Americans want to help refugees…

At a panel discussion on the global migration crisis held last week at Washington, DC’s Newseum, many of the questions from the audience requested practical guidance on how we Americans can help with resettlement. The panelists were less than totally able to answer these questions satisfactorily, a fact that captures at some level the vague cloud that surrounds the US refugee resettlement system. Indeed, an individual who has spearheaded refugee resettlement in New Haven, Connecticut, said in a forum several weeks earlier, run by the Episcopal Church, that when he launched his program, the US State Department advised him to operate “under the radar.” The authorities, it seems, fear that Americans who hear about refugees will be more inclined to push back against their arrival rather than roll up their sleeves to help.

A first step in changing this, according to the global charity Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), is to get the word out about the actual situation of refugees and displaced people worldwide. MSF devoted the past week to informing the people of Washington, DC about the realities of global migration. Timed tickets were available free of charge for a guided tour through an outdoor exhibit on the National Mall, close to the Washington Monument, where we were helped to understand through a number of hands-on re-enactments what it is like to be a refugee or displaced person.

My guide was a nurse from Connecticut in her sixties who has worked for MSF in South Sudan, Burundi and Tanzania and Afghanistan over the past fifteen years. She told us each to select items that we would take in an emergency evacuation. The options were pictured on laminated cards that we could carry with us on the tour. At each stage along our “journey” we were forced to choose one of the items we were carrying to give up for lack of space or sell in order to pay our way on the next stage of the journey. My five items were passport, family photos, medications, baby’s bottle, and water. The item I kept the longest was my passport. A number of my fellow travelers made the same choice. I have no idea whether this was a wise choice. My sense of randomness about it probably replicates the sense of randomness that overshadows most refugees as they try to make good choices hour by hour.

On our tour, we found ourselves in an inflated raft, squeezed closely so that twenty of us could just fit as we sat on the raised edges. Such a boat, we were told, would carry as many as sixty people from Libya or Turkey to Europe. Then we were shown a rudimentary refugee camp, including a latrine, the method by which people wash their hands after using the latrine in a place of water scarcity, and packets of dry peanut butter that can be easily distributed to nourish large numbers on the brink of starvation. In the next tent, a kind of clinic run by MSF, we saw how measles vaccines are kept cold without electricity and we viewed an efficient new malaria test instrument that can be administered to thousands in a single day. We learned the importance of cell phones – essential items for maintaining communication between scattered family members.

I learned that one of the main preoccupations of communities receiving refugees is how to ensure that refugee camps not become permanent dwelling places, in the way that the Palestinian camps have in Southern Lebanon and on the West Bank. Lebanon has not allowed official “camps” for Syrian refugees, so the 1.5 million Syrian refugees in Lebanon (now comprising one fifth of Lebanon’s population) are informally camped out in the Bekaa Valley, or renting patches of land closer to cities. The positive aspect of this approach is that the refugees become more integrated in the local economy, and Lebanese as well as refugees gain from the UN aid for the building of infrastructure. But 40 per cent of Syrian refugees in Lebanon live in temporary accommodation including garages, shacks and informal camps. They have little protection against the cold.

Deborah Amos of National Public Radio, who has recently taken up US refugee resettlement as her new “beat,” spoke at the Newseum of the dilemmas facing reporters who are getting the refugee story out. It is hard to find new things to say about a story that seems much the same from day to day. The goal is to humanize the situation, not get caught up in statistics. “You want to tell small stories rather than big stories.” You can focus on the tragedy, or you can focus on resilience. You can focus on the welcome offered from various countries, but you also describe countries that move from feeling welcoming to feeling threatened.

Most refugees are skilled people, middle class people, who expect to find places where they can charge their cell phones and use ATM cards. Instead of malnutrition, the diseases seen among refugees coming into Europe are chronic diseases, such as heart conditions. Today’s refugees prefer not to stay in camps: conflicts today are lasting longer than they used to, so refugees know they are not well advised to assume that they will get home soon.

And yet refugees resist becoming assimilated in their place of arrival, surely a sign that they have not given up the possibility of getting home one day. A matter for huge concern is that half of global refugees are children and two thirds of those children are not being educated, a situation that bodes ill for the future, and yet  Syrian refugees in Turkey resist sending their children to Turkish schools. They want their children to be taught in Arabic, not in Turkish. Initially some Arabic language schools for Syrians in Turkey were financed by the Arabic speaking diaspora, but over time these groups have run out of money.  One theory about why there was a surge in refugees from Turkey into Europe in fall 2015 is that the closure of these schools caused Syrian families to decide that Europe was the only place they would be willing to have their children educated.

A Dream Realized

The opening of Washington, D.C.’s new Museum of African American History and Culture on Saturday, September 24, occurring as it did in the same week as police shootings of black men in Tulsa and Charlotte, captured perfectly the mixture of grief and dignified struggle that has defined the African American story.

The juxtaposition was obvious to all.  We carried it inside us as we shared in the realization of a long-held dream to see the African American story honored in a central spot in our nation’s capital. President Obama underlined that the museum would not cure the racial ills of the United States. But, he said, the museum’s exhibits “can help us talk to each other, and more importantly listen to each other, and most importantly see each other.”

