Being a refugee, too, in a world that has made all of us "foreigners"

If what has happened recently in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya, Egypt, Kashmir and Myanmar has not reminded us enough, what has happened in Ukraine should have woken us to our reality: we are all refugees in this world. Both potentially, because we do not know what will befall us in this treacherous world, and because each of us in our near, middle or distant past surely rests on a migration, an asylum.

On the other hand, what is the world we live in, in essence, other than a great exile that makes everyone a “stranger”?

Modernity can be seen, in one respect, as the name of a social mobility that makes everyone a migrant. Such a definition points at first glance to the central place, in the sociality of our age, of the phenomenon of migration that has occurred on a global scale with modernity. Indeed, the reality that most determines the world we live in today is a dizzying mobility on a global scale. A very large part of the world’s population, in ever-increasing numbers, for economic reasons, for education or for one reason or another, leaves the places where they were born and carries on life in a new place of settlement; and a very significant part does not remain permanently in the second place either but turns to the search for a new one. Frankly, the world we live in is being dragged toward a scatteredness in which it seems almost impossible for anyone to die where they were born.

Of course, this situation expresses only the geographical appearance of the mobility in question. In this respect, throughout human history very great migrations, very great social mobilities, wars, powerful social organizations and so on have always fed people’s social mobility. Today we can speak of this mobility having become settled in such a way as to characterize a social structure and a historical situation. Yet we must still not forget that a person’s not dying where he was born, as one of the truest conditions of human existence on earth, is a condition as old as human history. However, when we speak of a modernity that has made all of us migrants, we are speaking of a somewhat different situation. Apart from the terrifying speed added to geographical mobility, the mobility whose way is opened in cultural and mental layers is undoubtedly of dimensions that cannot be compared with the past.

Without doubt, while the event of migration itself gives modernity its real content, tearing people from certain roots, places, times and spaces and leaving them to themselves, on the other hand modernity itself has brought about a radical change in the nature of the event of migration. This change can be expressed, at the very least, by a cultural situation in which who is a migrant and who is native has become thoroughly “ambiguous,” and in which indeed such a question no longer has any meaningful answer.

Of course, the state of being left homeless through asylum has an altogether separate place within all this mobility. Until reaching this ambiguity, which from one angle can be regarded as a rehabilitation, it is undoubtedly an experience lived with great suffering. The purpose of pointing here to humanity’s common condition and experience is to set in motion an empathy for the situation of the asylum seeker. Because an asylum seeker is frequently reminded, if not by everyone then even by a few people, that he is “a stranger” where he is, he is forced to live constantly with two personalities within himself. Like the black man under Apartheid whom Frantz Fanon depicts in “Black Skin, White Masks”… To be torn from one’s homeland is like that. It is not changing place; it is being left homeless. The way to compensate for this is of course a virtuous politics. To see the asylum seeker as Muhajir is to be Ansar to him.

There are those who are in a far worse condition than what we encounter today, who, because no one hears them, continue to live their worst conditions as a fate, who under those bad conditions, their hopes for humanity exhausted as well, continue to live having accepted and become inured to the situation, the wretched of the earth.

The jet-black, emaciated, placeless and homeless, identity-less, houseless, shelterless, voiceless and ownerless children of Asia, who live in Myanmar and are subjected to open discrimination only because they are Muslim. One million of the Arakanese, who since 1970, only because they are Muslim, have been refused citizenship in their own homeland, have been driven from their homeland through systematic attacks. 40,000 people were burned alive in fires, tens of thousands were massacred with firearms or knives, even the makeshift huts in which they took shelter were burned. Their women and children were raped.

These systematic attacks have continued since 1970, but in recent years the matter has reached the dimensions of a full genocide. The Arakanese who in the seventies were forced to take refuge in countries such as Pakistan, Bangladesh and Saudi Arabia still have no citizenship documents even in these countries, and though they work far harder than everyone else in order to hold on, they cannot hold on.

Unfortunately, the Arakanese have neither co-religionists who would embrace and accept them saying “these are of our religion,” nor kinsmen who would claim them saying “these are of our race.”

In my view we need to begin thinking by way of this lowest example of asylum. Both in order to give thanks for our condition and, of course, in order to become aware of the whirlpool into which our world order that gives rise to asylums and our discriminating understandings among refugees draw humanity.

Let us too not be forgotten, on account of those of us who have grown inured to, and set aside and forgotten, an oppression that, were a thousandth of it done to us, would make our lives a dungeon.