the most racistincidents – which is notnecessarily the case.

The United Kingdom,for example, has a verycomprehensive system(although it does not sep-arate out crimes aimedspecifically at asylumseekers and refugees). In2004, the UK reported35,022 recorded racist and xenophobic incidents,of which 4,840 involved“wounding.” In 2003 (last full year available),Germany – with a muchnarrower base – reported11,576 politically motivated right-wing incidents, of

which 2,431 were xenophobic (465 of these were classi-fied as violent).

Greece consistently comes top, or close to the top, ofEUMC’s negative attitude surveys. In 2003, for example,87 percent of Greeks described themselves as “resistant”to immigrants, and 77 percent were “resistant to diver-sity.” Yet Greece, along with Spain, Italy and Portugal, doesnot gather any separate data on racist crime or violence.

In fact, the gathering of statistics on racist and xeno-phobic violence is generally insufficient and unreliable,and virtually all countries that collect data – even within

the EU – use differentsystems.

Even those who collectthe most comprehensivedata, have big gaps. Mostdata, for example, relatesto foreigners (possibly in-cluding asylum seekers, although the latter arerarely separated out). Theexperience of nationalswho belong to ethnic minorities is, according to EUMC, “absent fromcriminal justice data col-lection in practically allEU Member States.” Theresearch problems arecompounded by the factthat most EU states do not even have a definitionof ‘racist violence.’

In its 2005 Annual Re-port, EUMC pointed outthat states were giving

mixed messages: “Although Member States have introduced legislation affording improved protection to racial [and] ethnic minorities and populations ofmigrant origin under the terms of EU Directives, somehave chosen to introduce other legislative measures which serve to restrict various rights and opportunitiesof migrants and minorities…

“In some Member States and some sectors there is aclear economic need for an increased workforce, whichimmigrants could at least partly satisfy,” the report said.“Yet some Member States are curtailing access to the labour market of refugees and asylum seekers, or givingout messages through new legislation that immigrantsare not welcome, for political rather than economic reasons. A further ‘mixed message’ can be generated byimmigration policies alongside policies against discrimination.”

WRONG TARGET?“Does tighter asylum legislation reassure citizens and reduce their racism, or does it cater to theexisting racism and justify it?” asks Niklaus Steiner of theUniversity of North Carolina’s Centre for InternationalStudies, in an analysis of the refugee debates in Germany,the UK and Switzerland during the 1990s.

Given the number of new asylum and immigrationlaws adopted in recent years, many European govern-ments and parliaments clearly believe the former to betrue. But many academics and researchers believe the opposite is the case: that if you give in to the nationalistor populist pressures to clamp down on foreigners – andasylum seekers are probably the easiest foreigners to clampdown on – instead of combating them, you are sendingout reinforcing messages to those same populist and nationalist forces (including the extreme right).

In other words, you create a vicious circle, becauseyou show that racism and xenophobia pay dividends as apolitical issue, which means they will come back on to theagenda again and again. This in turn starts to impact onasylum seekers, and on recognized refugees, legal immi-grants and even citizens with foreign ancestry. Go farenough, and you alienate different segments of the population, and before long there is a law and orderproblem. This can then be used by the same nationalistsand populists to push for further restrictions, and so on.

Just as racist thugs often do not differentiate betweenrefugees and other foreigners, or even their own fellowcitizens, an increasing number of punitive measures contained in new and ever tighter asylum laws do notdifferentiate between refugees and economic migrants.Their sole aim is to deter people from entry – to reducethe political heat by reducing the numbers.

TWISTING THE STATISTICSTh e n u m b e rs h av e fa l l e n c o n s i d e r ab ly . Across industrialized countries as a whole, the numberof asylum seekers has halved over the past five years, and is now at its lowest level since 1987. This is logical,since the global refugee number is also currently at

its lowest level for a quarter of a century.The asylum numbers game, however, has never

been all that logical. There were genuinely very highnumbers of asylum seekers in some European countriesin the early and late 1990s – not surprisingly, given thatthere were major wars taking place in Europe. After therefugees from the Balkans, the Afghans and then theIraqis became the top groups – increasingly giving uphope of any viable future in their home countries afterdecades of war and repression.

Yet in some countries where the political debate washottest, these details – which at least partly, if not totally,explain the high numbers – were rarely mentioned.

Statistics became a major source of distortion of theasylum issue. The habits of the UK tabloid newspapersare examined in some depth on page 16. But perhaps the key foundation stone of the immense number ofpejorative media reports about asylum seekers lies in asingle statistical distortion, encapsulated in a persistentrefrain which emerged during the 1990s: “the vast majority are bogus.” This has become totally enshrinedin the discourse, not just of the newspapers, but also thepoliticians and public at large.

This oft-repeated statement is based not just on afalse statistic (that “only around 10 percent of asylum seekers are recognized as refugees”), but also on a whollyfalse interpretation of what the refugee recognition rateactually means.

The 10 percent figure was a rough average of the number of asylum seekers recognized as refugees during the initial round of the asylum procedure – known as the ‘first instance’ procedure. It does not take into account the quality and thoroughness of thatprocedure, and therefore the number of asylum seekerswho are subsequently recognized on appeal.

Nor does it take into account the people given humanitarian status rather than full refugee status (forexample people fleeing war or generalized violence). Itis a bit like counting criminals by the number of peoplewho are accused of crimes, rather than the numberwho are actually convicted of them (another statisticaltrick that has been used to “illustrate” that asylum seek-ers have a high tendency to be criminals).

Including successful appeals, and those receiving humanitarian status (or exceptional leave to remain as itused to be known in the UK), the recognition rate of asy-lum seekers in the UK has actually been more in the rangeof 30-50 percent. But still, doesn’t this mean that the ‘majority’ – if no longer the ‘vast majority’ – are bogus?

“Bogus” is a very loaded word. In this context, it

implies that every single person who is not recognizedas a refugee is actively trying to defraud the system.

This, of course, is not the case.Generally speaking, you can divide asylum seekers

into three groups: those who are refugees; those who know very well they are not refugees (and therefore may be said to be misusing the system); and those who are in the grey area.

The latter are people who come from countries – theIraqs, Afghanistans, DR Congos, Sudans and Somaliasof this world – which produce lots of refugees. Thepeople in the grey area may not qualify for refugee status under the strict definition contained in the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, but when their countryis racked by war, or anarchy, or is run by one of the world’smost famous oppressors such as Saddam Hussein or the Taliban, then one can understand why they feel they might be refugees. Such people may be senthome, if sending them home is possible or ethical, butthey should never be labeled “bogus.”

But, nonetheless, “bogus” they became – not just in theUK, but also (with some variants) in several other countries. The media called them bogus, the politiciansstarted calling them bogus (or vice versa) and – reason-ably enough in the circumstances – the public began thinking they were bogus.

From the starting point of numbers (too many), andnegative labels (bogus, criminal, fraud), it is an easy step to begin the dehumanization and myth-making processes. Research has repeatedly shown that tolerance towards asylum seekers and other people perceived as “foreigners” is weakest among those whohave never actually met any.

A number of different studies have shown that hostile attitudes and physical assaults on asylum seekersand refugees are – to quote one such study – “most likelywhen hostile media images coincide with local experi-ences of deprivation and competition for services in short supply e.g. health and housing.”

When there has been an accelerating downward spiral of intolerance permeating the asylum system from top (policy-making government ministers) to bot-tom (policy-enforcing immigration officials and borderguards), media can only be viewed as one aspect of theequation. The general public cannot be excused its share of the blame either. Public opinion can force politicians to change their tune, or it can encourage them to sing their message of intolerance even louder.

But at the end of the day, when it comes to combatingintolerance, the actions of governments matter most.

