World Refugee Day is frequently seen simply as a cause for ‘celebration’. But if we want to decolonise migration, we have to recognise that the existence of displacement is not a cause for celebration. Should we be celebrating the fact that people have been, and will continue to be, displaced from their homes by colonialism and imperialism? Celebration without addressing the conditions that cause forced movement does nothing for migrant, including refugee liberation.
Last year, we spoke about ‘forgotten refugees’ for World Refugee Day. This year, we will continue to unpack this phenomenon, and how certain refugees are forgotten and silenced because of colonial legacies and racism. Just as Ukrainian refugees¹ were given protection, we must also give Black, Brown and other racialised refugees the same attention, solidarity and respect. This includes understanding the root causes of their movement, and amplifying their stories.
Remembering root causes
Conflict, and by extension displacement, tends to be reduced to merely “tribal”, “sectarian” or “religious” explanations. This ignores the very real legacies of colonialism, imperialism, White supremacy, capitalism and divide and rule that remain entrenched in post-colonial societies, fuelling endless cycles of death and violence.
In the UK, anti-Blackness and Islamophobia continues to deny Black and Muslim migrants, including refugees, their dignity and humanity: our governments refuse to recognise their complicity, and continue to turn a blind eye to, or actively fund, the suffering of millions. And so this piece will focus on examples from Africa and the Middle East. This is not to discount the numerous examples across the world of Western intervention’s role in causing displacement² across the world including South America, Central America, East, South and South East Asia.
The reason we have focused primarily on Western intervention is because it has the largest ongoing impact on our society and across the world today. Western colonialism provided the blueprint for subsequent non-Western forms of domination and exploitation. Our emphasis on Western colonialism is not to deny the existence and real effects of non-Western imperialism, but rather reflects what is still the most significant imperial force in our world.
The West’s deliberate colonial amnesia contributes to the silencing of Black, Brown and racialised refugees, who are fleeing conditions of instability and violence that Western colonialism, imperialism and wealth extraction has had a hand in creating. With this piece, we hope to counter this colonial amnesia by remembering the root causes of displacement.
Africa
In 1884, European powers such as the US, the UK and France divided up Africa into colonies in order to extract their natural resources. Since Transatlantic enslavement had ended, “European powers saw the chance to gain new colonies as a solution to maintaining power and wealth”³. This is commonly referred to as ‘The Scramble for Africa’ or the ‘Conquest of Africa’. During this colonisation, the artificial borders of colonies (and therefore future states) were decided effectively at random by the colonial powers⁴, and were not based on existing (although fluid)⁵ tribal/ethnic boundaries: these newly imposed borders therefore split many tribal and ethnic communities in half, which has had violent legacies in terms of increasing inter-tribal tensions and leading to conflict⁶.
From Transatlantic enslavement onwards, European intervention in Africa has created conditions of dispossession and conflict. Displacement and modern migration must be understood against a backdrop of hundreds of years of European conquest and its legacies of White supremacy and capitalist domination.
The fragmentation and carving up of East Africa into arbitrary nation-states by Western powers has had a lasting impact that continues to bring suffering to the region⁷: millions of Somalis have been displaced by legacies of British and French colonialism, whilst the genocide and displacement of Tigrayan people is “entangled in the imperial origins of the state of Ethiopia”⁸, and influenced by neo-colonial actors⁹ in the region.
Millions of Congolese people have been displaced due to Western, Rwandan and corporate intervention. Similarly, in the Central African Republic, displacement can be traced to French colonialism, which “induced a post-colonial political order reinforc[ing] the worst forms of exploitation and authoritarian rule”¹⁰.
In Sudan, British colonialism has laid the foundations¹¹ for the suffering that we see today. An Israeli- and UAE-funded power-struggle between the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) and the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) has killed thousands and displaced millions. This has exacerbated the already-existing genocide in Darfur, where both Government and non-Government forces have targetted Black Africans¹².
In Libya¹³, the creation of refugees can be traced to NATO’s military campaign and regime change¹⁴, resulting in two civil wars, the effects of which can still be felt to this day: violence and instability continues to ravage the country.
Today, the creation of refugees from the African continent is deeply linked to the ‘Scramble for Africa’, random border creation, colonial legacies, and corporate interventions. As refugees flee to Europe from Africa, it is important to remember Europe’s hand in causing their suffering and displacing them from their homes. Migrant, including refugee, liberation cannot be achieved without decolonisation. Until Western intervention ceases, and reparations are given to communities affected by colonialism and imperialism, displacement will continue.
The Middle East
Conflict and ensuing displacement in the Middle East can be traced to key moments in the start of the 20th century.
In 1915-1916 the UK Government promised a pan-Arab state to the Sharif of Mecca on the condition that the Arab people would agree to revolt against the Ottoman Empire¹⁵. Shortly after, the UK Government contravened their earlier promise by promising Palestine to the Zionists in the Balfour Declaration (1917). After the fall of the Ottoman Empire in 1922, the Middle East was divided up into puppet states called mandates¹⁶: for instance Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Egypt came under British control, and Lebanon and Syria came under French control. The sons of the Sharif of Mecca were installed as monarchs in Iraq, Syria and Jordan. These events set the scene for the destabilisation of the region, and intervention by the West (and its corruption of post-colonial political elites) that continues to this day.
