I worked with a small team to help a widow in Austria to build her new house a couple of years later in 1961—16 years after the war. For 16 years, she had lived in a hut in Austria, waiting for something to happen, and it was our task to help her to build her house. She had been born before World War I in Hungary, in a German-speaking community.
In 1919, her village was incorporated into the new Kingdom of Yugoslavia, but she did not get Yugoslavian citizenship because she was a German-speaker. In 1945 she was expelled from Yugoslavia and finished up in Austria. So, was she Hungarian, Yugoslav, German or Austrian? It is a reminder that, then and now, we cannot fit refugees into neat bureaucratic boxes. What they need is not the correctly shaped bureaucratic box, but safety, security and a home.
A UNHCR representative in Austria said in 1960 that, “nothing is easier than considering the refugees after a while as a pest or as troublesome aliens. In reality they are neither heroes nor inferior individuals. They are quite ordinary people like everybody else, but they are living in extraordinary conditions”.
Catastrophically, 50 years on, the flow of refugees continues: from the Middle East, from Sub-Saharan Africa, and even in Europe from Ukraine, and certainly into Europe from all of the above, and others as well. In as much as those tragic exiles get noticed, it is now almost universally in the United Kingdom in a hostile, suspicious and demeaning tone—too often, I have to say, led on by journalists and newspapers that certainly ought to know better.
The Daily Mail, having fought against the admission of Jewish refugees in the 1930s on the grounds of their religion, their doubtful loyalty and their alien lifestyle, has learned nothing. Now, it opposes the admission of Muslim refugees on exactly the same spurious grounds of doubtful loyalty, religion and alien lifestyle.
Just occasionally, a particularly horrific and photogenic tragedy opens a brief window of understanding and charity. The dreadful sight of three year-old Aylan Kurdi, drowned in the surf, did at least at last produce a reluctant, miserly agreement to admit 3,000 unaccompanied children.
What grudging, slow progress has since been made on meeting that commitment. The noble Lord, Lord Loomba, starkly reminded us today that it is not just the photogenic children who merit and desperately need our help and who will die without it, but the girls and women—and in particular, the widows, who are always left at the bottom of the pile and ignored.
It would not be right in a debate such as this to overlook the United Kingdom’s leading role in international development. I, for one, was pleased to hear the new Secretary of State for International Development coming to terms in her remarks earlier this week with the utility and effectiveness of the work her department does.
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