“It is one thing to bemoan the persistence of prejudice, and quite another to actually dosomething about it. All too often, when faced with bigotry and nihilism, political leaders,governments and ordinary citizens are silent or complacent. Such passivity must not be allowed to masquerade as tolerance. It is more like complicity, since it emboldens the intolerant, and leaves victims defenceless.” —Kofi Annan

The PerfectScapegoat

The black and whiteadvertisement (top left) wasproduced by a localbranch of a Swisspolitical party. Itreads: “Now weSwiss are becomingthe niggers!• Billions for asylumtourists• Soft on criminals• Billions for EUdreamers• Citizenship foreveryone – noquestions asked. Enough is enough.”

The colour poster(bottom left) waspart of a majornationwide series inSwitzerland coveringthe same themes butwith slightly lesscrude headlines.

14 15R E F U G E E SR E F U G E E S

B Y R U P E R T C O L V I L L E

AUSTRALIAN ‘FLOODS’

asked anAustralian journalist in June 2001. She was referring tothe Woomera detention centre in theAustralian outback.

This question kicked off a text thatis a master class in how to cram asmany pejorative associations, mythsand distortions as possible into a single 739-word column.

“Is it really ‘inhumane’ to detain insuch centres, at a cost to the taxpayerof $100 each a day, boat people andother asylum seekers who have cometo Australia illegally, while trying todetermine whether they are genuinerefugees or cheats?” she continued.“Is it ‘racist’ not to shower visas on former soldiers from Iraq and Afghanistan, suspected of commit-ting atrocities? Yes, according to worthies with a pulpit.”

Like many columnists of her type,one of the writer’s favourite tactics isto set up straw dummies and whackthem mercilessly to the ground. Shemoves effortlessly from roughing upthe asylum seekers, to clobberingtheir supporters – and then backagain: “It’s no surprise that the 1,500people who marched on Villawooddetention centre last week included the same coalitionof socialists, anarchists, students, unionists, greens and well-meaning dupes… There have even been

suggestions of an organised campaign by external agitators to encourage violence in the centres.”

The theme of the detained asylum seekers presenting a physical threat is quickly amplified:“Inside the centres, a military flavour has emerged insome protests, say sources. In a raid last month at Port Hedland, police found weapons including, allegedly, agarotte made from a guitar string…”

Then, one after another all the red-button issues aretrotted out. First, the asylum seekers are soaking up thereaders’ money: “But as a result of the riots, $20 millionhas been spent in nine months upgrading security,bringing to $250 million taxpayers spent on detention

centres in 18 months.”Then Australia risks being over-

whelmed: “The reality is that with 22million refugees in the world, nonation can afford an open-door policy.” At the start of 2001, Australiaactually had the 32nd largest refugeepopulation in the world, and received12,400 asylum seekers during the year – slightly more than Ireland, andhalf as many as Belgium.

And finally the clincher – a cascadeof direct and indirect accusations of illegality and criminality: “Lastfinancial year, 4,100 illegal immi-grants arrived in Australia by boat or plane… Almost half arrive withoutdocuments or with forged papers…Many of those in detention have paid about $10,000 to people-smug-glers who tell them they will get apartments and social security in Australia... You could argue theresourcefulness of these queue-jumpers makes them more valuablemigrants. But our compassion is better directed to those people whowait their turn patiently in squalid

refugee camps overseas... nothing evaporates compassion faster than the feeling you’re being tricked,by exaggeration and lies, into compassion.”

In some countries, this article would have scandal-ized readers with its wild generalizations that demonize entire groups of people – asylum seekers ingeneral, but also Afghans and Iraqis, glibly reduced to“former soldiers… suspected of committing atrocities.”In Australia, few eyebrows were raised at this article,largely because – even if the writer’s language was atthe intemperate end of print journalism (but mild compared to some talk-back radio presenters) – theideas were well established, and were being propagatedby politicians on a daily basis.

Within four months, Australia was actively engagedin a war to overthrow the Taliban, and 18 months lateranother war against Saddam Hussein. The regimes inAfghanistan and Iraq were sufficiently bad to result inremoval – yet the people fleeing them received littlesympathy from politicians, media or the public.

OR WAS IT A TRICKLE?For several years the Australian publichad been subjected to a continuous stream of politicalstatements and media commentaries on asylum seekersthat suggested they were “flooding” or “invading” thecountry; that those coming of their own accord were“illegal” (not so under international law); and that theywere “queue-jumpers” (while the ‘real’ refugees waitedpatiently to be resettled from overseas).

In September 2002, unhcrdid a simple survey usinga media search engine which covered all of Australia’smajor newspapers and several regional papers. This survey revealed that over the previous two years, therehad been 631 listed articles containing the words “Australia”, “asylum” and “flood.” Some of these wereanomalies, but the majority were what they appearedto be – suggestions that Australia was facing extraordi-nary large numbers of asylum seekers. Such articles were often accompanied by photographs of over-crowded boats, which alongside similar TV coverage,reinforced the idea of an “invasion.”

Yet Australia has never received anything approaching a flood of asylum seekers.

In an attempt to nail this particular myth, unhcrstated the following in July 2001: “By global standards,the numbers arriving in Australia are very low. Often

they are referred to as a tide or a flood, but in reality, and compared to most European countries, a more appropriate word might be a trickle. Compared to thenumber of refugees in a significant number of verypoor, developing countries – often in the hundreds ofthousands and even in the millions – the numbers coming to Australia, at less than 10,000 a year, arevery small indeed.”

In Australia, much of the mainstream media – withhonourable exceptions – was slow to wake up to the hype surrounding the asylum issue. But eventually, once they finally realized the flood was a mirage, therewere no queues to jump, and the country’s mandatory detention regime was probably the strictest in the in-dustrialized world, many Australian journalists adapted their coverage of the asylum issue.

By 2006, much of the heat had gone out of the Australian asylum debate, after ngos and academics had spent years doggedly chipping away at the stereotypes. Words like “flood” and “queue-jumper”started to diminish in the Australian media after the endof 2002. However, they still showed up quite frequentlyin readers’ letters to the press for some time after that,suggesting that the terminology had become deeplyrooted among the general public.

Over time, an increasing number of positive storiesabout refugees started to appear in the press, with rural employers in particular giving a thumbs-up to hard-working refugee labourers, who were presented asworthy human beings rather than as abstract threats.

The Woomera detention centre was closed down and dismantled in 2003, and a number of other positive modifications to Australian asylum policy have followed,including the decision in June 2005 to allow families with children to live outside the country’s detention centres. In March 2006, a Senate Inquiry into the administration and operation of the Migration Act recommended a raft of further improvements to the system, including reducing mandatory detention ofasylum seekers to a maximum of 90 days.

The number of asylum seekers coming to Australiahas fallen to 3,200 a year – just one percent of the 2005global total of around 335,000 spread over 50 countries.

Even less of a flood.

Words and Images

Politicallanguage… is designed to make lies sound truthfuland murderrespectable, and to give anappearance of solidity topure wind.”

—George Orwell in ‘Politics and the

English Language,’ 1946

““Does ‘concentration camp’ reallydescribe former miners’ lodgings up-graded with air conditioning, libraries,classrooms, Maytag washing machines,TVs and computers, and whose residentsare well fed with culturally appropriatemeals, like halal and vegetarian?”

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‘ASYLUM MADNESS’ IN THE UKMuch of the adverse or inaccurate mediacoverage of asylum and immigration can be put downto the complexity of the issues and the terminology, thewillingness of some politicians to distort the issues inthe belief it will bring them an electoral advantage, and

the media’s failure to check the facts, figuresand interpretations that they have been fed.The refugee lobby is also sometimes guiltyof failing to act quickly and effectively tocounter myths when they are still in theirinfancy.

