Refugee Week has been overshadowed by stories of harsh new laws, reports of government misbehaviour, and silence from government ministers.
For those who care about refugees it is a chastening time – one for looking at the world around us, focusing on how people seeking protection live and die, thrive and wither in it, for studying what needs to be done, what can be done, and for gathering companions in the task. It is a time also for keeping in mind and passing on the story of what has been done.
Refugee Week invites us to attend to the forced movements of people through the world, the conflicts that make them flee, under what conditions they live in their flight, where they go, and who offers them help and who torments them. It enables us to set the small flow of people to our region and our Australian response to it in its larger perspective.
It invites us, too, to recognise that the movement of peoples across borders is not like the flow of capital or trade of goods across borders. It involves human beings, all with their own face, their own story, their own hopes and their own relationships to land and to other people.
It invites us to enter imaginatively into the human consequences of the working out of policy – the anguish of a pregnant mother suddenly removed from relative security, the fate of her future child, the frustration of a young man held in indefinite detention. Refugee week reminds us that refugees are not the objects of policy. They are subjects who feel, long, rage and love. It is a time for compassion.
This is a time to ask if there is a better way. In Australia, refugees are on the nose, whether they be Muslim Australians who arrived as refugees, or people who have more recently come by boat. It is a time to look beyond this crabbed little world to imagine a polity in which states cooperate to change the conditions that force refugees to flee, in which states involved in conflicts take responsibility for the welfare and the settlement of people who flee the warfare, in which states cooperate to receive and process people’s claims for protection.
It is also a time to move from helpless unease at what is being done in our land to ask what we can do. Many people provide food and clothing for indigent