Conscription and the media narrative on refugees

The plight of people in this situation is made even worse by the hesitancy of courts to find that opposition to conscription – even to forceful conscription by illegitimate groups – itself counts as a “political opinion” that might ground an asylum claim. (For the U.S., this is set out in the case I.N.S. v. Elias-Zacarias, 502 U.S. 478, 482 (1992), a case that I think is pretty clearly wrongly decided, but that is still good law.) I don’t know for sure how adjudicators in Europe have addressed this issue, but if they follow the same approach as the U.S. has, the deck is really stacked here. Good lawyers and advocates have made some inroads in some areas, but it’s a hard area of the law. (Again, I think that most of the relevant case law here is pretty bad – some of it among the worse asylum decisions – but am just pointing out that, legally speaking, it’s been a very hard case for asylum applicants to make.)

This strays a bit, but if anyone’s interested in practical methods of getting refugee credentials recognized this presentation from Norway is inspiring: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/abdrs6uq38azfc1/AACb1IEZDdlR1AOPRAwMJN8Ra?dl=0&preview=EN_24_1500_1_Marina_Malgina_NOKUT.pdf

Essentially refugees with a lot of learning arrive in Norway and may become eligible for a process in which, even in the absence of documents, a degree in the field may be awarded based on interviews with professionals in the field. Maybe this program will survive Norway’s latest government. (Chris mentions Eritrea above: it’s also been the practice of the Eritrean government to withhold all documentation until military obligations are met, which may of course never be met.)

In Eritrea, conscription is actually forced labour on non-military work, hence the protection. As Philip says, conscription per se is not the issue. As an example of the broader issue raised in the OP, Iran tells Afghan refugees that things will go a lot easier for them as refugees if they join their militias in Syria.

I’ve been struggling to think of a similar case like Syria now, where civil war has been undertaken as Total War.

The recent summit in New York for the UN and Obama’s summit to go with it give me the most hope for the plight of refugees. In Australia our refugee policies have got worse as bipartisan politics condemns people to uncertain terms of detention in offshore sites.

Chris Bertram, do you have any ideas how community based refugee advocacy groups could try getting involved with the UN/national police making that has been scheduled by the UN to take place in 2017 and 2018?

The group I’m in is an Australian wide refugee advocacy group with branches right around the country, our branch in town has talked about the UN New York Declaration and Australia agreeing to take part in the process over 2017 and 2018, but we aren’t sure how we could engage in the process as a NGO community group.

I saw historian Joy Damousi speak the other year on refugees which is her new area of study, after previously looking at war and gender and things.

She has an article that touches on the issue of how support for refugees often coalesces around child refugees, “Humanitarianism in the Interwar Years: How Australians responded to the child refugees of the Armenian genocide and the Greek-Turkish exchange”

“This article considers the response in Australia to two international events that involved humanitarian aid with a specific focus on child refugees — the Armenian genocide of 1915 and its subsequent repercussions, and the 1923 populations exchange between Greece and Turkey. An examination of these campaigns shows how the cause of child refugees generated a form of humanitarianism in Australia comprised of several strands. These can be characterised as Christian humanitarianism, feminist internationalism, an intersection of national and international perspectives and an educative endeavour to impart information to the public. This article draws these strands together into a narrative that describes a varied and multilayered understanding of humanitarianism in Australia during the 1920s that coalesced around the plight of refugee children but was not transferred to the treatment of Australia’s Indigenous and migrant populations.”

ZM, you could try reaching out to the United Nations N.G.O. Committee on Migration. The committee’s work mostly takes place in New York City, but they might have ideas and would certainly welcome the opportunity to establish contact with allies in Australia.

https://ngo-migration.org

The Australian Foreign Minister Julie Bishop said a while ago she observed trust had broken down between America and Russia over Syria, and after recent events is calling for both powers to broker a cease fire and also asking for an investigation into the mass atrocities in Aleppo:

“Ms Bishop said the claims must be investigated and a political solution was the only way to end the civil war which has now raged for six years and has killed hundreds of thousands of people.

“”This is one of the worst humanitarian disasters that we have witnessed in many, many years,” she said. “There are reports of mass atrocities. They must be investigated. This is an appalling humanitarian disaster and the conflict has to end.”

It was the Australian government’s contention that no military solution could be brokered while either side believed they could defeat the opposition’s forces, Ms Bishop said.

Rather, a political solution overseen by Russia – allied to the regime of Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad – and the US was the only feasible way to end the violence, she said.

