The tide of refugees moving around the world continues unabated - ad, by all accounts, is destined to increase. Meanwhile, countries grapple with how to address the issue of so-called illegal immigrants. With the divide between rich and poor increasing and people seeking a better life for themselves, or their children, often forgotten in all the hubbub of what is involved in being a refugee is the human tragedy involved.
As Australia celebrates Refugee Week this week, writing in The Guardian award-winning novelist Mark Haddon discovers the horror of being a refugee in the UK today:
"Last year Oxfam asked whether I'd visit one of the projects they help fund, then write about it for The Observer. It's exactly the kind of thing a liberal, Guardian-reading novelist should be doing. Except that I don't fly. Because I know with absolute certainty that I'll die in a fireball of aviation fuel shortly after take-off. And visiting one of the projects that Oxfam helps fund would doubtless mean landing at some jungle airstrip in a 30-year-old Tupolev, possibly dodging mortar rounds on the descent. The amount of Valium I'd have to take to get me there would probably eradicate all memory of the trip.
So they put me on a bus instead. To Victoria. In London. So that I could visit the Migrants Resource Centre and meet a group of asylum seekers. Victoria not being Cambodia I wouldn't get much exotic local colour (run-down boarding houses round the corner from green squares ringed with large, cream Georgian town houses, if you're interested). But the bus was going to stay on the ground the whole way, which was good for me.
I had a rough idea of what we'd be talking about. I knew a number of refugees who'd come to the UK in the past. And I knew something about the UK's current asylum system, from newspapers, from TV and from the radio. In particular I knew that it was neither generous nor efficient. But I'd never met anyone on the receiving end.
Now I have. And nothing has made me this angry in a long time. We bellyache about the abuse of human rights overseas. But there are thousands of people living here, right now, in one of the richest countries in the world, forced to live in poverty. They are denied basic rights and services which the rest of us take for granted. And this is not an accident. This is government policy. And we should be ashamed of it."
Read on here. Don't for one moment think that what you read only applies to the United Kingdom. All too sadly it is the same "story" repeated all around the world. It ought to shame all the so-called "rich" countries!
As Australia celebrates Refugee Week this week, writing in The Guardian award-winning novelist Mark Haddon discovers the horror of being a refugee in the UK today:
"Last year Oxfam asked whether I'd visit one of the projects they help fund, then write about it for The Observer. It's exactly the kind of thing a liberal, Guardian-reading novelist should be doing. Except that I don't fly. Because I know with absolute certainty that I'll die in a fireball of aviation fuel shortly after take-off. And visiting one of the projects that Oxfam helps fund would doubtless mean landing at some jungle airstrip in a 30-year-old Tupolev, possibly dodging mortar rounds on the descent. The amount of Valium I'd have to take to get me there would probably eradicate all memory of the trip.
So they put me on a bus instead. To Victoria. In London. So that I could visit the Migrants Resource Centre and meet a group of asylum seekers. Victoria not being Cambodia I wouldn't get much exotic local colour (run-down boarding houses round the corner from green squares ringed with large, cream Georgian town houses, if you're interested). But the bus was going to stay on the ground the whole way, which was good for me.
I had a rough idea of what we'd be talking about. I knew a number of refugees who'd come to the UK in the past. And I knew something about the UK's current asylum system, from newspapers, from TV and from the radio. In particular I knew that it was neither generous nor efficient. But I'd never met anyone on the receiving end.
Now I have. And nothing has made me this angry in a long time. We bellyache about the abuse of human rights overseas. But there are thousands of people living here, right now, in one of the richest countries in the world, forced to live in poverty. They are denied basic rights and services which the rest of us take for granted. And this is not an accident. This is government policy. And we should be ashamed of it."
Read on here. Don't for one moment think that what you read only applies to the United Kingdom. All too sadly it is the same "story" repeated all around the world. It ought to shame all the so-called "rich" countries!
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