Publiced by Dagens Nyheter, 3 May 2005
Debate: The right to asylum
In two letters to the UN, the Nordic governments claim that granting protection to Roma people from Kosovo fuels ethnic cleansing. Hypocrisy, says freelance journalist Sanna Vestin.
A couple of years ago, most asylum-seekers were allowed to stay, even though the application process was long and humiliating. Today, ninety per cent of the applicants are rejected. Contrary to what the Minister of Migration and Asylum Policy says, this is not because asylum-seekers of today lack legitimate grounds for asylum. Sure, the wars in Bosnia and Afghanistan have ended and Saddam Hussein has been toppled, but there is still ongoing oppression and persecution in the world. The Armenians from Azerbaijan and the Roma from Kosovo, for example, do not migrate out of pleasure but because of ethnic harassment – house burnings, rape, stonings, murder… It is no strange coincidence that these children in particular seek refuge in apathy. These people are fleeing from conditions so harsh that adults and children alike rather take their lives than go back.
When the Swedish authorities get away with rejecting them anyhow, that is almost always because the grounds of asylum have been defined away and the responsibility juggled back to the home country or some other “safe” country. The home country has signed this or that convention, the home country has a functioning police force and judiciary. A person that has been persecuted may resettle in a different part of the country. Freedom of speech is legally guaranteed. Rape is illegal just like in Sweden. Ethnic discrimination is not being sanctioned by the state. Health care is available – and so on. With arguments like these, any form of persecution may be rejected and any trauma or disease becomes irrelevant.
The authorities used to spend a lot of time questioning the credibility of asylum-seekers. This continues in a routine fashion but is actually not needed anymore. Many recent negative decisions do not question at all the story presented by the asylum-seeker. The justification for rejection will still be the same for all that have fled the same country. Conveniently, Swedish authorities are under no obligation to follow up whether the rejected case actually receives protection in the home country. Instead, everything is based on the formal promises that other countries have given – and that they are obliged to give in order to be eligible for trade agreements and aid.
The UN Refugee Agency UNHCR is engaged in an uneven battle for the right to asylum by publishing recommendations for specific countries and by highlighting those groups that are actually facing risks. One example is the clear recommendations that the UNHCR has issued regarding the Roma and Serbs from Kosovo who under no circumstances should be repatriated. The UN administration in Kosovo, UNMIK, refuses to let rejected asylum-seekers back into the country if their security cannot be granted. A couple of weeks ago, UNMIK stated in a letter that seriously traumatized individuals should not be returned to Kosovo, due to the lack of health care.
Most Swedes probably remember Kosovo as the country from which a million Kosovo-Albanians were driven out in just a couple of weeks in the spring of 1999. We saw them on television, desperate people crammed together in muddy fields in Macedonia or on trucks in Albania. The EU countries did not want to receive them. It is not as widely known that Kosovo still to this day remains a high-risk area from which thousands have fled to Sweden in the last two years. Nowadays, it is Serbs and Roma that cannot live in Kosovo other than in UN-protected enclaves. In March last year, pogrom-like riots targeted, among others, Serbs and Roma trying to return to their homes.
On March 29 2005, the Swedish government, together with the governments of Denmark, Norway and Iceland, took one further step towards defining away the right to asylum. In a letter from the Danish Ministry of Refugee, Immigration and Integration Affairs to the Acting UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Wendy Chamberlin, the Nordic governments expressed regret that they had “experienced difficulties in implementing returns to Kosovo, ” and that the main obstacle was the UNHCR recommendations.
The Nordic governments claim that UNHCR contributes to ethnic cleansing by demanding protection of certain groups. Moreover, they state that the internal flight alternative should be allowed in these cases. Obviously, it does not really matter whether UNHCR contributes to ethnic cleansing, as long as the Nordic governments are relieved from responsibility for it.
In a similar letter to UNMIK, the Nordic governments complain that UNMIK has given itself the right to stop the return of rejected asylum-seekers. The governments point out that UNMIK’s “refusal to receive rejected asylum-seekers with minor medical problems will not guarantee residence permits in any of our countries. ”
However, the term minor medical problems does not correlate very well with those cases that have attracted attention (including those Albanians that were affected by the earlier persecutions and the exodus in 1999). Among the rejected cases, there was at least one apathetic child as well as several children and adults with serious posttraumatic stress disorder – which was the very reason behind UNMIK’s protest. At least one of these returns was halted because the European Court of Human Rights had demanded to scrutinize the case. At the end of the letter to UNMIK, the governments state that they are happy to contribute to the reconstruction process and to develop a program for repatriation.
It is certainly remarkable that the Nordic governments in this way are attempting to put pressure on UN experts to change their standpoint regarding a group that risks persecution. But even more outrageous is the argument that granting asylum fuels ethnic cleansing.
Was it ethnic cleansing to grant protection to Jews fleeing Nazi Germany? Was it wrong to save Bosnians during the war? The whole concept of right to asylum is undermined if protecting refugees is considered as supporting ethnic cleansing.
It may certainly contribute to ethnic cleansing if refugees are placed in areas that other refugees have left and which these ought to be able to return to. This has not only been a problem in the Balkans, but also in many African countries. Nevertheless, this is not an argument against granting protection but, on the contrary, an argument against sending refugees back to the area. There is ethnic cleansing going on. The Nordic governments should accuse those responsible in Kosovo, not those who are trying to save lives.
Sanna Vestin
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