Angelina Jolie and the Refugee Warehouses

What makes someone like Angelina Jolie take an interest in the lives of refugees?  What makes anyone take interest?   In this video Angelina visits refugees in Afghanistan.  It’s clear that there is no “foreignness” in how she relates to them.  She sees them as people who are suffering, and to whom we should respond.

Financially, we reward Angelina Jolie enormously for entertaining us and gracing our screens big and small.   We give her nothing for her service to her fellow human beings.   Millions of volunteers and poorly paid “human rights workers” around the planet are under-resourced in their efforts to work for the benefit of refugees.

If we pay little regard to the sacrifices of those who work for refugees, we pay even less attention to the needs and dignity of refugees themselves.  Many of them are condemned to years in camps where they are virtual prisoners.  Here Angelina Jolie visits refugees in Thailand.  “They are not allowed to go outside the camp”, she says.  “They have been inside this camp for 20 years, they could be here for 20 more.”

This phenomenon is known as “Refugee Warehousing”: we provide enough resources to keep the refugees in a camp but not enough for them to establish normal lives.  They are foreigners and never permitted to lose their status as such.  For the rich countries far away – they may only be allowed to reach us in small numbers by our act of generosity.  For the poor countries neighbouring the places where refugees come from, they must not be allowed to mix with the local people.

We reject the notion that free human beings are “burdens” to anyone. 

US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants

The US Committee for Refugees and Immigrants in 2004 listed more than 7,300,000 refugees held in camps for more than ten years in the West Bank and Gaza, Lebanon, Jordan, Sudan, Malaysia, Zambia, Congo, Namibia, Algeria, Thaland, Iran, Pakistan, Kuwait, Iraq, India, Yemen, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and more.  By 2007 the number of refugees “warehoused” had grown to more than 8,500,000.

The holding of almost ten million innocent people in such conditions where they are denied freedom of movement, the right to work and other basic human rights is a systematic and massive violation of both the Refugee Convention and Human Rights treaties.  In short rather than treating them as equal human beings, we treat them as foreigners.   “Foreignness” makes it possible for us to ignore that this is in fact the exercise our governments are engaged in: on our behalf.  More than a hundred non-government organisations have denounced warehousing as a breach of human rights and called on the international community to end the practice.

Further information see USCRI.