The new museum, with its distinctive architecture described by the New York Times as an “inverted ziggurat,” stands close to the familiar obelisk of the Washington Monument, within view of the site of Martin Luther King’s 1963 “I have a dream” speech and of the statue of Abraham Lincoln that provided King his setting,

The day of the museum inauguration was a day when we thought a lot about dreams. Many who spoke that day referenced the poem of Langston Hughes

What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
Like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore–
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over–
Like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?

Hughes spoke for African Americans in the twentieth century. In recent years a new swath of African American writers have eloquently confronted us with the continuing deferral of African Americans’ dignity in American society: Michelle Alexander (The New Jim Crow), Edward Baptist, (The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism), Ta-Nehisi Coates (Between the World and Me), Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy), Isabel Wilkerson (The Warmth of Other Suns). Black Lives Matter has gotten the word out about the kind of acts that have been rife ever since the ending of slavery but that have been treated with denial and callousness.

The opening of the museum was not so much an explosion as a jubilant acknowledgment that the African American story is and always was central to the American story. The ongoing struggles make that affirmation more meaningful, give it an edge, remind us that the battle for the world we aspire to is never won, is fought daily.

And somehow or other, I, and, I believe, many, many of us, felt drawn in last Saturday, knowing we were all part of this story. The story sends out a shaft of light that pierces our ongoing protections and defenses, that brings us alive, that teaches us what it means to love and engage.

Attending a concert of spirituals at Washington’s National Cathedral earlier in the week that was held in honor of the museum opening, I sat down beside a young black man and we introduced ourselves. “My name is Efram,” he said. “Pronounced like A-frame,” he added. I said my name was Margaret. The concert began, and I saw that Efram was looking up each of the songs on his i-phone so that he could follow the words. “Nobody knows the trouble I see,” “Take my hand, precious Lord,” “Swing low, sweet chariot, comin’ for to carry me home” – songs of resistance, of acknowledgement of deep emotions trampled, of separation of mothers and children, of exodus, of pleas for deliverance. When the audience was welcomed to join in, Efram shared his i-phone with me. It turned out that he had been born in Ethiopia. None of these songs was familiar to him, but he wanted to know them.  Leaning in towards each other, we sang the three verses of James Weldon Johnson’s “Lift every voice and sing, Till earth and heaven ring, Ring with the harmonies of Liberty,” reaching our heads higher for the crescendos as if we had been doing this together for all of time.

Book Review: David Rieff, In Praise of Forgetting

David Rieff is not the only writer discussing the current history-memory “boom” to propose that “forgetting” might have some social advantages over “remembering.” His book, In Praise of Forgetting, published earlier this year, is the most recent in a genre of literature that asks us to fine tune our assumptions that more knowledge of the past offers liberation or healing.

Reiff’s book is a complex reflection on matters of memory. Early in the book he cites Ecclesiastes 1:11 (“No one remembers the former generations, and even those yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow them”), alerting us to the possibility that all efforts to uphold memory and history imply an unfounded romanticism about the enduring value of the past.   But this is not Reiff’s real point, for he recognizes that human beings order their experience around memory and history, even if such efforts turn out to be shortlived.

Neither is Reiff questioning the importance of addressing war crimes in the immediate aftermath of conflict, especially crimes that were kept secret by a regime. That said, he recognizes that the longer the delay in revealing such secrets, the less satisfying is apology, or by implication, redress.

In arguing for less memory rather than more, Rieff underlines that ending impunity can sometimes have negative consequences, which, he says, is contrary to the message spread these days by the human rights establishment. His case in point is the Dayton agreement, ending the Bosnian war of 1992-1995. A “just” ending of the war would have meant prolonging the war. The decision to allow Bosnian Serbs to retain most of the territory of Bosnia and Herzegovina they had seized through “ethnic cleansing” was a recognition that the best was the enemy of the good: ending the war was a more important goal than achieving true justice.

Reiff’s main target is collective memory – the process by which groups assert social identification – and the romanticism and nostalgia that this has created in Israel, Sri Lanka, Bosnia, Northern Ireland and Armenia, to name a few. Collective memory is a product of social and political forces, and therefore is never a truly accurate rendition of what actually occurred in the past. Reiff argues that collective memory is usually false and often dangerous.

This argument pushes back against a late twentieth century tide of interest in collective memory that Rieff understands well. He captures the way that the Holocaust has elevated “memory” or “remembrance” to a form of justice. This is understandable in the face of an event where almost no justice in the legal sense of the word was possible.

Likewise, Rieff captures the way that the translation of Maurice Halbwach’s book Collective Memoryinto English from the original French in the 1980s provided new openings for exploration of the power of group memory in society.   Halbwachs’ book, first published in 1925, has been used to legitimize the validity of substate group identifications in an era when the power of the state to define national identity has been on the wane.

