"What place, what life, what did they leave behind?
What sights, what sounds, what thoughts are on their mind?
What crimes, what hurt, what wars have you survived?
What hopes, what dreams were left when you arrived?"
So wrote Howard Goodall in a long poem about refuge and refugees not long ago.
The literature of exile and asylum is full of loss and anguish."We, the exiled survivors", Virgil has Aeneas lament, as he flees the burning city of Troy, "were forced by divine command to search the world for a home in some uninhabited land".
For most asylum seekers, looking for refuge, the land they reach is not so much uninhabited as filled with confusion, paradoxes and people who are often hostile. "Refuge", according to the Oxford English Dictionary, means "shelter from pursuit or danger or trouble", but its second, more archaic definition, "a pretext or excuse", is too frequently what asylum seekers encounter on reaching the west - excuses and pretexts for doing nothing, for rejection and obfuscation.
No one, in the end, wishes to be a refugee.Refuge in a foreign land is a last resort, when all else has failed, when violence and persecution have left no option but flight.But refuge is what the west has to offer and protecting people who flee persecution is a responsibility all nation states must share if collective sovereignty is to have any moral worth.And refuge, so grudgingly given, is not only a fundamental right:it is an opportunity for a state to demonstrate its humanity.
Caroline Moorehead
March 2009