“Russia and the US must find a way forward to stop the killing and to allow humanitarian relief to be provided,” Ms Bishop told ABC radio on Wednesday. “Those backing Syria and those backing the opposition must sit down to discuss a peace deal.””

From The Sydney Morning Herald

Both a preferential tendency for an individual to flee the country, and for the nation to conscript the individual, if that individual is a young male, derive from the same factor — that young men are the least attached to a family.

From the individual’s point of view, however dangerous and difficult it has become to try and carry on in the home country, the journey to anywhere else is likely to present great dangers and difficulties as well, and these get much worse if you’re taking young children and elderly adults with you. People who are the freest from the responsibility to care for the young and the old are freest to flee.

From the nation’s point of view, if it needs manpower, it’s least disruptive to take it from among those least responsible for the care of the elderly and the young.

#13… why do you think wars between countries are worse than civil wars? If anything, in a lot of cases, they are much worse. An occupying enemy force does not have a ton of people telling them who they have to kill, who are the lefty/conservative/sectarian/whatever on town and who is nice, dont have untold years of personal grudges to settle, and, most of the time, dont operate on a vision of a necessary transformation of the country that requires the total extermination of the betrayers that ruined the sacred motherland/revolution/religion…

In any case, the Spanish Civil War? More or less same size population then than Syria now, more or less the same ballpark # of dead. I think less in refugees/exiles – about 300000 or so. Country so thoroughly trashed (and then so stupidly managed) that the 1935 levels of income were not seen again till the the end of the fifties.

And if it is a predictor of anything, whoever ends up winning will go on purges and repression for years to ensure everybody knows who won and what price the losers had to pay.

ZM et al: I agree with J-D, but point out that the one that sprang to my mind was both recent and has recently been more or less resolved with the split between North and South Sudan. A couple of million people died and it was nasty even by war standards. What made it different was poor internet coverage and of course that the participants were black Africans.

Australia has a few Sudanese refugees, mostly from what is now South Sudan, but their experience here is generally poor. The case that hit me was a man arrested in Melbun, then allegedly released before being found nearby a few hours later beaten and drowned. The relationship between the police and community was such that the police were unable to convince anyone local that they didn’t beat the guy to death then dump him in the river. Many white Australians like me find it hard to disagree with them – Australian Police have a long, proud history of killing marginalised people.

Apparently a lot of Sudanese want to go back: http://www.abc.net.au/news/2012-11-26/90pc-of-sudanese-migrants-want-to-return-home/4392956

The preponderance of young men has been treated by those who want to keep refugees out as a reason for suspicion. The “genuine” refugees for the newspaper columnists are mothers and children. It is the toddler drowned on the beach, like Aylan Kurdi, who elicits public sympathy. But young men are often the ones with most reason to flee.

I think the attempt to set up some kind of competition between children, women and young men is regrettable.
http://www.savethechildren.org.uk/2016-09/increase-child-suicide-attempts-madaya-sieges-worsen-across-syria
http://metro.co.uk/2016/12/13/this-is-our-last-chance-to-saves-lives-in-syria-say-red-cross-6319589/

In modern warfare, more civilians die than combatants. And that’s not to say conscription of young men isn’t to be condemned. Just that it is *all* unacceptable.

You can, and I would argue you should, also look at this from a different perspective. Had all of these hundreds of thousands of young men taken up arms, they would still have a country. As it stands, they pretty much don’t and they should largely blame themselves for it. They should’ve defended it. If they don’t like the regime, fight it, change it. If they don’t like the opposition, same argument applies. DO something. As it stands, they removed themselves from the conflict in a self-serving way and are now a burden on others. Why should they be helped when they cannot help themselves? They cannot in all honesty say that this is not their fight – the fight is for the existence of their country whichever camp they belong to…

Re “alternative view”‘s comment:
Had they “taken up arms”? Those who provide the arms get to call the tune. Their choice was whether to fight for a psychotically vindictive dictatorship, a spectrum of supposedly religious nutcases, or a handful of ethno-nationalists. Maybe if they had gotten started a long time earlier, some Syrians could have been ready to set up a nice liberal militia when the government went shaky. Given the sort of resources that would have needed, though, you can hardly blame young men for that failure.

The trouble with 24 is that this argument assumes there is a “good” side to join. A civil war means normal politics has failed and the parties may be all politically objectionable. If there was a reasonable stable path to follow there would be no civil war to begin with.

