“No one leaves home unless home is the mouth of a shark,” begins the famous poem Home by Warsan Shire, “You only run for the border when you see the whole city running as well.”
These words were brought to life this week when the world watched the terrifying images of desperation faced by people in Afghanistan after the Taliban swept into power at a dizzying pace. People were seen running after planes at the Kabul airport, some trying to climb on board, clinging to the wheels as the planes rose to the skies. Newscasters were filmed crying on air, pleading with the international community to not stand by idly while the country falls under the same brutal regime which persecuted opposition, minorities and women 20 years ago. The fear has been real and palpable to anyone paying attention.
"You have to understand," Shire continues in her poem, "that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land." It doesn’t take much imagination to shift these words slightly to say, "no one climbs the wheels of an aeroplane unless the land is less safe than the sky".
The possibility of a vast humanitarian crises with hundreds of thousands of people becoming forcibly displaced has quickly become a reality as the Taliban seized power last week. Countries throughout the world began pledging numbers of asylum seekers they would accept, with the US, UK and other NATO members hastily attempting to evacuate Afghans who worked alongside the military and are now feared to be targets of revenge. The US Pentagon announced they will attempt to evacuate 3,000-5,000 Afghans per day who worked alongside US troops. Canada, Albania and Uganda are among countries that have pledged to accept asylum seekers, even India has cautiously said they will create emergency visas for religious minorities coming from the country.
Most of the time, as we are currently seeing in Afghanistan, borders become closed and militarized to those who are trying to cross them.
This is how the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees was written. It mandates countries to recognize exceptions to their national sovereignty and accept non-citizens who qualify for international protection. Specifically, someone must prove they are unable to return to their country of origin because of a "well-founded fear of persecution due to race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion." Included in the treaty is the right for asylum seekers to not be punished for entering that country illegally in the first place.
Afghans represent one of the largest and longest-lasting refugee populations in the world. They have been fleeing the country since the Taliban’s brutal rule from 1996-2001 and continued to seek asylum countries during the US-led invasion and subsequent 20-year democratic transition. In Europe, Afghans have represented the second-largest group of asylum-seekers after Syrians, with more than 570,000 applicants since 2015. The majority of these applicants have had their asylum applications rejected, and flights of those being involuntarily returned to Afghanistan reportedly stopped only on August 3rd, 2021. Two days after these flights stopped, six EU nations including Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands and Austria reportedly wrote a letter to the European Commission encouraging flights to resume immediately, given that Afghanistan "will continue to be a significant source of irregular migration" to the EU.
In the same breath, Afghans who are called "refugees" in need of protection are the same people called "illegal" or "irregular" by countries across the world.
Oxford professor Guy Goodwin-Gil states that the original intention of the 1951 Refugee Convention was to address the rights of Europeans who fled during the second world war. At the time, it did not cover mass displacements of people in the rest of the world, including those during partition in India in 1947, arguably still considered the largest mass movement of people in history with some 15 million people displaced almost instantaneously. The treaty has not been updated since 1967 and most believe it is outdated and insufficient to manage the now unprecedented number of people who seek refuge. Notably, some countries – including the US – are party to only a portion of the treaty, and others – such as India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the latter two which currently host the world’s largest refugee populations from Myanmar and Afghanistan– are not signatories at all.
"Who has the right to have rights?" asked Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt in her exposé about refugees in The Origins of Totalitarianism. Well, according to the refugee law, that’s debatable. The vast scale of inconsistencies in the interpretation and implementation of this supposed common law has created an almost impossibly imbalanced global system of protection. Decision-makers within each country have the discretion to approve or deny a case, so an Afghan seeking asylum in Denmark might be denied refugee status and deported, while right next door in Sweden they might be accepted and given full rights of a citizen.
While there is no quick fix to the global refugee crises, there is a need for more pressure on individual governments to recognize that all people should have the right to have rights.
Kelsey LeBrun Keswani is the co-founder of RAIN (Refugee Assistance and Information Network). Currently, she is a PhD candidate for migration studies at Institute of Social Sciences University of Lisbon, Portugal
