Home ›› 26 May 2022 ›› Opinion
Since the Russian annexation of Crimea in 2014, Eastern Europe has faced a migration crisis. The ongoing Ukraine Russia crisis has severely exacerbated the situation. Several million Ukrainians are internally displaced or have fled the country and face an uncertain future. At the same time, Western-imposed sanctions and the creation of the Eurasian Economic Union have affected Russia’s migration policies. These processes could change the social landscape of the region for many years to come.
During the 2015 refugee crisis, the EU called for detaining arriving refugees for up to 18 months. Not so today in the wake of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. The reasons for this difference point to an intractable challenge in Europe's ability to embrace the international refugee protection regime. Russia's invasion of Ukraine has triggered one of the largest and fastest refugee movements that Europe has witnessed since the end of World War II. By 2 March, only seven days into the war, 874,000 people were estimated to have fled to neighbouring countries. More than 14 million people are thought to have fled their homes since Russia's invasion of Ukraine, in what the United Nations has termed as Europe’s fastest-moving refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War.
According to data from UNHCR, the speed of the exodus is already bigger than the migration crisis of 2015, when 1.3 million asylum seekers from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan and Africa, fleeing poverty and wars, entered Europe. In the history of accepting refugees, countries have shown an erratic streak. Universal human characteristics have often been overlooked in favour of the particular: race, cultural habits, religion. Even immigration nations, such as the United States and Australia, have had their xenophobic twists and turns on the issue of who to accept, be they victims of pogroms, war crimes, genocide, or famine.
In 2021, those fleeing Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq and Yemen were left stranded by the hundreds in the freezing woods along the Polish-Belarusian border. Eight individuals perished. In this cruel farce of inhumanity, the European Union, along with Poland and the Baltic states, notably Lithuania, must shoulder the blame. The president of the European Council, Charles Michel, has been openly calling the Belarusian President Alexander Lukashenko’s fashioning of irregular arrivals as a hybrid attack, a brutal attack, a violent attack and a shameful attack. Globally, the war in Ukraine is now giving countries a chance to be very moral to the right type of refugee. They are fleeing the ravages and viciousness of the Russian Bear, the bully of history; this is an opportunity to show more accommodating colours. If nothing else, it also provides a distracting cover for the more brutal policies used against other, less desirable irregular arrivals. This is a strategy that is working, with media outlets such as USA Today running amnesiac pieces claiming that Ukrainian families, in fighting ‘Putin’s murderous regime’, were engaged in a ‘battle for life and death; there is no time for debates about political correctness”. Countries in Western Europe are also showing a different face to those fleeing Ukraine. The United Kingdom, which is seeking to adopt an Australian version of refugee processing the use of distant offshore islands and third countries, lengthy detention spells and the frustrating of asylum claims has now opened its arms for 200,000 Ukrainian refugees.
Distant Australia, whose participation in the illegal war against Iraq which produced refugees and asylum seekers that would eventually head towards the antipodes, is now offering to accept a higher intake of refugees from Ukraine and fast track their applications. The same politicians speak approvingly of a system that imprisons asylum seekers and refugees indefinitely in Pacific outposts, promising to never resettle them in Australia. The Morrison government has presided over the dismantling of Australia’s refugee intake, leaving Australia unable to adequately respond to emergencies, with 2022 ‘marking the lowest refugee intake in nearly 50 years.
True, the global pandemic did not aid matters, but Covid-19 did little in terms of seeing a precipitous decline in refugee places. The reaction from other European countries to the unfolding refugee crisis has also been swift and unified. EU member states announced that they would trigger the temporary protection directive, unused since it was created in 2001 after the wars in Yugoslavia and Kosovo. It will give Ukrainian refugees the right to live and work in the EU for up to three years without a visa. An amendment changed the proposed text of the directive to only extend the protection to Ukrainian nationals instead of all refugees fleeing the war.
The UNHCR has applauded efforts across Europe to deal with the refugee crisis but called on the current show of solidarity to be preserved throughout the coming months and, potentially, years as the violence escalates inside Ukraine. Alongside Ukrainian refugees are groups of foreign nationals from countries including Pakistan, Ghana, Morocco and Somalia, many of them students, but also workers and asylum seekers. There have been reports of foreign nationals being racially abused and discriminated against as they tried to cross to safety.
Ukrainian nationals will be given the right to live and work in the European Union for up to three years without having to claim asylum after emergency measures were approved by European states. The sticking point is that many countries do not want an automatic burden-sharing mechanism that forces them to take on a share of asylum cases from front-line states. This means they cannot have arrivals any more, but no one wants to say that. They are all hiding behind their figures. Nobody wants anybody, but they all want sort of a more open approach. It doesn’t work. However, these rights have not been extended to people fleeing Ukraine from other countries, who will still have to claim asylum. It is currently unclear how they will be processed once they pass into neighbouring countries.
Sadly, these double standards have reared in the response to non-Ukrainians fleeing the war in Ukraine. There are a growing number of accounts of students and migrants from Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who have faced racist treatment, obstruction, and violence trying to flee Ukraine. Many described being prevented from boarding trains and buses in Ukrainian towns while priority was given to Ukrainian nationals; others described being aggressively pulled aside and stopped by Ukrainian border guards when trying to cross into neighbouring countries. There are also accounts of Polish authorities taking aside African students and refusing them entry into Poland, although the Polish Ambassador to the UN told a General Assembly meeting that assertions of race or religion-based discrimination at Poland's border were "a complete lie and a terrible insult to us.” he asserted that “nationals of all countries who suffered from Russian aggression or whose life is at risk can seek shelter in my country.” According to the Ambassador, people from 125 different nationalities have been admitted into Poland from Ukraine.
The Ukraine refugee crisis presents Europe with not only an important opportunity to demonstrate its generosity, humanitarian values, and commitment to the global refugee protection regime; it is also a critical moment of reflection.
The writer is a freelance columnist. He can be contacted at raihan567@yahoo.co.uk
