On safely seeking safety

More likely than not you missed the fact that Monday was World Refugee Day. Yes, “dem again.” Few appeared to believe that the occasion required much official or even informal attention in T&T.

Even less attention has been paid to the fact that on the margins of the recent Summit of the Americas, a ‘Los Angeles Declaration on Migration and Protection’ was signed by 21 countries, not including T&T.

The main intention of the Declaration was to express a willingness to “strengthen national, regional, and hemispheric efforts to create the conditions for safe, orderly, humane, and regular migration and to strengthen frameworks for international protection and cooperation.”

The Caribbean signatories were Barbados, Belize, Guyana, Haiti, and Jamaica. I have been advised that “a decision was taken (by T&T) not to endorse” the Declaration having been given the opportunity to do so. I have not seen an attempt by anyone to get to the bottom of this specific abstention.

Even so, according to the UNHCR, our government has “supported recommendations made at the recent Universal Periodic Review to implement measures to ensure that all children, including refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, have equal access to education, and to set up a national refugee status determination procedure whilst developing national legislation on refugees aligned with existing international standards.”

We have? There has still been no groundswell of either spontaneous or engineered public opinion on such issues.

Letters to the editor, social media posts, and plaintive pressers ritualistically omit mention of possible measures to address the tragedies we encounter. This is clearly not the stuff of political advantage or disadvantage.

Our resident Chavistas, closet xenophobes and even those claiming human rights high ground have not sought to interrogate these striking omissions. The “close de borders” gang has moved on to COVID denial and anti-vaxing.

On Monday, the UNHCR nevertheless restated the essential global objectives:

“Whoever they are, people forced to flee should be treated with dignity. Anyone can seek protection, regardless of who they are or what they believe. It is non-negotiable: seeking safety is a human right.

“Wherever they come from, people forced to flee should be welcomed. Refugees come from all over the globe. To get out of harm’s way, they might take a plane, a boat, or travel on foot. What remains universal is the right to seek safety.

“Whenever people are forced to flee, they have a right to be protected. Whatever the threat – war, violence, persecution – everyone deserves protection. Everyone has a right to be safe.”

Of course, all of these are aspirations better verbalised than done. Our own ad hoc, calamitous embrace of the imperatives has reflected the anomalies, though we are not the only ones.

There are simply more people who have been forced out of their homelands in recent human history – over 100 million by some counts. Ukrainians have latterly joined a list that had for more than a decade included Syria, Afghanistan and, of course, Venezuela among others.

It is true that the realities of small size, limited resources and vexatious, counter-productive socio-political arrangements militate against even the most modest ambitions.

These are chronic Caribbean conditions that have rendered many of us incapable of satisfactorily meeting our obligations under international law and basic principles of humanitarian conduct.

It might be that the share of the global burden has been disproportionate, but there has also been a shortage of serious effort on our part.

Yes, the rest of the world has also exhibited shortcomings. There are notable inequities among both source and host countries. Some, for example, are noting smoother flows involving those fleeing the crisis in Ukraine, even as the wealthy have opted for the outsourcing of moral and lawful responsibility to others … of different backgrounds.

Back home, there is a timeline of atrocities we can reference. The killing of nine-month-old Yaelvis Santoyo Sarabia in February, the fiendish “close de borders” demonstration outside the Queen’s Park Oval in 2019, and the 2020 return of a boatload of migrants including 16 minors in the midst of a yellow level weather alert.

Meanwhile, on Monday, I had cause to recall “Richard De Souza” (not his real name) and Everard Sookharry who famously epitomised the scramble out of T&T in 1990 amid (fake) claims of ethnic strife.  

The perilous wheel well of a Lockheed Tristar bound for Toronto became, back then, a macabre symbol of our version of flight. By then, others had simply bought a ticket, landed, and claimed a right to stay, based largely on lies.

We appeared to pay much closer attention to these things back then.