On the Margins of the World

"I like his book very much, because it’s short and illustrates the situation of displaced people very well. Today we have 43 million people who are “forced displaced” in the world. Some of them are refugees, some of them are asylum seekers, some of them are stateless. The majority of them are internally displaced people. The majority of these people are in poor countries. We have only a minority – I think it’s about 20% – of all refugees in the world in Europe. The majority of refugees and “forced displaced” people are in poor and developing countries. And it’s cheap to keep them there. It costs only $1 per day per person to keep one refugee alive in a refugee camp in Kenya or in Sudan. But it costs a lot of money when they come here. An asylum process in Canada costs $25,000, so it’s very cheap to keep all these people over there, to put them in a refugee camp. This is why the situation of protracted refugees has become more important today. The average time of being a refugee – if it’s more than five years, it’s called “protracted”. In 1993 the average time of being a refugee was nine years. In 2006 it was 18 years. The time of being a refugee has doubled. We have a lot of people concentrated in refugee camps, without access to basic rights, without protection. They are raped and robbed, not only by bandits, but also by government soldiers. The choice is a life in hopelessness in these situations or to take a dangerous way to seek a future in the rich world. That is what this book is about. When we talk about refugees we talk about a legal category. States which sign the Refugee Convention have obligations on them to protect. It’s a very specific and defined category. It’s based on the UN Refugee Convention from 1951, and it’s very clear who can be regarded as a refugee and who cannot. Liisa Malkki, an American anthropologist, has a brilliant book about a refugee camp, Purity and Exile , about Hutu refugees in Tanzania. She writes about this in that book. She has a statement from a refugee who says, “We are educated to be refugees here”. Refugee camps train people to be refugees, to act like refugees. We created a model of the refugee which became a model for the refugee. A refugee camp is a place we put people we don’t want to have here. So we put them over there. We don’t want refugees, so we put them in camps. In this book Agier describes the role and function of refugee camps brilliantly, how refugee camps are spaces but not places. They are “outside” not only in terms of place and space, but also in terms of time. Imagine all these refugee camps in Kenya – there are hundreds of thousands refugees who have lived there more than 10 years. It’s like a small town, but it’s not recognised. It’s not mentioned on the map of Kenya. It’s not mentioned in the census. It’s not mentioned in official documents. So it’s outside our time. It’s not a place. It’s not hostile, but we look at the refugees as kids. We take the same approach with kids as with refugees. They don’t understand, they don’t know what to do, so we have to teach them. We have to teach them how to behave, how to do things. Of course it’s harmful. It’s harmful on the psychological level – that you reduce them, talking about adults who have their own history, their own life, and who survived a very dangerous journey, to treat them like kids. “Don’t do that, do this.” The same kind of violence people use against kids – when we try to make kids into better human beings sometimes we use violence, not physical violence always, but other kinds of violence – the same is true for refugees. The approach is almost a pathological approach. “Refugeeness” is like an illness. It’s very interesting when today we have a lot of people coming from Libya – every day we have hundreds of them coming – and how they are treated like sick people. All these border guards have gloves and protection on their mouths. It’s a very telling example of how we look at them, like they carry something dangerous in their bodies. In the Hollywood movie Men in Black , in the first scene of that movie when American border patrol harasses some Mexicans, a space alien comes out from the body of one of these border crossers. This is showing us the same thing, I guess."