WHO PRODUCES REFUGEES?
A lot has been said in this publication about how "Fortress Europe" is being built and how its repressive concept affects law and practice throughout Europe. Yet, only few contributions have dealt with the question, why all this happens. In your editor's view, a regular and genuinely interdisciplinary exchange of views on precisely this question is a precondition for understanding a process threatening constitutional democracy at its roots and for finding ways out of a development that ever more resembles a vicious circle. Jurists alone will not do the job. With the following contribution by Kenneth Hermele, an economist and researcher at Uppsala University (Sweden), we hope to open a necessary broader debate among our readers.In recent years it has become ever more difficult to make use of commonly established definitions of who is to be called a refugee. The quite obvious cases where persons are directly threatened as a result of their political convictions, their religion, language or ethnic origin are regulated by international law and conventions on refugees. But these political refugees, in the classical sense of the word, have been joined by more diffuse categories, usually named - somewhat disparagingly - economic refugees. They are widely seen as people simply seeking a better life and sometimes out for taking advantage of our welfare systems.
Yet, as a matter of fact, making a distinction between various categories makes ever less sense, as all refugees are political in that they flee from the consequences and effects of a certain policy. A change has ocurred in so far as previously it was natural catastrophes or local repressive regimes that forced people to flee, whereas nowadays many refugees are forced out of their home countries by policies dictated by the Western countries. The role of the West in producing refugee fluxes has increased during the 80s. This evolution is closely linked to the debt crisis, which resulted in a shift of power towards the creditors. The indebted countries had little other choice than bowing to the demands of the prosperous West. This is true not only for the indebted countries in the Third World, but also for Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Let us therefore take a closer look at the various kinds of refugees that can be distinguished today.
Debt crisis and refugee fluxes
Economic refugees are produced each and every day as in indebted developing and Eastern European countries. The debitor countries are forced by their creditors to implement brutal austerity programmes in order to "save" themselves out of the crisis.
This policy usually strongly affects social sectors such as education and health and deepens poverty, above all in urban areas. At the same time, the indebted countries are pressed to deduct an ever growing part of their resources for paying interests to the prosperous part of the world.
As aconsequence, the amount of money spent during the 80s in both Latin America and Africa for interest payments on the one hand and for health and education budgets together on the other was the same.
Teachers, nurses and employees of the public sector are the first to suffer, together with workers, when real income dwindles as a result of devaluation and when public welfare is downgraded.
The downfall of communism and the triumphal march of democracy in Eastern Europe - quite paradoxically - is leeding to a development that threatens to resemble the situation in the indebted Third World. Eastern Europe too is indebted, and the entry ticket for debt rescheduling aid and new credits by the West consists in that the states accept that their economic policies be dictated by the creditors - just as in the developing countries. And in Eastern Europe too the prescription consists of austerity programmes and the liquidation of public welfare. Therefore - and this is where the paradoxon lies - freedom and democracy in Eastern Europe could well be accompanied by ever more people fleeing - from poverty and unemployment. According to estimates within the EC one must reckon with between 1 and 2 million refugees per annum from Eastern Europe in the years to come. This is a number four times higher than all refugees coming to Europe, before the Yugoslav crisis.
This scenario comprises the risk for the democratic period in Eastern Europe to be short-lived. Indeed, what sense does democracy make, when you cannot even afford to eat your fill? Many are asking the same question in Latin America's and Africa's new democracies. If democracy does not get a human face, the door will be wide open for populist and demagogical movements of all sorts, for "strong men" offering simple solutions to complex problems. The step into a new despotism could therefore prove to be a short one and in that event the West can be sure to be confronted with a rising wave of refugees of the classical political kind.
Environmental refugees too are created as a consequence of the debt crisis in the developing countries (Eastern Europe organised its ecological collapse on its own). In close correlation with their call for austerity, the creditors usually enforce force a ruthless committment to the export of agricultural products, forestry products, and minerals. This leads to an increased use of chemicals in farming and extensive destruction of forestsand poisoning of soils on and around the mining sites.
The economic result is that the Third World's raw materials are sold cheaper and cheaper on the world market, a fact that obviously does not contribute to solve the debt crisis but on the contrary maintains the developing countries in their state of dependence and submission. No wonder that many in the developing countries bitterly remark that the more they export, the poorer they get.
The industrial countries are also producing environmental refugees by another way. Indeed, most of the global pollution has its origins in the North. The greenhouse effect is an example: most of the destructive gases originate from the prosperous part of the world. In Bangladesh and Egypt maps are drawn on which parts of these countries will be flooded if the greenhouse effect leads to a half-meter or one meter rise of the sea level. Will 10, 20 or 50 million people be forced to seek refuge? There is a real risk that the total number of refugees world-wide could be suddenly doubled.