Ill-informed or sloppy journalists or editors are one thing: they can always bebetter informed. A media organization thatdeliberately pursues an agenda which is ap-plied to all its contents – not just the editori-als and opinion columns, but also the newscoverage – is something altogether moredeadly.

Four out of the five national daily tabloidnewspapers in the uk – with an estimatedcombined readership of over 17 million (oralmost one third of the country’s popula-tion) – have been full of “news” about asy-lum seekers that is often not really news atall, but anti-asylum spin.

Out of the hundreds of blazing front-page storiesand dramatically headlined one- or two-page inside

spreads carried by these four papers, over the past five years or so, the number of pieces that depict a reasonable or sympathetic individual asylum seeker orrefugee can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

A media search reveals that The Sun, Daily Mail,Daily Express, Daily Star and their three Sunday stable-mates – News of the World, Mail on Sunday and Expresson Sunday – between them produced a staggering 8,163 articles that mentioned the word ‘asylum seeker’in the five years from 1 January 2000 to 1 January 2006.The search totals include some quirks and repetitions,but nevertheless provide a useful insight into thetabloid approach to asylum and immigration.

A key element of the tabloid strategy has been toconfuse terminology. The term ‘asylum seekers’ is often used interchangeably with ‘immigrants’ (1,427tabloid articles with both words over the five-year period). An ‘asylum seeker’ in one line, becomes an ‘immigrant’ or a ‘refugee’ in the next, with 575 tabloidarticles employing all three terms. Incorrect and misleading phrases such as ‘illegal asylum seekers’ and ‘illegal refugees’ have also been employed.

As a result, they have all become part of the samesoup: foreigners (with ‘gypsies’ – some foreign asylum-seeking ones, some local ones – thrown in for good measure).

During the same five-year period, the term ‘bogusasylum seekers’ appeared 713 times in the seven uktabloids, and ‘asylum cheats’ 188 times. The words

‘criminal’ and ‘asylum seekers’ occurred in the same article 538 times; and ‘crime’ and ‘asylum’ appeared to-gether 945 times (in 375 cases, within five words ofeach other). Fifty stories associated asylum seekerswith rape – with titles like “Refugee is rape beast,” “Migrant monster” and “Iraqi in rape quiz.”

‘Asylum’ shared an article with ‘madness’ 271 times,141 of them in The Sun which at the beginning of 2003ran a campaign called ‘Stop Asylum Madness.’

According to The Sun, 839,000 of its readers cut out coupons which appeared in the paper daily over aperiod of several weeks in conjunction with an appar-ently never-ending series of ‘asylum madness’ newsstories. The coupons were periodically taken in a largenumber of sacks, with Sun photographers in tow, anddumped at the Home Office – the uk ministry in charge of asylum and immigration. A few weeks later,the paper announced that more than 1 million readershad signed on to the campaign and told the govern-ment menacingly: “The clock is ticking.”

A fair amount of research has been done into uk me-dia coverage of the asylum issue by university depart-ments, ngos and policy research institutes, but thesheer volume of anti-asylum articles, editorials,columns, cartoons, and even snide comments on thesports pages, has never been fully catalogued and ex-posed.

Nevertheless, the fact that during one 31-day periodin 2003, the Daily Express ran 22 negative asylum or

refugee stories on its front page gives some idea of theintensity of the coverage.

THE DEFAMATION GAMEH a r d ly a n y o n e r e a d s m o r e t h a n o n enewspaper a day, and so few people are fully aware ofthe unremitting nature of the anti-asylum war drums.Britain was repeatedly dubbed the “asylum capital of the world.” Asylum seekers were routinely brandedas criminals or terrorists. They had a habit of import-ing hiv/aids and tb. They raped British women, andthey ran over British children. They even ate Britishswans and donkeys, and poached most of the fish out of British rivers.

The ‘soft touch’ British state meanwhile was said tobe lodging them in luxury hotels, giving them mobilephones, paying them huge amounts of state benefitsand even giving them free golf and cooking lessons. The complete set of anti-asylum-seeker, anti-migrantand anti-gypsy articles – the tabloids much prefer ‘gypsy’ to ‘Roma’ – would fill a large exhibition hall.

Many of these stories were based on unnamed “police sources” and some (as the police themselvesmade clear) have been exposed as inventions. These include The Sun’s swan-eating eastern European asylum seekers, and the Daily Star’s Somali donkey-eaters. One Daily Express story entitled “PLOT TOKILL BLAIR; Asylum seekers with hi-tech equipmentand maps caught half a mile from pm’s home” was

Words andImages

The mendacityof much tabloidcoverage haspoisoned publicdiscourse aboutasylum issues.”

“Hundreds of frontpages and insidespreads similar tothese haveappeared in theUK tabloid pressover the past fiveyears. The DailyExpress aloneproduced 22 anti-asylum frontcovers in a single31-day period.

18 19R E F U G E E SR E F U G E E S

dedicated to the preservation of freedom of speech – issued a stinging report in August 2003, describing “acomplex picture of inaccurate reporting, unfoundedstatistical claims, inappropriate use of labels and one-dimensional images of asylum seekers andrefugees living in Britain.”

Daily Express journalists have twice taken the highly unusual step of reporting their own paper to theuk’s Press Complaints Commission (pcc). In August2001, the paper’s union chapter complained about theExpress’s “sustained campaign against asylum seekersin pursuit of circulation.” And in January 2005, a secondcomplaint was lodged after dozens of anti-Roma articles culminated in one entitled “1.6 million gypsiesready to flood in.” An unnamed journalist was cited bythe Press Gazette as saying they were being “pressuredinto writing articles which they believed to be racistand inflammatory.” The complaints were rejected.

Pressure from ngos like the Refugee Council andthe MediaWise ram Project eventually forced the pccto issue a warning to editors about the use of inaccurate

and misleading language.Richard Ayre, Article 19’s Chair, said that

the point was “not to sanitize [the asylum issue], not to minimize it, but to report it fair-ly and accurately. Get it right and the mediacan offer us real insight into a critical area ofpublic policy. Get it wrong and they will giveus not insight but incitement.”

The British police seemed to agree. As farback as 2001, the Association of Chief PoliceOfficers issued a ‘best practice’ guide, whichsaid “Racist expressions towards asylum seek-ers appear to have become common currencyand acceptable in a way that would never betolerated towards any other minority group.”

This turning of racism and xenophobia into some-thing commonplace and banal (a phenomenon that isby no means confined to the uk), with asylum used as aTrojan Horse to get around the race relations laws, isperhaps the most dangerous aspect of the wholedefamation game.

In October 2003, the Swiss Foundation Against Racism and Anti-Semitism issued a series of advertisements: one, shown on

cinema screens aswell as in news-papers, asked“How do the Jewsget their money?”A pause, and thenthe reply appeared: “Byworking, just likethe rest of us.”A poster in thesame series asked“Where do Kosovars get theircar radios?” Theanswer: “Theybuy them, like therest of us.” And athird asked“What do blacksdo with theirwives at lunch-time?” The reply: “They

eat their meal, like the rest of us.”Switzerland was in the run-up to

a general election, in which asylumseekers and immigrants – with theiralleged predilection for committingall sorts of crimes – were featuringprominently.

The ironic advertisements werecontroversial – in some ways morecontroversial than the stream of anti-foreigner posters they werecountering (see page 12). Some pro-asylum commentators argued that they were playing intothe hands of the anti-asylum lobbyby helping to keep the immigrationand asylum issues centre stage.

