I shut my eyes in horror, already having seen what was coming. The pregnant refugee, whom activists not lengthy earlier than had given a reassuring cell CT scan, was about to be become a projectile: three guards had been looming to forcibly launch the tormented lady from a truck over the razor wire fence between Poland and Belarus.
Watching the torturous scene in Inexperienced Border from an opulent Viennese cinema, I used to be confronted by this inhumane act at a cushty distance – bodily distant and safeguarded by illustration. However I nonetheless felt the lack of life that’s all too actual at EU borders; Agnieszka Holland’s movie is predicated on occasions unfolding since Lukashenka, as of late 2021, started admitting refugees largely from the Center East and North Africa into Belarus solely to drive their passage onwards to Poland as a punishment for EU imposed sanctions. Rounded up on each side of the border and ruthlessly handed backwards and forwards between the deadlocked nations, refugees are trapped in a forested no man’s land, pressured into abject survival.
In an earlier scene from the movie, a supercilious head of operations, briefing Polish border guards, describes refugees as international weapons, not folks. Bodily aggression wrought on refugees is the palpable manifestation of the structural violence of border regimes. The movie encourages each empathy with displaced peoples and outrage at their dehumanization – so very important in issues of persecution haunted by political gameplay.
Debate in Europe in regards to the destiny of refugees is an alarmingly weaponized subject. From the UK authorities’s human-rights violating, but quickly advancing invoice on deportation to Rwanda for asylum seekers, to the EU’s plans for offshore migrant processing amenities, European policymaking has gone on the defensive.
Civility in query
Hans Kundnani, in an interview with the Inexperienced European Journal, calls this ‘Europe’s civilizational flip’: ‘between the end of the Cold War and 2010, the EU had been in expansive, offensive mode … optimistic and outward-looking, and imagined a world that could almost be remade in its own image’. He compares this to its present place of perceiving ‘threats against a European civilization that must be protected’. When discussing the Mediterranean, which Kundnani describes as ‘a sea border with North Africa’ likened to the US ‘land border with Mexico’, he refers back to the witnessed consequence of merciless directives:
Human Rights Watch says that EU migration coverage will be summarized in three phrases, “Let them die”.
And that is the dismissive therapy, leading to brutality, of those that have usually already fled violence. In his article ‘Wars of de-civilization’, Hamit Bozarslan identifies a typical denominator connecting a litany of twentieth-century aggression: impunity. He emphasizes occasions when the West had turned a blind eye, retracted or colluded with invading forces.
‘Following the horrors of the Ghouta chemical weapons attack, Putin … seemed to believe that the door had been left open to advance his plans for an imperial Russia’; ‘after occupying Afrin, Turkey went back on the offensive to occupy a new area of Syria, taking it from Kurdish forces with the complicity of the Trump administration’; ‘Aliyev … had the green light to attack Nagorno-Karabakh’, given ‘that the much-vaunted “West” was far removed and paralysed’; and ‘Iran remains convinced as ever that the Westphalian system is giving way to the rule of strength and extortion,’ writes Bozarslan.
He argues that wars of de-civilization are being waged ‘in the name of … sovereign ethnic/national and non-state entities’. ‘Civilization’, he writes, ‘imposes limitations’ and but ‘in return it allows us to orient ourselves more securely in time and space.’
Violence disguised as safety
Specializing in Gaza, Bozarslan units out the assorted acts of violence perpetrated by opposing sides that refute or break with public worldwide regulation. On first studying, it may appear that the one lack of civility Bozarslan describes is a tit-for-tat degradation of societies at warfare. Nonetheless, a second studying hints on the breach of civility that happens from inside, when staging raids, whether or not purportedly offensive or defensive: violence disguised as ‘protection’ remains to be violence.
Attacking civilians who’ve nowhere to flee is a double violation of human rights: though Israeli hostages are nonetheless being held in Gaza, Netanyahu’s escalation of broad navy assault in Rafah is brutally concentrating on already confined and internally displaced Palestinians – refugees in their very own land.
Agnieszka Holland is aware of precisely what she’s doing when she depicts the emotionally conflicted Polish border guard in her movie, after he turns a blind eye quite than mindlessly upholding his deplorable patrol responsibility. He curls up in mattress, bare, within the foetal place, embraced by his pregnant spouse – the fallacious position of protector and the privilege of security each laid naked.
This editorial has benefited from a current, in-depth Eurozine workforce assembly on Gaza, plus suggestions from colleagues Mars Zaslavsky and Salma Shaka.