Rieff also captures the ongoing discussion about the difference between history and memory. Today memory, the living remembrances of individuals, has won the preferred position over history, the written record that remains after all who lived through the events have passed on. Thus story telling, even if not vetted for its objectivity or fact-based rendering, has moved center stage in current culture. And concerns about accuracy, whether in such movies as Selma and The Imitation Game, or even in some local history endeavors, have been reduced to second place.

In the face of conflicting tides and whirlpools of debate that feed the memory boom, Reiff cuts through the sentimentality about collective memory. The political purposes that hold memory hostage and the illusions that collective memory produces do indeed raise the question whether the caché currently accorded all memory is such a good thing. As Reiff proposes, in a number of cases Santayana’s aphorism that “those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it” may well have become displaced as a moral imperative by Nietzsche’s “active forgetting.”

But forgetting is not easy to bring about, especially in our era of democratized communication. Moreover, memory is an important source of meaning making in rapidly changing times such as those we live in. The question whether we can find a morality of memory to fit our age is one that Rieff only partially examines. He does not reference the literature of forgiveness or restorative justice. But he does propose that we cut through the cant in the exploration of this important area of human experience.

It could be that the rapid in which we live enlivens our interest in memory because we feel the need to anchor our sense of things and impose meaning on a world that challenges previous definitions. in the 1 believed that collective memory supported our hope for progress. Margalit expanded on this idea: memory, he said, allows us to hope that all is not meaningless.

Here it diverges somewhat from Reiff is.

In the peacebuilding world, we have long recognized the short term inter-relationship between peace and justice in post-war countries – that more of one implies less of the other. Another aphorism that reigns in post-conflict peacebuilding is that one the long term you cannot have true and lasting peace without justice. This latter proposition, argues David Rieff, comes from the human rights community, whose endeavors are framed with reference to the law. The call for justice is a call for remembering, to the point that remembrance is at often synonymized with justice. And certainly, in the immediate aftermath of war crimes, justice cannot be side-stepped.

But Reiff raises the question whether the human rights community has served us well.

Calais Jungle

Switzerland, July 22, 2016

Yesterday, while attending a forum on European migration issues, I learned that in the town of Calais on France’s northwest coast, a growing shanty-town known as Calais Jungle populated by migrants and asylum seekers, now has a population of 7,300 and is likely to reach 10,000 by September. This deteriorating situation in Calais, not widely known in the U.S., cries out for attention, if only to allow those of us living at a distance to sense the shocking and heart-rending tensions and contradictions still surrounding Europe’s refugee/migrant crisis.

Calais, best known to the Anglophone world as the entry point into continental Europe via the Channel Tunnel, is a gathering place for refugees and migrants who have set their hopes on getting to the UK. Camps of this kind have been forming in Calais since the early 1990s. They have been set up on unoccupied land, using tents and other temporary shelter, moving to new locations when the French authorities close them. Last year this particular camp grew significantly. By April 2015, it had acquired, for the first time, showers, toilets and electricity. Charities have been providing one meal a day.

Because the UK is not party to the Schengen agreement for free movement of people in Europe, the UK is not legally required to allow entry to these people. Nor are they likely to get asylum in the UK as refugees, since they have already been living in France for some time, and therefore can no longer make a case that they are unsafe. But these people do not want to give up on the dream of getting to Britain, where many already have family members, and where they believe their chances of getting jobs are better than in France. The current population includes over six hundred children not accompanied by an adult, many of whom are waiting to be reunited with family members in the UK.

Frequently inhabitants attempt to board trucks or trains entering the Tunnel. One man recently walked almost the entire 31 miles of the tunnel, with freight trains rushing past him inches away, only to be arrested shortly before his arrival on the British side, and forced to return to France.  Just one month ago the port of Calais was forced to close for a time when migrants took to the streets, erecting barriers in the road in order to slow down vehicles heading for the tunnel so that they could board them. Police dispersed the migrants with tear gas.

The alternative to going to the UK for these people is to request asylum in France, but these migrants regard that step as giving up on better possibilities in the UK.

Left wing groups, including Jeremy Corbyn, embattled head of the British Labour Party, have been lobbying the British government to let in a good number of the migrants.  British who want to demonstrate their compassion for the Calais situation have mobilized an aid convoy for the refugees, but French authorities have blocked its departure from Dover, the port town on the British side of the Tunnel. This policy arises from French recognition that anything they do to improve the lot of the inhabitants of the camp is likely to encourage more people to come.

France seems unable to find a means effectively to disperse these people, even though conditions in the camp are unsanitary and crowded. In February of this year, a court in Lille allowed the Calais police to evict 1,000 migrants from the camp. But since the February evictions, the numbers have grown even greater. The authorities have brought 125 shipping containers into the shanty-town as a form of temporary housing for 1500 people. Permanent buildings are not possible because of the sandy soil.

The news site infowars.com reported in January 2016 that the French Army is making contingency plans for the “reappropriation of national territory,” in case these groups acquire weapons and become more hostile to authorities.

The situation presents the French authorities with a terrible dilemma.  Let’s fervently hope they can find a way out of this before the law of the jungle has its way.