A PROVOCATIVE APPROACHThe following year, across the Alpsin Austria, where similar hostile – if largely unsubstantiated – beliefsabout asylum seekers had takenstrong root, UNHCR also decided thata “soft” approach simply wouldn’tregister in the minds of a busy public,and something more provocativewas needed to get people to at leastconsider the idea that some of thethings they were hearing about asylum seekers and refugees werenot true, or were highly exaggerated.

And so it was that the citizens ofAustria, going peacefully abouttheir daily business in the summerof 2004, were suddenly confrontedby two strange men, the first withhis finger entering one ear and coming out of the other, and thesecond with his entire head in theprocess of being unzipped down themiddle.

Both of them looked a littlepleased with themselves, as theygazed out from 3,100 billboards,hung out in cafes and bars on60,000 ‘freecards,’ popped up onwebsites, morphed onto electronicinfo boards in Vienna’s Metro system, and paraded up and downon T-shirts.

The captions made it clear thatthese dubious characters were asylum seekers, up to their usualgame of abusing the asylum system.

“Asylum seekers never showtheir real faces,” says the poster withthe zip. “Asylum seekers get up tosneaky tricks,” says the one with thefinger through his ears. The straplineat the bottom promises to reveal“All prejudices” on UNHCR ’s Austrian

Tackling Alpine Asylum Myths website, where the agency posted12 of the most common myths andshort, sharp explanations about whythey were misguided.

The campaign achieved somemeasurable successes. The numberof visitors to the UNHCR website hitrecord highs. The postcard carrying

the images was voted “Freecard ofthe Year 2004” by a Viennamagazine. A second phase of the“Fairness in Place of Prejudice”

campaign was launched inthe autumn with the help oftestimonials by the FederalPresident Heinz Fischer, aprominent Austrian scientistJosef Penninger and thefamous musician Hubert vonGoisern.

And finally, the weeklymagazine Die Furche built aseries of five articles aroundthe theme of the campaign,which subsequently earnedAustria’s most prestigiousmedia prize for its author,Wolfgang Machreich.

Whether or not thecampaign – which wasproduced pro bono by theinternational advertisingcompany Publicis – wonover many people is hard to

prove. However, it certainlystimulated a fair amount of debateabout the prevalent myths andprejudices in Austria. Echoes of

that debate continueto this day in the media, and in public statements by federal and local government officials.

It could be argued that thecampaign bust a thirteenth myth –the one which says an aggressiveand provocative pro-asylumcampaign will annoy people and istherefore bound to fail, howevertruthful it may be. UNHCR ’s RolandSchoenbauer, who directed thecampaign, is convinced it was theonly way to make an impact.

“Given the detrimental politicaldiscourse that had been takingplace, and the lack of financialresources to run a huge campaign,we had to do it like this,” he says.“Positive messages simply wouldn’thave worked in that kind ofenvironment.”

The ironic advertisements were controversial — in some ways more controversial than thestream of anti-foreigner postersthey were countering.

Words andImages

Racistexpressionstowards asylum seekersappear to have become common currency.”

—uk Police

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angrily denounced by the local police in a statement:“Let me say in the clearest possible language that thisstory is rubbish and the Daily Express was told this inunequivocal language when it first asked us about it...”

A July 2003 study by the Information Centre aboutAsylum and Refugees in the uk (icar) showed thatmembers of the public, while aware that the tabloidswere stirring up ill-feeling, still broadly agreed withtheir viewpoints, and used the same language. Anotherstudy found that “interviewees… in drawing their ownconclusions about the newcomers to their community,repeated media myths about predatory male asylumseekers threatening their wives and daughters and eco-nomic migrants coming to Britain.”

Not surprisingly, a 2005 eu study placed the uksecond in a list of 30 European countries with regard to‘resistance to asylum seekers.’ Yet uk citizens wereshown to be relatively tolerant on the other topics, com-ing 20th in their ‘Resistance to Multicultural Society’and 16th – out of 19 – in their ‘Resistance to Diversity.’

“The mendacity of much tabloid coverage has

poisoned public discourse about asylum issues,” saidjournalist Mike Jempson, director of ethics charity MediaWise. “Refugees are denied a voice, so the publicdon’t discover why people seek sanctuary and whatthey can do to help.”

The tabloids thunder with indignation when theyare accused of racism, or of indulging in propaganda reminiscent of the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer in the1930s. They skilfully turn every criticism against thecritic: the tabloids become the valiant but beleagueredcrusaders for the ‘truth.’ Their critics, they claim, aredriven by excessive ‘political correctness,’ and are out to curtail freedom of speech.

Never mind that Article 19 – an organization

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B Y V A N E S S A S A E N E N

H olidays are always the loneliest time for people far from home.

This simple truth inspired an unusual initiative last Christmasby Het Belang van Limburg, a localnewspaper in the Belgian provinceof Limburg.

The paper suggested readers in each of the province’s 44 com-munes give substance to the slogan “Hospitable Limburg,” byinviting asylum seekers intotheir homes for Christmas dinner.In the end, more than 100 Belgianfamilies opened their doors to foreigners they had never metbefore – and the number wouldhave been higher if there had beenenough asylum seekers to matchthe number of would-be hosts whocame forward in response to thepaper’s appeal.

The Christmas project wascoordinated by Gert Reynders, editor of

Het Belang van Limburg ’s Tuesday supplement, entitled “The Good News Paper.” He said he believed it was the paper’s “journalistic duty” to reduce the“staggering level of ignorance” about asylum seekers and refugees. He saw theChristmas dinner idea as a means tocounter all the negative slogans, stereo-types and shocking images.

Several journalists devoted their Christmas Day to covering the story, criss-crossing the province to take dinner-table photos and interview hosts andguests. Their stories then appeared inthe next edition of the “Good News Paper.”

The initiative was a resounding success. Afterwards, Reynders said,some of the hosts wrote to the paper “to say

how grateful they were for having had achance to get to know asylum seekers.”

Limburg province, which borders Germany and the Netherlands, has plentyof experience with immigration. From the moment coal was discovered there in1901 through to the 1970s, immigrantscame to work in the mines. The province’swebsite still boasts that Limburg has “black gold” and a “colourful character.”

“Because of our familiarity with immigration issues, we have a more openattitude than in some of the big cities, likeAntwerp or Brussels,” said Reynders. “Sowe were pretty sure to find fertile groundfor our Christmas action.”

Belgium’s French language daily Le Soirhas also tackled immigration issues in an unusual way. The paper’s Sunday

magazine recently published portraits ofa number of foreigners who were occupying a local church in a bid to secure regularization of their status. Theportraits put a human face on these so-called “illegals,” each of whom had been“adopted” by a local resident. The sameportraits could be seen at the entrance ofthe occupied church, and some local shopkeepers were also displaying themas a sign of solidarity. “By having theirnames, photos and stories posted, the illegals take risks,” wrote Le Soir. “But it isan act of dignity.”

POSITIVE APPROACHModern Belgium is a laboratoryof multiculturalism: a federal state wherepower is shared among language

communities (Dutch, French and German)and regions, including the city of Brussels.Belgium was one of the original signatories of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and although its asylum system is not without problems, UNHCR’sRepresentative in Brussels Judith Kumincalls it “one of Europe’s better examples,”citing “good reception arrangements anda robust recognition rate.”

A key moment in Belgium’s recent asy-lum history centred on the tragic case of afailed Nigerian asylum seeker, 20-year-old Semira Adamu, who was suffocated todeath as she resisted deportation in 1998.This led to considerable soul-searching –especially by the country’s media.

Unlike papers in some other European countries, Belgian newspapersshow little inclination to launch virulent

anti-asylum campaigns accompanied by aconstant stream of stories depicting asylum seekers and refugees as criminalsor welfare scroungers.

