When we reduce people to statistics we stop hearing their voices.
The theme of Refugee Week (14-20 June) this year is ‘A million stories’. It fits in with the yearly refugee statistics. Numbers do not look at the humanity of refugees but only count them. When only counted, refugees easily cease to be seen as people but become things for which policies need to be made.
Anne Frank, a young Jewish woman who died in the Nazi persecution of Jews under Hitler, described refugees as like parcels that are bundled up and sent from one post office to another. Refugees were voiceless and did not dare to be noticed. Only later was the voice preserved by Anne Frank in her diary and the voices of other Jewish people in the ghettos heard. They made the Western world resolve, Never Again!
The latest refugee statistics remind us that refugees are again forced from their homes by war and famine and that their numbers are growing. Most people are forced to flee from their homes in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and Asia. Many flee from wars fought with the Western weapons that are part of Western economies. Western nations, including Australia, devise ever more cruel ways of denying them refuge and of driving them out.
While Refugee Week invites us this year to listen to a million stories, the refugee statistics tell us that last year more than 117 million people were forced from their homes. More than 30 million were refugees. Those forced from their own nation generally fled to similarly poor nations. We might expect that during this year their numbers will again grow as ever more destructive weapons make life unliveable in cities destroyed by war. The economic pressure caused by war will also affect the lives of people in far distant nations, too, leading more people to flee from starvation. This year millions of voices crying out for help to live will go unheard.
When we treat people as numbers, we soon begin to divide peoples. We do not see the others as faces but as threats. Shortly after WWII, Australia signed the United Nations Convention on Refugees. The world had then recently seen the horrific results when both the Nazi and the Russian Communist regimes treated people as statistics and as threats to be eliminated. The UN Convention was one of many agreements which insisted that vulnerable human beings mattered and so were to be protected. Today, however, the Convention has been whittled away. We are encouraged to see people who flee from persecution and hunger as threats to our prosperity and security.
Governments ensure that we do not hear the voices of the Anne Franks of our world, and dispatch them from nation to nation, from camp to camp, like parcels.
In Australia the rhetoric of governments and political parties has turned the word ‘protection’ from a light for refugees into a moral darkness in which we must live. We are no longer drawn by generosity to protect threatened peoples, but driven by fear and selfishness to protect ourselves from them. We need to open our hearts this week to listen to the stories of refugees.
Fr Andrew Hamilton SJ is an editorial consultant at Jesuit Communications
