LITMIR.BIZ

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of the lifeless body of a young boy—one of at least 12 Syrians who drowned attempting to reach the Greek island of Kos—encapsulated the extraordinary risks refugees are taking to reach the west.

      —Guardian, 2 September 2015

      Reacting to yesterday’s news that almost 150 people have drowned in the Mediterranean and around the same number have been returned to Libya by the Libyan Coastguard, where they risk indefinite detention, Massimo Moratti, Research Director for Europe at Amnesty International, said: “This high number represents a new low for European leaders. They have done everything they can to pull up the drawbridge to Europe; withdrawing Search and Rescue Operations; criminalising NGO rescue boats; cooperating with the Libyan coastguard, and yet people are still risking their lives to come to Europe.”

      —Amnesty International, 26 July 2019

      “Twelve people have died while Malta and Europe were watching. We should never forget that these deaths are the direct result of Malta’s and Europe’s non-assistance policies, and their clear intention to let people die at sea. These deaths could and should have been prevented.” The survivors are all still in detention cells, including the toddler and baby, at Tripoli’s Tariq al-Sikka, where, according to lawyers and charities, they have no access to medical treatment, or sufficient food and water.

      —Guardian, 19 May 2020

      Three-year-old Alan Kurdi’s death captured Europe’s imagination in the Autumn of 2015. The media coverage led to an outpouring of support for those seeking refuge in Europe. Germany had already opened its borders, and, over the course of that year, allowed over one million people to enter.

      I started working with migrants arriving in Northern France that same Autumn of 2015. After some twenty years of establishing mental health programmes in emergencies across the globe, including East and West Africa, Central America, and the Middle East; the emergency now appeared to be on my own doorstep. Since then, I have continued to work in different ‘hotspots’ in France, Italy, Greece, and in Mexico—where a similar crisis plays out on the US border. Over these five years, I have watched as the initial welcome and compassion shifted to indifference, and sometimes overt hostility towards all those seeking refuge, driven by negative media stereotypes and a European and US leadership that either embraces, or is intimidated by, the racism of the far right. Meanwhile, the conflicts and desperate circumstances that drive this flight have become background noise to domestic preoccupations.

      I kept these diaries, publishing some as online blogs, because I wanted to show what it’s like to be caught up on the front lines of the migrant crises in Europe and Central America, either as a person in flight, or as a volunteer.

      Why diaries? I love diaries, both as a reader and a writer. For a reader, diaries provide a sense of immediacy, explaining how things happened at that moment in time—what people felt, thought, said and did. As a writer, this is what I strive to capture, so that my readers can time travel in history. The diary format provides an honest, completely personal account. It provides continuity in the present tense, which allows readers to accompany me and directly witness how people and situations change and evolve, rather than have them summarised through retrospective analysis, with hindsight thrown in for good measure.

      I have tried to throw a spotlight on the human dimension of the migrant crisis allowing particular people and places to come to life. I wanted to increase our understanding of who migrants are, what forces them to take such extraordinary risks in travel and put up with so much uncertainty and ill-treatment.

      Secondly, I wanted to document the emergence of a new kind of humanitarianism that challenges the professional models that have framed my own working life. The large international agencies, both UN and NGO, with the exception of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) and Medecins Du Monde (MDM), were for the most part, largely absent in the earlier part of this crisis. Two groups stepped into the void. One was the migrants themselves. In the absence of outside support, they started taking care of themselves, often in astonishingly creative ways. The other was unpaid volunteers who arrived from all over the world, many with no previous humanitarian experience. Over the course of time, both groups have come together to create new ways of working that, in many respects, appear more egalitarian and empowering than old models.

      I also wanted to describe what it was like to try to provide mental health and psychosocial support in these situations, and how my own practice evolved and developed over time. Working in these settings challenged my stereotypes of how we cope with stress and what fosters resilience. One of the most rewarding aspects was how often I witnessed, and was told, how helping others had helped people to help themselves.

      Another aspect of this resilience came through creativity. Alpha, an artist from Mauritania, who opened an art school in the Calais Jungle told me:

      – If you want to survive, do art. Work hard at it, and every time you are drinking poison if you do art, you will lose all the pain in your life. Wherever I went, I saw migrants creating artwork and beauty around them, out of whatever was available: stuffed toys, plastic bottles, tear gas canisters. I wanted to encourage this. With colleagues and friends, we created a story telling project to provide an opportunity for children to tell stories about any aspect of their lives, in any form they wanted. The work is shown in exhibits and online. Some of the children’s stories (and pictures) are included in this book. In this way children can talk directly to the reader, sharing what is important to them, unmediated by myself.

      I have struggled with the issue of what term to use—migrant, asylum seeker, or refugee—and have used all three over the years. I started out feeling that the term migrant was so heavily stigmatised that it was better to avoid it. Al Jazeera took a similar position in 2015 arguing that:

      “The umbrella term migrant is no longer fit for purpose when it comes to describing the horror unfolding in the Mediterranean. It has evolved from its dictionary definitions into a tool that dehumanises and distances, a blunt pejorative. […] Migrant is a word that strips suffering people of voice. Substituting refugee for it is—in the smallest way—an attempt to give some back.”¹

      In fact, the term refugee has a strict legal definition. According to the 1951 UN Convention on Refugees: “A refugee is an individual who ‘owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion’ fled the country of their nationality.” They have defined rights under that Convention; one of the most fundamental principles being that refugees should not be expelled or returned to situations where their life or freedom would be under threat.² The term ‘migrant’ is not defined under international law and is used in varying ways. For example, it’s used as a term to describe those who choose to leave their own country for economic reasons or to study. The problem with making a clear distinction between migrants who choose to leave their home countries for ‘economic’ reasons and refugees ‘forced’ to flee because of fear of persecution or war, is that it ignores the complex reasons forcing people, particularly children, to flee difficulties and/or poverty at home, the complete lack of normal standards of protection for many children living in countries which are not at war, and the growing impact of climate degradation. What would you do if you were abused or prostituted by your own family? How would you react if all your family’s cattle were killed by disease? Where would you go if drought or floods made life impossible at home?

      The International Organisation for Migration uses the term ‘migrant’ to describe any person “who moves away from his or her place of usual residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently, and for a variety of reasons.”³ The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) describes an international migrant as “any person who is outside a State of which they are a citizen or national, or, in the case of a stateless person, their State of birth or habitual residence.”⁴ Thus, refugees fleeing war or persecution are one form of forced migration. There are “important overlaps in the challenges and vulnerabilities faced by people who move along the same routes, use the same forms of transport, and are similarly exposed to human rights violations, abuse and xenophobia. Moreover, today, and notwithstanding the gradual expansion of refugee protection,

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