Although the far-right political partyVlaamse Belang toes an anti-immigrantline, the Federal government minister responsible for social integration, Christian Dupont, insists on the value ofdiversity. “All great nations,” he recentlytold a pan-European conference on migration, “welcomed the travellingstranger and insisted that he should feel at home.”

In the same spirit, a key aim of Fedasil– the Belgian government agency respon-sible for the reception of asylum seekers –is to establish mutual respect. The agencyis unique in its active sponsorship ofcultural and educational events designed

to help Belgians and asylum seekers understand each other. Recently it rolledout a new educational game “Chez Mo &Co.” which aims to give children an ideaof what it is like to be an asylum seeker ina Fedasil reception centre.

However, even Fedasil’s awareness-raising projects can be controversial. Whenthe organization was planning an itinerant photo exhibition on refugees andasylum seekers, and chose Antwerp’s prestigious brand new main library as avenue, their request was refused. The city’smayor said he was concerned the exhibition would give a bad name to thesurrounding area – which hosts a lot ofrefugees and illegal immigrants – and alsosaid he did not believe the theme was appropriate for the new library’s first exhibition.

“The reaction of Antwerp city was veryunfortunate,” said Fedasil’s Communica-tions Director Mieke Candaele. “…Yet, whathappened in Antwerp was an isolated case.The exhibition has been – and will be –shown in numerous other cities, and re-ceives undividedly positive reactions.”

R E F U G E E SR E F U G E E S

Belgium bucks the trend

“Belgium’s asylum system is one of Europe’sbetter examples… good reception arrangements

and a robust recognition rate.”

A desire to build mutual understanding hasbeen one of the driving forces of Belgium’s famous stand-up comedian Pie Tshibanda, aCongolese refugee who has become a Belgiancitizen. For the past six years he has presentedhis one-man show to audiences all over theFrancophone world, performing in majorvenues and also appearing regularly on TV andradio. Sometimes outrageous, often sad, butalways hilarious, he uses humour to dismantle the barriers of suspi-cion and misunderstanding.

Pie Tshibanda was a distinguished psychologist, teacher andwriter before fleeing Zaire (now DRC) in 1995, after producing avideo and writing articles and comic strips about ethnic cleansing.Arriving in Belgium at the age of 44, he had to start all over again,confronting total anonymity and isolation in a foreign land, whiletrying to navigate his way through the complex asylum bureaucracy.

In his show, he tells of going door-to-door in the Bel-gian village where he was placed when he first lefthis reception centre, in order to introduce himself tohis neighbours. People peeked nervously out at himfrom behind their curtains, as he stood outside in therain. He introduced himself to one household afteranother and gradually became “one of them,” refin-ing his story-telling skills as he went along. Helaunched his first one-man show, “A crazy black man

in a white man’s land,” in 1999 and has performed it hundreds oftimes since. He currently alternates this show with another produc-tion, entitled “I’m not a witch-doctor.”

“The audience, black and white, laughs at its own image in Pie’smirror,” wrote the French daily Le Monde. Another French paper, LeCanard Enchaîné, was similarly impressed: “He’s often funny, he’sforceful, very revealing: how surprising it is to see that we western-ers have a few things to learn about hospitality.”

“The difference between my African roots and western ‘values’ tears me apart.And I want to share this with others.” – Pie Tshibanda

Bridging the divide One of 100 Belgian families and their asylum-seeking guests on Christmas Day, 2005.

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B Y K I T T Y M C K I N S E Y

T hey say dead men tellno tales, but the dead of Gikongoro speak elo-quently. The body of a man is frozen in time, his

hands futilely shielding his face. Anotherman writhes in unspeakable agony. Amother tries in desperation to protect the baby cradled in her arms. One man’sthroat has been slashed. A child’s head is missing entirely.

Now a ghostly chalky white, the mummified bodies of some of the 25,000victims of an orgy of killing in the south-ern Rwandan hills lie on wooden racks in a grisly genocide memorial, offering their own mute tales of the insanity that grippedthe tiny African country of Rwanda in 1994, when Hutu extremists rose up and exterminated 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus.

Details of the three-day frenzy of killingby guns, grenades and machetes here atGikongoro are filled in by a man who by allrights should be dead too. Emmanuel Murangira, a Tutsi volunteer at the memorial in a former school, still bears a deep bullet hole in his forehead, over hisleft eye, evidence of the night he was left for dead under the bodies of his family, friends and neighbours.

“My whole family was killed in the genocide,” he tells a visitor, “five children,my wife and 50 people in my extended family. I was one of only four people who survived in Gikongoro.” Some 25,000 people from many villages had obeyed thelocal authorities’ instructions to gather inthe school, where they were promised they would be safe. Instead it turned into a killing ground.

How does he manage to tell his story, over and over, to the many visitors to thememorial? “I don’t like to be asked about it

because it brings back bad memories, but Ihave to tell it…” Murangira’s voice trails off.The logical conclusion of his sentence –“To keep it from happening again” – is leftunsaid.

Fewer than ten years after the cry of“Never again” went up in Africa after theRwandan genocide, in another part of thishuge continent, men and children were once again being slaughtered, and womenraped, simply because of their ethnicity.

The rebellion that broke out in Darfur,western Sudan, in February 2003, has beendepicted as a war by government soldiers,militias and rebels against civilians, or as aclash between nomadic herders and settledfarmers over scarce grazing and farmland.

But many of the victims of the murder, rape,pillage and arson that show little sign ofabating have a simpler explanation: they say they are being persecuted for being black by fellow Sudanese citizens withlighter skins (often referred to colloquially,if inaccurately, as “Arabs”).

One displaced man told a visitor to Kalmacamp in South Darfur in 2004 that he andhis fellow villagers were targeted “becauseof the colour, the black colour,” pulling theskin on the back of his hand by way ofillustration. “They attacked us because weare Fur, 100 percent Fur.” (Darfur means‘homeland of the Fur.’) A Fur woman saidthat the men who attacked her villagescreamed: “We are going to kill you. We are

going to use you women, and we are not going to leave anybody. Because you are black, we are going to finish you all.”

Three years after the war started in Darfur, nearly two million people eke out ahazardous existence in miserable, unsafe settlements around the region’s cities, stillunable to go back to their destroyed villages.

THE CURSE OF INTOLERANCEWrestling with the legacy of slaveryand colonialism, Africa today still hasn’t escaped the curse of intolerance. The 2001World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and RelatedIntolerance, held in Durban, South Africa,noted that Africa still struggles with all these

problems, which it said constitute a viola-tion of human rights “and deny the self-evident truth that all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.”

And if intolerance is sickening wherever it occurs, in Africa it has all toooften turned deadly. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, a six-year war thatwent largely unnoticed outside the immediate region claimed over four million lives and sent more than 400,000Congolese into exile, with a further threemillion displaced inside the country. Thewar officially ended in 2002, but villagersare still fleeing localized fighting in the eastern part of the country. Atrocities –particularly the gruesome practice of hacking off hands, arms and legs – continue. According to medical experts, as many as 1,200 people in drc are still dying from war-related causes every day.

While the Africa that produced the1969 oau Convention on Refugees – generally regarded as one of the mostrefugee-friendly pieces of international legislation in existence – continues to pro-duce acts of remarkable generosity towardsrefugees and others fleeing violence, espe-cially at the local level, there have also beensome major reverses at the national level.Countries with a rich history of welcom-ing outsiders – like Tanzania in East Africaand Côte d’Ivoire in the West – have recentlygrown much less hospitable, or becomedownright hostile to refugees.

Last August, for example, a South Africanmob attacked shops belonging to refugeesand asylum seekers in Bothaville, a town in Free State province. Eight of the ten foreign-owned shops that were attacked and looted – two of them were burnt to theground – were owned or run by Somalis. After they lost everything in the attack, someof the Somalis were reduced to working asshop assistants in the premises they them-selves had formerly owned.