#24

Imagine that you are a young peasant boy in Russia in 1917. As Revolution breaks out and violence and death roll over the land, you find that you want to fight for something. Unfortunately, you have a limited set of options. None of the sides are willing to accept your neutrality and all sides are ultimately horrific. The Bolsheviks are standing up for the working class, but ultimately don’t care too much for peasants and are slaughtering every aristocrat they can find. The White Army supports a repressive Tsar and landed aristocracy and conducts repeated and bloody counter-reprisals on anyone they assumes has Bolshevik sympathies (mostly fellow peasants). The Anarchists seem viable at first, but for the most part they spend their time in the city of Petrograd raping and looting. The Ukrainian nationalists are composed of free peasants using this opportunity to try to free themselves of the Russian yoke, but ultimately aren’t too interested in your fate. Choose your own adventure!

In a case like that, I would see fleeing as the only sane option. When all the possible countervailing forces are terrible, you may not get the opportunity to fight for you beliefs. In a place and time where all of the well-armed, well-organized entities are authoritarian in different ways, fighting for one of them is immoral. If you fight alone, your life will be quickly extinguished in vain.

So it took 24 comments for someone to bring up what I was talking about, blaming the refugees for the situation and calling them cowards. Even if there is a clear side to fight for and someone isn’t going to be forced to fight for another side I don’t see why they must fight. The more responsible thing might be to stay alive and, maybe, earn money to support their family and even tr and get them out of the country too. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori.

The trouble with 24 is that this argument assumes there is a “good” side to join.

The right-wing answer, of course, is that you can create one.

[neither collective-action/coordination problems nor opportunity cost exist in right-wing thought.]

alternative view

Which is that if people make a voluntary choice to flee rather than sort things out, it is their choice and they can hardly expect others to be either sympathetic to their plight or helpful in that. They *might* get the help & sympathy, but they cannot *expect* it.

The question ‘what treatment can They expect from Us?’ might be an important question for They to ask themselves, but it’s not clear to me why you would suppose it to be an important question for Us; surely the important question for Us is ‘how should we treat Them?’, and what They can expect from Us does not appear to have any bearing on that.

Whether you intend to or not, you create the impression that you think that if They have made choices, then We should not feel the same disposition to help Them as we might if … if what? If They had not made choices? Everybody makes choices, and everybody winds up in situations which are partly the product of those choices. Since this is true of everybody, it doesn’t make anybody less deserving of help. Yes, the people who have fled Syria have, obviously, chosen to flee Syria, but in no way does it follow that they are less deserving of help than they would be if they had chosen not to flee Syria. For one thing, if they had not fled Syria, that would also have been their choice. Would you then argue that the people who have not fled Syria ‘can hardly expect’ help and sympathy because it was their choice not to flee Syria? Is it your position that nobody can expect help and sympathy?

LFC,

Following Obama’s comments on Syria, and not being able to intervene more strongly without international support or support from the House of Congress, I was wondering if Syria has become a bit of a proxy war due to the geography and American interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan. If Iraq becomes peaceful and part of the American leaning bloc of countries in the Middle East, the geography means you get American leaning countries from Saudi Arabia to Turkey which is trying to join the EU. Would this be why Russia and Iran have taken such a strong role in the Syrian conflict, and why America hasn’t brokered a cease fire with Russia?

collin street@34: “neither collective-action/coordination problems nor opportunity cost exist in right-wing thought”.

I o not have an extensive knowledge of right-wing thought, but I would be grateful if you would explain why all forms of it are inconsistent with both collective-action/coordination problems and opportunity cost.I would have thought the second in particular is a concept perfectly compatible with left, right or central modes of thought. Also, many right-wingers seem to advocate collective action, and may have perceived problems with coordination.

Should we abandon refugees from other nations?

The question one of the major ‘left-leaning’ parties in the richest nation on earth is asking is similar, but not unconnected:

“Yet as a matter of politics, those in Mr. Biden’s camp believe the party’s ethos of inclusion may add up to less than the sum of its parts. In the minds of those Democrats, they will not be a majority party again in Washington or across much of the country without winning back white voters of modest means.”

Support for those left behind begins at home, it seems, like it or not. We’re all familiar with the boilerplate “don’t tell me of the hard times of the white working class, especially men.” Ignoring/dismissing the concerns of white working-class voters has real consequences, if any of us hope to make space for refugees, economic, and otherwise.

I also read in the NYT this weekend that the election of Trump is the same as the coup in Chile, which gives folks some sense of how poorly the intellectual left seems to understand that the ground is collapsing beneath their/our feet. (I’d prefer not to be included in this group.)

White working-class voters – Should Democrats cut them loose?

http://nyti.ms/2hIRAi1