The cold and bitter attitude in Europe towards migrants and refugees is nothing but an echo of colonial and imperial supremacist thinking, writes Abdel-Qader Yassine* In March I set off for an international conference in Luxembourg, the organisers having booked me on a Sabena (Belgian Airlines) flight from Gothenburg via Brussels. At Sabena's checking counter at Gothenburg's international airport I discovered that I had no chance of boarding the plane. I wondered why, and the ground hostess checking in my luggage pointed out that I am Palestinian and that my visa to Belgium had expired. With a touch of superior reproach in my voice I enlightened the Belgian lady that I had not planned to break my journey in Belgium. I went on, topping up the sarcasm, that in any case I had only a 45-minute stopover in Brussels, sufficient simply for me to catch my flight to Luxembourg, a country for which I had a valid travel document and a visa. With disinterested slowness, the ground hostess informed me that Palestinians ought to have a special permit to enter Belgium and that I would not be able to get on the flight unless I had my Belgian visa renewed. It was when I let go of my "Palestinian" temper, that a Sabena check-in supervisor arrived on the scene and took me aside to inform me that their decision not to accept me as a passenger was part of elaborate new legislation that the airline had received from Belgian authorities, a draconian set of new regulations restricting entry of non- Europeans into Belgium. She then showed me a copy of the legislation which stated, among other things, that not only would I not be allowed, under the prevailing conditions, to board any Belgian plane, but neither would I be allowed to touch Belgian soil or enter that country's air space for the duration of a single second, even if I had the right of re-entry into Sweden (where my trip was beginning) and had a visa to Luxembourg (the country of my destination) -- and even were I to stay in the very aircraft that had taken me there -- unless I had a valid visa! I protested vigorously and in harsher language, but to no avail. Eventually I did what I had to do. I recovered my luggage and stood at a KLM (Royal Dutch Airlines) counter to be booked on a flight to Luxembourg, this time via Amsterdam, which, to my chagrin, would not leave until 2pm that day. As I waited for the computer to change the route but not the final destination of my trip, I calculated that my trip to Luxembourg would take five hours longer -- five hours in which I had all the time in the cosmos to curse. But curse whom? Curse myself, curse my naïveté; indeed curse the European and Arab worlds in which I lived. Finally, I cursed the lamentable politics of hate and of falsehood, cursed European politicians who insist on working "non-European" migrants into statistics of electoral gains, reducing every "non-European" into a trickle joining the "flood" of migrants with which Europe is allegedly overrun. And I wondered how my presence for a transitory 45 minutes within a secure and semi-prison- like Brussels airport might have warranted so much paranoia? How are we of the Third World to react to "Fortress Europe," an ideology of Eurocentrism benefiting from terror tactics and arson attacks on children and women? As a result of Europe's growing hysteria, newspapers all over the continent speak of "floods of migrants masquerading as refugees" coming from Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe. Real people are depicted as bestial hordes swarming at the sluices of well-to-do Western Europe. Would it be unethical of me to accuse the authors of these articles of deliberate misinformation? Is it worthwhile to remind some ill-informed Eurocentrists that within living memory it has been the practice and policy of imperial Europe to shoot its way to wherever its economic strategists had set their hearts and minds; that no sense of scriptural justice, no sense of secular morality, prevented these greedy men from massacring the natives of lands overseas, whose peoples they moulded into second or third class citizens in their own homes. In the 20th century and our own, millions of European nationals abandon their homelands and take up permanent residence in Africa, Australia, the United States, or Canada. Meanwhile, the largest contingent of African descent ever to make it to the so-called "New World" did not go of their own free will but were taken forcibly by these very European émigrés and settlers as slaves. Until recently the world had not known of Arabs or Africans migrating to Europe in large numbers. Where emigration has boomed is in relation to conflicts with which the West is linked: Israel's invasion of Lebanon in 1982, the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, and civil strife which has erupted in various parts of Africa. When I hear of Europeans speaking lamentably of the "refugee flood" I cannot help remembering that Pakistan alone took care of five million Afghani refugees, and that Somalia, one of the poorest nations in the world, until the country began to fall apart (believe it or not), supported a similarly large population of refugees, to the extent that one in three had come from somewhere else. Honestly speaking, personally I find it an affront to logic for Europeans to say that they are unable to meet the needs of the small influx of migrants that have come their way. One hears the slogan "Fortress Europe", a phrase with a disturbing resonance, taking one's memory back to the erstwhile days of fascism, a notion as nightmare-producing and exclusivist as the idea, which sadly persists, that any given continent belongs only to a certain race. I hope Hegel was wrong when he said, "History teaches us that we never learn from history." * The writer is a Palestinian researcher at the Centre for the Study of Cultural Contact and International Migration at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden.