A unhcr investigation into the inci-dent determined that “xenophobia playeda key role in the attack. There were percep-tions of foreigners taking available job opportunities, not making meaningful contributions to the community and undermining the businesses of the local communities.”

As a response to this and numerous other acts of physical and verbal abuse ofrefugees and other foreigners in SouthAfrica, unhcrhas been funding a campaigncalled Roll Back Xenophobia, which is run under the supervision of South Africa’sNational Consortium for Refugee Affairs.

The campaign aims to stimulate the education of civil servants from a wide range of sectors – including the police, andhealth and education departments – aboutrefugees and their rights.

Godwin Ale Willow, a soft-spoken Sudanese refugee, has participated very actively in Roll Back Xenophobia, speaking openly about how he became a refugee and how difficult it is to find acceptance in South Africa.

Standing head and shoulders above most people, and – in his own words – as “dark as midnight,” Willow has attendedcommunity meetings where he was told togo home. He has braved the hostility ofhawkers competing for customers and hasbeen put on display as an “oddity” from beyond the Limpopo, the river separatingSouth Africa from the rest of the continent.

Despite the enthusiasm with which heembraced the Roll Back Xenophobia campaign, and his participation in the November 2004 public hearings on xeno-phobia chaired by the government’s Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Foreign Affairs and the South African Human Rights Commission, Willow is resigned to the likelihood that his physicalappearance will continue to determine howhe is treated for the foreseeable future.

HOSPITALITY WEARS THINFive thousand kilometres away inWest Africa, various codified concepts of hospitality towards foreigners have

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“Tired of Refugees” Is African tolerance in decline?

Côte d’Ivoire provided a graphic example of how xenophobia can spreadlike wildfire, once the cultural, political and legal restraints are removed.

An armed fighter, allegedly janjaweed, in a village in Darfur.

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benefited refugees over the years. In Mali,for example, the term Djatiguiya is used todescribe the custom of greeting foreignerswith open arms.

And in next-door Côte d’Ivoire, the similar concept of Akwaba set the tone forthe country’s policy towards foreign mi-grants and refugees for decades (the conceptalso exists in neighbouring Ghana). Côted’Ivoire was conspicuous for its religious andethnic harmony under the leadership of itsfirst president, Félix Houphouët-Boigny.

“La Côte d’Ivoire appartient à tout le monde” (Côte d’Ivoire belongs to the wholeworld) was his motto. And he put it into practice, welcoming millions of fellowAfricans and taking the best from theircultures. Not only did outsiders become cabinet ministers, but foreigners – more thana quarter of the country’s population – made

a significant contribution to “the Ivorianmiracle” that created one of the most devel-oped economies on the continent.

But following Houphouët-Boigny’s death in 1993, and a coup against his successor in 1999, all that ended. An armedrebellion in September 2002 split the nation in two, the economy slid downhill,and the attitude to foreigners turnedugly. Thousands of foreigners – includingboth migrant workers from neighbouringstates and refugees from Sierra Leone andLiberia – were forced out of the shantytowns where they lived, and their homeswere burned down. Many were assaultedand others robbed of the little moneythey possessed. It was a graphic illustra-tion of how xenophobia can spread likewildfire, once the cultural, political and legal restraints are removed, either by

direct action on the part of the authori-ties or in a situation of near anarchy.

On the other side of the continent, fordecades Tanzania stood as a model oftolerance and hospitality, and set the “goldstandard” in accepting wave after wave ofrefugees from the tumult in the Great Lakes region. On a visit to the country inMarch, UN High Commissioner forRefugees António Guterres paid “warm tribute” to the country’s “very generous and hospitable” people and government.

However, over the past ten years, Tan-zania’s patience with hosting the largestnumber of refugees in Africa has worn no-ticeably thinner. “We are tired of refugees,”the ruling party announced in December2004.

Refugee advocacy groups have been disturbed by some of the Tanzanian

government’s actions in recent years. In October2002, Tanzania decreed thatall remaining Rwandanrefugees should leave by the end of that year. Somereceived threats that theirhouses would be burneddown, in an apparent at-tempt to force the issue. InSeptember 2003, Tanzaniaexpelled 922 Rwandanrefugees who had lived inNgara refugee camp sincefleeing the aftermath ofthe Rwandan genocide in 1994. In February 2005,unhcr protested whennine Burundian asylumseekers were forcibly returned to their own country – a practice knownas refoulement, and prohib-ited under the 1951 UN Refugee Convention, of which Tanzania is a signatory.

Refugees in Tanzaniaalso face increasing re-strictions on their freedomof movement and rights towork. The government

forbids refugees from venturing morethan four kilometres from their camps, a policy that prevents them both from farm-ing and from finding more markets for their goods. Authorities also closed down a thriving market in Lukole ‘A’ camp thatserved more than 50,000 Burundianrefugees. And in each of the five camps inthe Kibondo region, both refugees and local Tanzanians were affected when thecamp markets were shut down.

“Restrictions on movement and the closure of markets... have led to a deterio-rating food security situation,” the WorldFood Programme reported in July 2004. Simultaneously hit by cuts in food rationsbecause of insufficient money from donors,many refugees have been forced to sell household goods, and some have allegedlybeen driven to steal just to feed themselves.

Nevertheless, the Tanzanian govern-ment still hosts some 348,000 refugees

in 13 camps – the largest refugee population on the continent. (Another200,000 Burundians live in settlementsoutside the unhcr-run camps, and there are estimated to be about 200,000 other unregistered refugees living in villages innorthwestern Tanzania.) Tanzania also continues to maintain one of the most liberal admission policies in Africa, and unhcr offers health, education and other services to many local communities in an effort to mitigate the effects of decades ofhosting so many refugees.

And even if Tanzania has reduced its previously very gen-erous standards, thereare certainly still plentyof bright spots boththere and elsewhere inAfrica. In stark contrastto many industrializedcountries, for exam-ple, most African stateshave refrained fromtaking legislative mea-sures that would makeit more diff icult forrefugees to receive asylum.

Against the back-drop of the horrors of Darfur, the generos-ity of neighbouring Chad stands out. De-spite being one ofthe poorest nations in the world, Chad has accepted 220,000 Sudanese refugees,200,000 of them in 12 camps run by un-hcr. (In the south, Chad also hosts 45,000refugees from the Central African Repub-lic, with more coming all the time.)

Even before the Chadian governmentcalled in unhcr and other agencies to helpcare for the Sudanese refugees, Chadiansalong the Darfur border in the east of thecountry opened their homes and shared theirprecious food stocks with the refugees,who mostly belonged to their own ethnicgroup, the Zaghawa.

The locals “gave us everything they had,” said refugee Salim Ahmed, living with a local family in Tine in 2004. “Now

they are in the same situation as the refugees.”As in Tanzania, unhcris helping host com-munities that have shared their scarce re-sources with the refugees.

Sometimes, the local population can beless welcoming, however. In Malawi, inMarch of this year, the government issueda strong press release after receiving reportsthat refugees residing outside designatedcamp areas were being attacked by mem-bers of the public. “Harassment and attackson asylum seekers and refugees, just as harassment and attacks on any human being, are criminal acts and punishable by

law,” it stated, warningthat anyone caught com-mitting such acts wouldbe prosecuted.

Nevertheless, allacross the continent, localized gestures ofhospitality and generos-ity continue to smooththe way for people whohave lost everythingwhen they fled theirhomelands. Last year, for example, a local chiefin southeastern Ghanaopened his palace to recent arrivals fromTogo, and urged his people to show the samehospitality to scores ofother Togolese refugeesin the area.

