By Dimitris Dalakoglou The European Union, one of the strongest economies in the world and home to some of the most advanced state apparatuses in human history, is preparing to shut down its borders, one after the other, because it can’t cope with the number of refugees arriving from war in the Middle East. These same institutions were of course able to find the resources to finance an expensive military operation on the European sea borders against the same refugees.
Tag: refugees
By Pál Nyíri My son and I have come to see the Hungarian State Folk Ensemble’s show An Evocation of Subcarpathia. According to the introduction to the venerable troupe’s new show, it wants to showcase the multicultural musical and dance heritage of the Western Ukrainian region that formerly belonged to Czechoslovakia and, before then, Hungary, and had a mixed population that included Ruthenians, Slovaks, Hungarians, Romanians, Jews, Gypsies, and Hutsuls. That heritage – juxtaposed rather than hierarchically arranged, the text emphasises – is displayed in the folk dresses of the performers and the languages they sing in (including, counterfactually, Hebrew). But the photos projected on the wall mix nostalgia for a bygone time of diversity with nostalgia for Greater Hungary that is the bread and butter of contemporary Hungarian nationalism.
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By Saskia Jenelle This story relates to my fieldwork, which takes place in Amsterdam and concerns undocumented refugees. My research focuses on how refugees and the volunteers who work with them experience encounters with ‘others’, and how these encounters influences their perception of human dignity. I would like to share a recent experience with you.
On May 29th 2015 the refugees from ‘We Are Here’ who resided in the ‘Vluchtgebouw’ (literally ‘Escape building’) had to leave the building that had served as their home for nine months. They were offered shelter in a barrack in Amsterdam-North and decided to walk the distance, making it serve as a form of protest to raise awareness for their need for adequate accommodations and fair legal proceedings based on international human rights.
To show support I joined the walk, together with friends and volunteers of the refugees who are active and loving supporters, and refugees from other ‘Vlucht-havens’.
1 CommentBy Marina de Regt “Yemen’s conflict is getting so bad that some Yemenis are fleeing to Somalia,” read a recent headline read a recent headline on Vice News. The article mentioned that 32 Yemenis, mainly women and…
2 CommentsErik van Ommering Last week around 1.7 million refugees from Syria received the following text message on their cellphones:
“We deeply regret that WFP has not yet received funds to reload your blue card for food for December 2014. We will inform you by SMS as soon as funding is received and we can resume food assistance”
The message was sent by the World Food Program (WFP), one of the UN agencies that has played a vital role in supporting refugees from Syria in Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan and Egypt. Hosting refugees “in the region” has been a key policy pursued by the Netherlands and other countries. Accordingly they seek to both provide aid in efficient manners and discourage refugees from seeking asylum inside, for instance, the European Union.
As refugees register in their respective host countries, they receive a special credit card (the ‘blue card’) that is charged monthly by the WFP with the amount of USD 30, enabling refugees to purchase basic food items in selected grocery stores. For many who own little more than the clothes they wore as they fled the brutalities of Syria’s war, this support has proved indispensable. Its suspension may therefore spur catastrophe.
1 CommentBy Ursula Cats and Allegra Palmer January this year, a concrete wall collapsed in Pathum Thani, Thailand, severely injuring Charlie Tiyu, a man from Burma who lives in Thailand as an undocumented migrant worker. He broke his left hip and suffered internal injuries, including a crushed large intestine and a bruised bladder. And yet, his injuries were not the biggest of his concerns.
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By Ursula Cats When I started my fieldwork as a Master’s student last year, I had many ideals and I mainly wanted to represent the women I was researching as “agents of change”. What I actually experienced was different. As I wrote in an e-mail to my supervisor Ellen Bal towards the end of my fieldwork: “I can clearly see the restrictions these young women have. I can see that they are active agents, but their impossibilities are also becoming painfully obvious.”
I have always had the motivation to support people who have fewer opportunities than I do. To gain more knowledge on developmental work, I decided to enroll in the Master’s program in anthropology in September 2009. It was not complicated to find a focus for my fieldwork: the women who had fled from Burma to Thailand. The anthropological theories I used, however, did not correspond directly with what I actually saw and experienced. Eventually I was able to gain a perspective based on the stories of the women themselves, which I used in my thesis to shed light on the situation of unrecognized refugee women from Burma.
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