Already now the World Watch Institute sets the number of environmental refugees at 10 million, world-wide.
Finally, development refugees have been forced to flee from the catastrophic effects of missled aid and "development" policies. The term is most frequently used in relation to dam construction projects, e.g. in India and Brazil. Hundreds of thousands of people are forced to leave their homes, as fertile soils are drowned.
The World Bank alone is for the time being financing some 70 dam construction projects, which will lead to the displacement of 1.5 million people.
Concurring factors
The destruction of forests is a telling example of how various of the above-named factors concur in a fatal way. Partly, the issue is a ruthless exploitation of rain forests by large trans-national companies' in search of fine woods. With every exportable some thirty trees are cut without commercial value. But rain forests are also destroyed by poor peasants driven away from their farms by governments acting on behalf of export-oriented great landowners.
However, two thirds of deforestation in the Amazonas region occurs for making space for cattle-breeding ranches for export of meat to North America. By this last form of exploitation, the soil becomes sterile within a few years - all for the sake of getting hard currency which will end up in international banks and credit institutes.
Responsibility denied
In the prosperous industrial countries largely accountable for this situation, the debate is cynical. A 1991 Swedish governmental inquiry, for instance, disdainfully blames the "refugee producing countries" - i.e. the refugees' home countries - for the refugee problem. No mention is made of the creditor countries responsibility for producing refugee fluxes.
Thereby the prosperous industrialised countries confirm a pattern behind most of wars in the Third World - the maybe most common reason for people to flee: the weapons used in Third World conflicts are sold by the industrialised countries, especially by the five permanent member states of the Security Council. These countries account for at least eight tenths of the weapons sold to the Third World.
The wasteful way of life
The appropriate conclusion to be drawn from the correlation between the policy of industrialised countries and the increasing number of refugees from the Third World and Eastern Europe is obvious: a fundamental change of policy in the industrialised countries is a precondition for preventing the emergence of ever more refugees. This conclusion holds for the collection of debts as well as the West's modell of wasteful and unlimited growth.
But for precisely this topic the rich part of the world has shown little interest. This became particularly visible at the UN Conference on environment in Brasil, in June 1992. Former US president George Bush's statement on the eve of the conference, that the American way of life was "not negotiable", is a spectacular demonstration of this attitude.
The American way of life comprises the right to consume 52 kilos of resources per person and day - oil, food, raw materials, finished products, etc., while an Indian or African peasant will have to do with 2 kilos a day. When considering also the time since the USA has introduced its way of life, the difference becomes even greater. Every US citizen bears a historical liability of 260 tons of carbon dioxide per person against six tons per person accountable for in India. Hence the US liability is fourty times higher.
Not either in Western Europe can we imagine a fundamental change of our way of life. This becomes obvious when we propose to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases and carbon dioxide to the level of 1990 (!) by the year 2000. This certainly is no no qualitative difference compared with the provocative US statement of "non-negotiability".
The prosperous societies are simply unwilling to share the world's resources with the poor. Instead, the rich part of the world derisively offers the indebted countries to take care of its waste.
An indefensible model of growth
When one gets to the bottom of the logic behind this reasoning about ways of life it becomes evident that the wealthy part of the world cannot permit the Third World to develop - if by development we mean becoming like ourselves. There exists a threat against the global environment that is more serious than poverty, a threat worse than underdevelopment - and that is development as we understand it. Should the Third World develop as we have, this would result in global environmental problems and in unforeseeable collapses of ecosystems. Our "non-negotiable" way of life would be wiped out by storms and floods and bleached away by cancerigenous sun rays.
Thus, maintaining this way of life is not only unjust, but also shortsighted, because - even if it may take one or two more generations - it will end in self-destruction.
To jealously guard a system of abundance that cannot be extrapolated to the rest of the world also contributes to the making of refugees trying to make their way to the forbidden paradise. Our only response, so far, consists in closing our doors. With high walls and more police we want to keep out the rest of the world from our societies of abundance. But by doing so, we are also step by step turning our system of open democracy into a policed fortress. This dramatically affects our way of life.
The "closed door"-policy will, however, not succeed against people who have no other choice than going West. It only leads to an increase of illegal immigration. Already today the number of illegal immigrants is estimated at 1 million in Italy and half a million in France.
It would obviously be more appropriate to change the policy that creates refugees, i.e the policy we are imposing on the indebted countries and our own ruthless waste of resources. This would be the only way for contributing to a solution of the refugee issue, instead of further contributing to the problem.
Kenneth Hermele
This contribution is the slightly abridged English translation of "Vem skapar flyktingar?", an article drawn from the book "Miljoner på flykt" (Millions on flight), edited by Elisabeth Abiri and published by World House Papers, Gothenburg, 1992. Contact: K.Hermele, Kyrkogårdsvägen 145, S-122 35 Enskede (Sweden).