Jamil F. Khan | How geopolitics spawns refugees and reduces humanity to abjection

The state of geopolitics currently inspires many panicked debates about resources, economies, and governance. Many of these debates are framed in terms of the cost to institutions and markets, the demise of which we are told must be avoided at all costs. These precious institutions, which for centuries have sacrificed the well-being of the people whose labour makes them run, are often made a priority for saving while the human cost of geopolitics is deemed par for the course.

This cost, which is most painfully realised through mass killing, is also seen in the creation of multiple migration crises, turning citizens into refugees. The status of refugee, when assigned to people, is almost always perceived as a state of abjection.

Nowhere in the world are refugees treated well, especially when they are not white. Wherever people arrive in need of help, the logics of boundary maintenance inherent in the concept of the modern nation state are mobilised to create divisions that let refugees know they are outsiders living on the mercy of their hosts, for which they must be unconditionally grateful. Ironically, most people do not identify with nationality significantly on an everyday basis, until they need to assert themselves as more worthy of resources, and more important than refugees, whose outsiderness is seen as a threat. This kneejerk reaction to a perceived threat overlooks the humanity of people forced into refugee status too swiftly.

When exploring writing on experiences of refugees, the most prevalent theme is always a clear statement highlighting how long most people take to leave their homelands, and when they do, it is with great regret that lingers as a longing to return that never goes away. As poet Warsan Shire reminds us in her poem Home: Nobody leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark. People do not want to be forced out of their homes, and certainly do not want to start their lives over at the very bottom of a new social order as pariahs.

Refugees are often seen as pitiful characters and charity cases, but Writer Khaled Hosseini reminds us in his book The Kite Runner that in their home countries, they were often prominent, respected members of society. They are doctors, professors, community leaders, artists, successful businesspeople and all other iterations of people contributing to the advancement of their societies. Some were even wealthy members of those societies.

When reduced to “refugee” in host countries, people are forced to survive in impossible circumstances through lowly paid, menial work designated for the most disrespected and overlooked. The refugee car guards, cleaners and cooks we cannot even muster eye contact with were people of importance in their home countries. They are the people who would be called to help us if we were injured or otherwise in trouble while visiting their countries. They did not ever imagine they would be the objects of disgust and irrelevance in a foreign land.

With the volatility of current geopolitics caused largely by the USA, Israel and the UAE, statehood and belonging for many is temporary. As a country of people who know too well what happens when home becomes the mouth of a shark, our compassion for refugees should be a given. As a country of people who know how quickly statehood can be dissolved by colonial invasion, our understanding of refugees here or anywhere should be unwavering, lest we have forgotten our own suffering under such conditions. It takes a special kind of cognitive dissonance for us to look down on refugees wherever they live, considering how recently we celebrated the return of those exiled by the apartheid government.

Looking ahead, all of us need to rethink our ideas of nation and belonging when national sovereignty is so severely under threat by colonial powers, yet again expanding their reach into territories already disempowered by an unfair global order, set up to ruthlessly extract resources of the global majority and kneecap the economies that produce those resources. Under these conditions, human communities need to pull together across manufactured divides and reject the inhumanity we are being cajoled into by political powers hellbent on exploiting divisions for the advancement of their political ambitions.

On a more personal note, closer to home, South Africa’s precarious relations with the USA, egged on by false claims of white genocide amongst Afrikaners, has placed us in danger with an unhinged colonial power whose idea of diplomacy is sensationalism. Not only does it threaten our security under conditions where invasion is an ever-present threat across the world, but it makes a mockery of the very real suffering endured by refugees driven out of their homelands by war and genocide. While these antics are nothing but the protestations of petulant, entitled people unable to relinquish their historical privilege, they cannot be dismissed as insignificant.

The status of refugee is not to be taken lightly, and to treat it as a political tool signals a kind of recklessness that could result in any of us legitimately becoming the refugees we feel superior to. If such circumstances befall us, we can only hope that our plight may yet again be treated with kindness and compassion. We will need the doors we try to close on others to be opened to us, yet again. Our short memories of our own suffering serve only to harden us in times when we, in our communities, need to be softer towards each other.

Where our hard anger and indignation should be directed is towards the failing leadership that has let us down through disrespecting our history and muddying our memories. Our only way forward to a bearable life is softness, with the most vulnerable amongst us, that allows us to build connections that mobilise us to hold the power that constrains us accountable.

This is not the time to turn inward to individualist aspirations of occupying power to further oppress our neighbours, but to turn to each other and recognise how we are all being deceived into compromising our collective humanity.

Dr Jamil F. Khan is an award-winning author, doctoral critical diversity scholar, and research fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study.