Chief Togbe Tu Agbalekpor III of Hevicalled his people to-

gether in May 2005 to appeal to them to welcome the Togolese into their homes.The villagers responded positively, offer-ing rooms and farm land. That veryevening, the women of the village begancooking huge pots of cassava and stew for more than 100 refugees.

Veronica Edzodzi, 29, who fled to Ghana with her sister, husband and youngdaughter, was overwhelmed. “You can’t believe it until you’ve experienced their love,” she enthused. “It’s incredible. The people of Hevi are angels on earth.”

That’s certainly something Africa – andthe rest of the world – could use more of.

R E F U G E E SR E F U G E E S

Across the continent, localized gestures of hospitality and generositycontinue to smooth the way for people who have lost everything.

For decades, Tanzania received wave after wave of refugees from its troubled neighbours, including these Rwandans lodged in Benaco camp after the 1994 genocide.

Liberian refugees standing outside the UNHCR office in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, after their house was burntdown by a rampaging mob inSeptember 2002.

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VICTIMS OFGENOCIDE

26 27R E F U G E E SR E F U G E E S

More than 2.5 million people have been killed in acts of genocide since the mid-1970s

Some 10,000 skulls wereunearthed around Chong Ek,Cambodia. In all, 1.7 millionpeople are believed to have beenkilled during the 1975-79genocide. Targets includedintellectuals, Buddhist monks,politicians, civil servants, ethnicVietnamese and Laotians andeven people who wore glasses.

The bodies of victims of theRwandan genocide filmed on 1 May 1994 by a UNHCRcameraman from the Tanzanianside of the Kagera River, whichforms the border between thetwo countries. The footage, which was released to TV stationsacross the world, was one of the earliest pieces of visualevidence that the genocide wasunder way.

Victims of the1994 Rwandangenocide, in a

village school inNyarubuye, a year after

their deaths. A total of some

800,000 people– mostly Tutsis,

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Hutus – wereslaughtered in

100 days.

Nearly 8,000 men and boys were killed in or near Srebrenica in July 1995, a mass killing

that was classified as genocide. In all, severalhundred thousand people were killed during the

war in Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Relatives of genocide victims can never forget.Here, two women grieve over their murdered

loved ones at a 2005 ceremony marking the 10thanniversary of the Srebrenica massacre.

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B Y W I L L I A M S P I N D L E R

The year of the “discovery”of America, 1492, was also the year when the large and long-

established Sephardic Jewish communitywas expelled from Spain and Portugal. And, in the same year, the armies of theCatholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabellamarched into Granada, the last of theSpanish Muslim kingdoms, bringing an end to seven centuries of Moorish rule onthe Iberian peninsula.

The drive to forge a single nation out ofSpain’s diverse cultural, linguistic, ethnicand religious traditions was based to a largeextent on intolerance, as exemplified bythe Spanish Inquisition, a campaignlaunched in 1478 to stamp out religious dissent. The concept of limpieza de sangre(“cleanliness of blood”) was used to justifythe persecution of thousands of Spaniardsof Jewish or Muslim ancestry, accused ofsecretly practising their former religions.

“You cannot project backwards our modern morality to a society which did notknow toleration, in politics as well as reli-gion,” argues Professor Agostino Borromeo,an Italian historian who has been grantedrare access to the Inquisition’s archives.

On the other hand, some of the effectsof past intolerance and persecution are stillfelt today in Latin America, more than 500years after Christopher Columbus set sail in search of a new route to the Indies.

The true discoverers of the New Worldwere, of course, its first inhabitants, whoare thought to have arrived there some20,000 years ago from Asia, through theBering Strait. By the time Columbus arrived, a vast array of cultures and waysof life had developed, ranging fromhighly organized multi-ethnic empiressuch as the Inca, which ruled some 12

million people, to nomadic hunter-gatherers like the Ona and Yamaná ofTierra del Fuego.

The Aztec, Maya and Inca accomplish-ments in engineering, science, architectureand the arts, and the splendour of their civilizations, stimulated the imagination –and the greed – of the European invaders.However, it would be a mistake to idealizepre-Columbian societies as some lost Utopia: many of them had thrived on constant warfare, slavery and the brutal subjugation of other, weaker, peoples.

This internal strife was a major factorin the dramatic collapse ofthe Inca and Aztecempires at the hands of a few hundredwell-armed Conquistadores.

Bartolomé de las Casas, the first priest ordained in the Americas, railed against theinhuman treatment of the natives by theconquerors: “It was a general rule amongSpaniards to be cruel,” he wrote, “not justcruel, but extraordinarily cruel so that harsh and bitter treatment would preventIndians from daring to think of themselvesas human beings… they saw themselves…crushed to the earth by the horses, cut inpieces by swords, eaten and torn by dogs,many buried alive and suffering all kindsof exquisite tortures.”

DEVASTATING IMPACTTh e i m pac t o f t h e c o n q u e s t , exacerbated by the native population’s lack of immunity to European diseases, was devastating. The population of theAmericas when Columbus arrived is esti-mated at some 30 million. Over the next 50years, it plummeted by up to 75 percent.

With insufficient indigenous labour, the colonial plantations and mines ground to a halt. A solution to this prob-lem was found in one of the worst formsof persecution and exploitation ever seen

– the slave trade.Although slavery had existed for

centuries in many parts of the world, in-cluding Africa and the Americas, thetransatlantic slave trade – in which manycountries, including England, France, theNetherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Spain,Portugal and the United States participated– was unprecedented in its scale and consequences.

According to unesco’s Slave TradeArchives Project, “the various waves ofslavery resulted in the deportation of an estimated 25 to 30 million persons, not counting those who died on board ship orin the course of wars and raids.”

A LEGACY OF DISCRIMINATIONBoth the conquest of Latin Americaand the subsequent expansion of the slavetrade left a legacy of discrimination whichlies at the root of the social exclusion ofindigenous and Afro-Latin Americans today.

In 1811 the German scientist and ex-plorer Alexander von Humboldt was surprised by the colonial society’s ob-session with race: “In a country governed by whites, the families reputed to have theleast mixture of Negro or mulatto blood are also naturally the most honored,” he observed. “The greater or less degree ofwhiteness of skin decides the rank whichman occupies in society.”

Independence from Spain and Portugalin the 19th century did not significantlychange the prejudices and structures of thecolonial era. Indigenous and Afro-LatinAmericans continued to be at the bottomof the social hierarchy. In fact, some of theworst forms of abuse against these groups,amounting in some cases to genocide, have been carried out since Latin American countries became independent. These

include campaigns of extermination against native peoples in countries such as Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Paraguay.

Some of the descendants of the Africanslaves have suffered a similar fate.

Haiti shares the island of Hispaniola with the Dominican Republic. Relations between the two neighbours have not always been easy because of historical andethnic differences. Haitians, who tend tohave darker skins than Dominicans, havecrossed the border for decades, either to look for work or to escape violence and persecution in their country.

In 1937, in one of the worst instances of racially motivated violence in Latin America’s recent history, President RafaelTrujillo of the Dominican Republic orderedhis army to kill all the Haitians in the coun-try. Some 30,000 people were killed in thecourse ofa few days with machetes and clubs.

“The Dominican Republic’s govern-ment made the people believe that theircountry and culture was being taken overby the Haitians,” Haitian author Marie Chantale S. Déclama explains. “They warned that the mixing of the two nationswould mean the end of the culture of the Dominican people. Generalissimo Trujillodevised a simple test for identifying Haitiansfrom Dominicans by the way Haitians pronounced perejil (parsley). According toTrujillo, Haitians do not trill their r’s whenspeaking. When Trujillo gave the order tokill all the Haitians, his soldiers… simply had to ask them to say perejil .”