In Iraq, the conditions for displacement can be traced to Britain’s desire to accumulate Iraqi natural oil resources, as well as British colonial economic structures, and US and UK foreign policy¹⁷, whilst in Syria, displacement has been intensified by US and UK foreign policy invasions, and can also be traced to sectarianism as a direct legacy of French colonialism¹⁸. Meanwhile, Palestinian people have been displaced by genocide, ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism since 1948. Both the US and UK are directly complicit in Palestinian dispossession through their arms deals and provision of aid to Israel.
In Afghanistan, Cold War geopolitics led to the 2001 US and UK led invasion¹⁹, which displaced almost four million people, whilst in Yemen, the US and UK have armed Saudi Arabia’s war on Yemen²⁰, causing mass death²¹ and displacement. Yemeni suffering is also marked by a history of pro-Western regime change²². We must also remember the UK and the US complicity in the creation and rise of ISIS²³, Al Qaeda and the Taliban²⁴, either through enforcing power vacuums or supplying funds. This has also caused mass suffering and brought about further displacement across the region.
Armenians have also been displaced and subjected to genocide by both Azerbaijan and Turkey, whilst Kurdish suffering and displacement continues to be traced to “the toxic legacy of British officialdom”²⁵, and enforced assimilation²⁶ by Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria. We have to remember that the creation of nation-states in the region is a Western invention, which replaced the region’s historical pluralism, and entrenched ethno-nationalism at the expense of the Kurdish people and other groups.
The mandate system, colonial legacies, and Western foreign policy interventions continue to cause the creation of millions of refugees from the Middle East. We must remember Europe’s complicity in displacing refugees from their homes. Justice for all migrants cannot be achieved without decolonisation. Migrant, including refugee, liberation cannot be achieved until the root causes of displacement are tackled.
Geopolitics and imperialism have and continue to shape displacement. We will be exploring this further as part of our Who is Welcome campaign. Stay tuned!
References
¹ Ukrainian and HongKong refugees are not actually legally considered to be refugees, despite the fact that they are fleeing conflict and/or persecution on account of a protected characteristic. This is also a problem. And while all movement is valid (whether that be in search of better employment or academic opportunities, or in escape of violence), we do recognise that refugees are afforded specific protections based on their reasons for moving.
² For instance, in Haiti, displacement is traceable to legacies of French colonialism, which paved the way for a US and French backed coup, as well as ongoing Western political intervention. Meanwhile, across Latin America, a backdrop of CIA interventions and US-enforced coups/regime change has caused displacement and suffering in countries like Nicaragua, Guatemala and Venezuela. British divide and rule policies displaced millions across South Asia with the dissolution of the British Raj and the creation of Bangladesh, Pakistan and India. Britain, once again, is implicated in the ongoing Tamil Genocide in Sri Lanka. Regarding Rohingya refugees, we must also remember that “it was during Britain’s governance that the groundwork for ethnic tensions and the subsequent persecution of the Rohingya people was laid”.
³ https://www.bbc.co.uk/bitesize/articles/zrfjqfr#zqssf82
⁵ These existing tribal boundaries were not strict boundaries: a lot of the entrenched animosity that has led to significant violence is the result of British/European constructions of these groups and giving them particular socio-political roles.
⁶ https://freakonomics.com/2011/12/the-violent-legacy-of-africas-arbitrary-borders/
⁷ https://refugees.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Somalia-Backgrounder.pdf
⁸ https://thefunambulist.net/magazine/against-genocide/tigray-oromia-and-the-ethiopian-empire
⁹ https://www.jstor.org/stable/48732440
¹⁰ https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2013/12/21/central-africa-crisis-cherchez-la-france
¹² https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2707480
¹³ Libya’s history is also marked by Italian settler colonialism and genocide: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-world-history-of-genocide/eurocentrism-silence-and-memory-of-genocide-in-colonial-libya-19291934/2F6A0A6F7010B944D4C13A4A6425A0A1
¹⁴ https://responsiblestatecraft.org/libya-floods-nato
¹⁵ The McMahon-Hussein Correspondence (1915-1916) consisted of a series of letters between the Sharif of Mecca and The British High Commissioner to Egypt.
¹⁶ https://www.britannica.com/topic/mandate-League-of-Nations The mandate system also hierarchised non-European people based on civility and how deserving or “ready” they were of ruling themselves. The mandate system was ultimately very similar to the scrapped 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement.
¹⁸ https://www.vox.com/2015/9/16/18093552/syrian-refugees-war-assad
²¹ https://magazine.columbia.edu/article/war-atrocities-yemen-linked-us-weapons
²² https://www.declassifieduk.org/britains-covert-war-in-yemen/
²³ https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/03/us-isis-syria-iraq
²⁴ https://amhsnews.org/4515/justice-awareness/title-tbd-operation-cyclone/