Suzanne Harrington: All people fleeing war deserve help, no matter what they look like
People wait in the reception center for refugees from Ukraine at the main train station in Berlin, Germany at the weekend. Picture: Hannibal Hanschke/dpa via AP
As we watch helplessly the horror being meted out on ordinary people by a dictator-led military, have you noticed how this atrocity in Ukraine is being reported?
The Telegraph calls it “an attack on civilisation itself.” Its journalist writes, “They seem so like us….[Ukrainian] people watch Netflix and have Instagram accounts….War is no longer something visited upon impoverished and remote populations. It can happen to anyone.”
Then there’s CBS’s senior foreign correspondent, saying how “This isn’t a place like Iraq or Afghanistan…. [Kyiv] is a relatively civilised, relatively European city where you wouldn’t expect this to happen.”
On France’s BFM TV news channel, a journalist reminds us that “We’re not talking here about Syrians fleeing the bombing….we’re talking about Europeans leaving in cars that look like ours to save their lives.”
An ITV journalist says how “This is not a developing, third-world nation. This is Europe!” And Al Jazeera says: “Looking at them, the way they are dressed, these are prosperous middle-class people. They are not obviously refugees looking to get away from areas in the Middle East that are still in a big state of war.”
Hang on a sec. This is what an ‘obvious refugee’ looks like: frightened, fleeing, exhausted, terrified for their children, hungry, desperate for a safe place to sleep, to shower, to regroup. Trapped in the permanent present, unable to plan, all power and agency stripped away. Possibly grieving. Traumatised, in shock. Everything lost. Connections, culture, roots, status – all ripped up and ripped out.
Yet the reporting of the terrorising of Ukrainian people has been so openly racist towards those suffering in other war zones beyond Ukraine that the US-based Arab and Middle Eastern Journalists Association issued a statement, condemning and rejecting “racist implications that any population or country is ‘uncivilised’ or bears economic factors that make it worthy of conflict.”
This, says the association, “dehumanises and renders their experience with war as somehow normal and expected.” It’s pure tribalism.
And yes, humans are tribal by nature.
But the very use of the word ‘civilised’ is uncivilised. If ‘we’ up here in wealthy, white, blue-eyed Europe were genuinely ‘civilised’, we would not be using things like Instagram and Netflix as markers of civilisation and seeing their users, therefore, as more deserving of our help.
All people fleeing war are deserving of help, no matter where they are from, what they look like, what they drive, who they pray to, or what they have for dinner.
Being ‘civilised’ does not mean Starbucks and eBay. It does not mean traffic lights and trains that run on time – these are merely conveniences.
No, ‘civilised’ is when we see the suffering of others – all others, not just the ones that look like us – and reach out to help. Everyone. All refugees. Everywhere.
