It was one of my first shifts back at work and everyone was lamenting the tragedy of the Paris terror attacks, when one colleagues turned to me and said, “I hope it wasn’t one of the people you helped through Greece that did it.” Everyone stopped and stared at me, but I couldn’t look back. I was gazing at the ground, appalled and reeling. After a few seconds I said: “refugees aren’t terrorists; they’re trying to escape from places where attacks like that happen every day.”
***
I had been travelling through the Balkans with my friends, Alex and Clodagh, when we made the crossing from Turkey to the Greek island, Chios. After a day spent at beaches, we arrived at the local ferry terminal. We had time to kill.
Amongst the crying families and old Greek men playing cards, we sat down to swap stories with a fellow traveller – Amjad. He was a third year medicine student from Syria, who was hoping to finish his training in Sweden. In flawless English (learnt from spaghetti Westerns and Hollywood sitcoms) he told us both about the suffering of his country and the future he hoped to build.
Another man joined our table with a friendly smile, a few words of English and a plate of chips. Through translation over three languages we learnt he was a civil engineer who hoped to seek asylum in Germany. After two hours of warmth and hospitality in the crowded ferry terminal our newfound friends had to depart. It was then that I felt all our preconceptions about refugees, our very plans for our trip, unravelling irreversibly.
We left the terminal in this state of mind and stumbled across a refugee camp in the park. Tacked to a wooden shed we saw children’s drawings, depicting sunrises and rainbows over an open road, and others of mutilated bodies, machine guns and bombs. I didn’t really feel like speaking to anybody, but in this refugee ghost town two figures approached us. They were local volunteers who told us about the desperation of the people, of what they were doing to help, of how it didn’t feel like enough.
The next day we went to Lesvos, an island paradise now the scene of a humanitarian crisis. Instead of the planned trajectory of my Europe trip, I spent the last weeks preparing food for refugees who had just made the deadly crossing over the Aegean in inflatable boats.
***
Nothing could have been more shocking then to hear a colleague say: “I hope it wasn’t one of the people you helped through Greece that did it.” Later in the discussion, she added: “I think we should just bomb them all.”
Despite seeming abhorrent and counterproductive, these opinions are horrifyingly common in Australian discourse on refugees and terrorism. They express the reactionary, right-wing myth of refugees as waves that need to be contained by Western military forces, lest they flood civilisation. It is worth noting that ISIS propaganda is laden with similar invader rhetoric, where Western militaries are the “Crusader coalition against the Muslims.”
A Syrian passport was found by the body of one of the attackers. Yet, does this justify my colleague’s suspicions that refugees are infiltrators of civilisation, who threaten to rent it asunder?
The passport has turned out to be fake and the remainder of the identified attackers were European citizens. A journey on a Syrian passport is marginally safer, but they are all perilous, which begs the question: why would ISIS send an operative through this way (or pretend to), when they have 1400 members that are French nationals?
Perhaps to foster xenophobia, the staple diet of reactionary nationalists such as ISIS, or, on the Australian side, their supposed opponents like the Australian First Party and the United Patriots Front.
If ISIS intentionally used a Syrian passport to demonise Syrians and other refugees then they have already been partially successful. Right-wing media and political parties are demanding closed borders, and Poland is considering withdrawing the pledges made by its previous government to take several thousand Syrians. But closed border policies will not reduce suffering, or terrorism. If anything, the cruelty and ineptitude of Western intervention in the Middle East will increase suffering and terrorism, if the history of the last 35 years is anything to go by.
***
This brings me back to my work colleague’s second point: “we should just bomb them all.” Chomsky’s words are pertinent here: “Everybody’s worried about stopping terrorism. Well, there’s a really easy way: stop participating in it.”
Since the world is in a frenzy over ISIS, it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider how they initially formed.
ISIS, ‘the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria’, was born from Al-Qeada, an abbreviated translation of “the database” in Arabic. According to former British Foreign secretary Robin Cook, this referred to a database of thousands of Islamic extremists, trained to fight Russian forces in Afghanistan by none other than the CIA at the height of the Cold War. Many of these trained and armed groups turned against the USA in this time but returned to their home countries after the war.
Despite the supply of arms and training to extremist militia, Iraq remained a peaceful country – that is, until the first gulf war in 1990. Following from this the US and the UK used their influence to impose massive trade embargoes on Iraq in a failed attempt to remove Saddam Hussein’s regime. According to UNICEF, the outcome of this was the death of over 500,000 Iraqi children, who could not receive clean water, food or medication. Even after this was revealed, the Australian Wheat Board remained the largest provider of kickbacks to Saddam’s regime, securing lucrative wheat contracts in exchange for oil in the notorious ‘Oil-For-Food’ program.
Since then, the West has bombed, invaded and occupied Iraq in the name of Western democracy. It has been arbitrarily supplying and training extremist cells in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and elsewhere. It’s no coincidence that these three countries are producing the greatest number of refugees, caught between the crushing rock of ISIS’s beheadings, mass executions and tortures and the hard place of autocratic governments, climate change and “targeted Western interventions.” It should be clear from this that refugees are in serious need of support; that they are not terrorists, and that increased bombings are not going to fix their (or our) problems.
ISIS are armed, highly ideological and now control a territory the size of the UK. They should be taken seriously, but not in the manner that suits the political elite or reactionary portions of the population – that is, by demonising refugees and Muslims. Waleed Aly beautifully put it in his address ‘ISIL is Weak’ on The Project: the marginalisation and demonization of Muslims is exactly what ISIS want. They are promoting ‘holy war’, in an egomaniacal attempt to force an apocalyptic confrontation between Islam and the Western world. It does not appear to bother them that they are killing more people from their professed recruitment pool than any other religious group.
Meanwhile, the right-wing political elite of the West continues to use perceived threats of terror to justify the violence of the state as well as the increased surveillance and targeting of minorities. The left needs to rise to this occasion and show that empathy and support to minority groups is not simply the humane thing to do – it is the only approach that will help to heal a festering wound. When the Australian Federal government announced ‘Operation Fortitude’, an initiative to randomly ask people for their visas in the streets of Melbourne, hundreds of people mobilised, forcing the government and Victorian police to retract the operation. While this kind of mobilisation was no doubt a powerful demonstration of such solidarity, the question remains: How can the left de-escalate the war mongering, anti-refugee rhetoric more broadly?
Understanding the history of Western imperialism and colonialism means understanding our complicity in creating the conditions that force refugees from their homelands. Presenting the untold histories of the rise of radicalism in the Middle East is important but not sufficient to develop a more humanitarian, sensible refugee and terrorism policy. The anxiety felt by three quarters of Australians towards ISIS inspired terror in the wake of Paris is currently a tool of reaction. However it could become a window to empathy and solidarity if people realise this anxiety is only a taste of the incarnate terror experienced by people living with the daily threat of autocracies, Western imperialism and radical fundamentalism.
***
We live in a time of unprecedented safety and material comfort, yet we seem to be more afraid than ever. This is a situation that has been manufactured, which suits the political elite, and right-wing nationalists. I do not believe that the majority of Australians are viciously racist, despite a protracted and violent colonisation process and abominable refugee policies. Our collective memory of the suffering we have wrought on other people may be poor, but we can ultimately offer sanctuary from, rather than perpetrate institutionalised violence. What shocked me, then, about my colleague’s comments was not simply that they portrayed obliviousness to the history of the West’s involvement in the Middle East. It was handing out hot meals in Lesvos – brief and humbling as it was – that made me leave the stigmas I was taught behind.