RECENT TIMESFrom the 1960s onwards, poverty, unequal distribution of wealth and restricted civil and political rights led toconflicts in many parts of Latin America.

In Guatemala, for example, a brutalcounterinsurgency campaign resulted inthe internal displacement of an estimatedone million people and led to acts ofgenocide being committed against indigenous Maya communities suspectedof supporting left-wing guerrillas.

“Entire villages had been destroyed andall their inhabitants killed,” the UN-sponsored Guatemalan Historical Clarification Commission concluded.“The policy had been total destruction, notonly ‘scorched earth’, but, in some cases,every human being had been killed, including women, children, babies and elderly people. Pregnant women and babies had been victimized with particu-lar brutality… such atrocities could not beexplained other than as an attempt to exterminate the ethnic group as such.”

Between 1981 and 1984, more than

R E F U G E E SR E F U G E E S

The Lethal Legacy of the Conquistadores

In Guatemala, a brutal counterinsurgencycampaign led to acts of genocide being committed

against indigenous Maya communities suspected ofsupporting left-wing guerrillas.

Mayan Indians from Guatemala, who became refugees in Mexico, receive documents entitling them to own land in Mexico – an increasingly rare act of generosity by a host nation.

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200,000 Guatemalans, many of them in-digenous Maya, sought refuge in Mexico.

After the 1996 Peace Accords, refugeesbegan to return. By 1999, some 43,000refugees had gone home with the help ofunhcr, while another 23,000 chose to stayin Mexico, where by and large they havebeen well treated. Many of the root causesof the conflict in Guatemala, however, remain. The Maya continue to face discrimination and are denied access to land, resources and basic rights.

TODAY’S REALITIESFar from being relegated to the distant past, slavery and killings of in-digenous people continue to this day inLatin America. The authorities in Brazil,for example, last year raided 183 farms inremote parts of the country and freed morethan 4,000 people living in conditions ofslavery. Official government estimatessuggest that there are still more than25,000 enslaved Brazilians, even thoughslavery was formally abolished in 1888.

In Colombia, a 40-year-old conflict

between the army, right-wing para-militaries and left-wing guerrillas is badlyaffecting the country’s one million in-digenous people and there are fears that entire communities could disappear afterbeing forced to flee their traditional terri-tories. Indigenous culture is closely linkedto the land, and forced displacement oftenleads to the total collapse of traditional authority and cultural patterns. Afro-Colombians also suffer disproportionatelyfrom the effects of the conflict.

Haitians, irrespective of whether theyare fleeing poverty or violence, are stillgenerally not welcome in the region. TheUnited States immigration authorities, for example, treat Haitian boat people dif-ferently from Cubans. Whereas Cuban boatpeople are routinely asked by US CoastGuard officials if they have any concernsabout returning to their country of origin,Haitians are not asked the same question.Instead, they themselves must take the initiative to express their fears while on theboat. unhcr said it is concerned that, as aresult of the application of this so-called

“shout test,” Haitians may not be given sufficient opportunity to express their fears of persecution.

With the important exception ofColombia, armed conflicts have been resolved or have faded away in most ofLatin America. Democracy has grownstrong roots in the region, but prejudice andracism are still a fact of life, carrying withthem the seeds of possible future conflict.Despite a high degree of racial mixing, most Latin American countries continue to be “pigmentocracies,” societies whererights and resources are apportioned in accordance with the colour of the skin, asin the time of Humboldt.

In the words of Rigoberta Menchú, aMaya woman from Guatemala who won the1992 Nobel Peace Prize for her struggle forthe rights of indigenous people: “LatinAmerica has a pluralist culture and ifthis plurality is not accepted – if instead intolerance, imposition, exclusion and the alleged superiority of one race prevails – then undoubtedly there will be wars in thecontinent.”

R E F U G E E SR E F U G E E S

Despite a high degree of racial mixing, most Latin American countries continue

to be “pigmentocracies,”societieswhere rights and resources are apportioned

in accordance with the colour of the skin.

A US Coast Guard vessel pulls up alongside a boat carrying Haitian boat people.

| P E O P L E A N D P L A C E S |Two new Assistant High Commissioners have recently taken up their posts at UNHCR,

completing the UN Refugee Agency’s top management quartet headed by High Commissioner António Guterres and Deputy High Commissioner Wendy Chamberlin.

Ray WilkinsonAfter a long and distinguished careeras a journalist, and eight and a halfyears as editor of REFUGEES magazine,Ray Wilkinson has retired. Building onhis wide-ranging experience as aforeign correspondent, Wilkinsontransformed REFUGEES from being atypical institutional publication into amagazine that aimed to presentserious content with vividness andstyle. We wish him every success in hisfuture endeavours.

Judy Cheng-Hopkins, from Malaysia, has beenappointed as UNHCR’s new Assistant High Commissioner forOperations. She comes with 27 years of UN experience,including a decade in Africa with the UN DevelopmentProgramme in Zambia and Kenya, and various key positions atUNDP headquarters. She also served as the World FoodProgramme’s Director for Asia, the CIS and the Balkans, and

was responsible for major WFPemergency operations in Kosovo,North Korea and Afghanistan.Most recently, Ms Cheng-Hopkins served as Director ofWFP’s New York office where, inaddition to dealing with UNinteragency issues, she also setup and managed WFP’s privatesector fundraising in the UnitedStates. “I am sure that her wealthof experience will be of greatbenefit to UNHCR,” High

Commissioner António Guterres said of Ms Cheng-Hopkins.“Her field experience, management experience and knowledgeof UN operations across a wide spectrum of humanitarian and development activities will be particularly relevant.” Ms Judy Cheng-Hopkins, who took up her position on 15 February 2006, will be responsible for overseeing UNHCR’sfield operations.

Erika Feller, anAustralian national, hasbeen appointed asUNHCR’s first everAssistant HighCommissioner forProtection. Ms Feller has more than 33 years of experience ininternational humanrights and refugee law, a field in which she is a widelyacknowledged authority. Her work has been publishedextensively in many refugee and international law journals. Duringher 19 years at UNHCR, she has served in a variety of capacities inthe Department of International Protection, most recently as itsDirector. She has also served as UNHCR’s Regional Representativefor Malaysia, Brunei and Singapore, and earlier as RegionalCoordinator for the Comprehensive Plan of Action for Indo-Chinese refugees in South-East Asia. Stressing that refugeeprotection is an obligation, not a choice, Ms Feller has pointed tosome sharp contrasts in the current era: “One of high rates ofvoluntary return and falling asylum numbers, but also ofprotracted refugee situations and waning generosity on the partof certain host states. Abuse of children, violence against women,refoulement of refugees and restriction of basic rights, such asfreedom of movement, are endemic in many displacementsituations.”

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Michel Paul MoussalliUNHCR’s former Director of International Protection MichelMoussalli died in Geneva on 13 January 2006, after a long illness. After joining UNHCR in 1961, Moussalli moved toTunisia where he organized the repatriation of Algerianrefugees to their newly independent homeland. Moving on toEthiopia, Moussalli played a key role in the preparation andadoption of the 1969 Organization of African Unity’s refugeeconvention. This was the first major legal agreement to explicitly extendrefugee recognition to people fleeing acts of external aggression, occupation or foreign domination. After a spell in Belgium, Moussalli becameUNHCR’s Director of Administration and Management and finally a popularand highly respected Director of International Protection. Moussalli devotedhis career to strengthening UNHCR’s protection mandate, visiting countriesworldwide to encourage their accession to the 1951 UN Refugee Convention.He retired in 1992 but returned briefly the following year to serve as ActingRepresentative in Algiers and in 1994 as UN Special Representative on the situation of human rights in Rwanda in the wake of the genocide.

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