Refugee deaths, refugee lives
You may remember the name Abdulfatah Hamdallah. He drowned in the English Channel in August 2020 after he and a friend got on an inflatable dinghy in Calais to head for British shores. Abdulfatah, who previously told friends that he was unable to swim, lost his life when their boat capsized soon after they set out. His friend survived. Much ink was spilled on Abdulfatah’s age – initial reports suggested that he was a teenager, but his age has since variously been put at 22 and 28 years. The Daily Mail gave over its Facebook pages to readers, some of whom made no effort to conceal their identity and posted racist comments and delighted in his death. Home Secretary Priti Patel labelled the death ‘an upsetting and tragic loss of a young life’, but she quickly reverted to type by stressing the need to curb ‘people smugglers’ and to urge the French authorities to prevent refugees from leaving France in the first place. The British government, the Guardian reported, ‘rejected the claim that UK policy was to blame for Abdulfatah’s death and insisted the UK did more than other EU member states to resettle refugees’.
No sooner had British readers scanned this news item than another story briefly hit the headlines. Mercy Baguma, a 34-year old Ugandan asylum seeker, was found dead in a flat in Glasgow. What made this story ‘newsworthy’ was not her death – there had recently been other deaths of refugees and asylum seekers in the city – nor was it the familiar weasel words of the Home Office in response to her death (‘This is a tragic situation … The Home Office takes the wellbeing of all those in the asylum system extremely seriously, and we will be conducting a full investigation’). What made the story newsworthy was the fact that her one-year old son was found next to her body in a malnourished state. An inquest will in due course establish the cause of death.
Do (some) refugees’ lives matter only in so far as they die prematurely and in the glare of some kind of publicity, such as happened in September 2015 when the body of three-year old Alan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach?
Judith Butler’s meditations on ‘grievable life’ are relevant here. They prompt questions in my mind about the premature death of refugees, including the question: What about life before death?
In my recent book, The Unsettling of Europe, I described several instances in which people had drowned at sea. But this did not exhaust the litany of premature deaths. There was no shortage of material to describe racist attacks, including arson attacks on buildings housing refugees and migrants. I had no room to discuss all of these. I mentioned the fact that two Vietnamese men were killed in an arson attack in Hamburg on 22 August 1980, but I omitted their names: Nguyễn Ngọc Châu (22) and Đỗ Anh Lân (18). There are plenty of other examples of murderous attacks.
I also mentioned several suicides, attempted and successful, including the self-immolation of 22-year old student Kostas Georgakis, who set himself alight on a square in Genoa on 19 September 1970 in protest at the Greek dictatorship, and the suicide of 23-year old Kemal Altun, who threw himself from the window of a courthouse in West Berlin on 30 August 1983 in order to avoid his imminent deportation to Turkey where, as a left-wing activist, he had incurred the wrath of the military dictatorship. I know of a more recent and equally distressing event that took place outside the offices of UNHCR in Geneva on the morning of 23 October 2019, when a Syrian Kurdish man who had recently travelled from Germany doused himself with petrol and set fire to his body. He suffered 80 per cent burns. I have been unable to establish whether or not he survived. It is important to emphasise that moments such as these of excruciating finality have a political purpose, which means that we can speak of life after death.
Then there are deaths in detention or during deportation, the result of harsh institutional treatment, neglect or physical assault, all of it hidden from view and rarely subject to proper scrutiny. What has been happening in Libya provides one illustration, demonstrating that European governments turn a blind eye in the hope that conditions will act as a deterrent to migrants and refugees who attempt the Mediterranean crossing.
Assigning responsibility for premature deaths may sometimes be fairly straightforward, as in the case of the 23 undocumented Chinese cockle-pickers who died in Morecambe Bay in February 2004, having been recruited by a gangmaster who left them to their own devices; or the recent verdicts in relation to the deaths of 39 Vietnamese migrants who suffocated in the course of being transported between Zeebrugge and Purfleet in October 2019. But a courtroom verdict that assigns direct responsibility does little or nothing to broach wider questions about the background political context.
To be sure, politicians in Britain and elsewhere have made a habit of pointing the figure at ‘people smugglers’. They have gone further and accused NGOs of indirectly encouraging migrants to risk crossing the Mediterranean in unseaworthy boats knowing – it is argued – that they will be rescued in the event of getting into difficulty. But the suggestion that NGOs’ search and rescue operations act as a pull factor is difficult to sustain. Besides, the recent measures taken against NGOs such as refusing disembarkment of passengers on board their vessels have not deterred migrant journeys. The point, however, is that these arguments are designed to absolve governments from accepting their share of the blame by virtue of having erected administrative barriers to entry, including obstacles to making a legal claim for asylum.
There are other aspects worth considering as well. Human geographer Avril Maddrell writes of ‘deathscapes’ as a way of drawing attention to the emotional significance of space and place. This neatly encapsulates what I attempted to write about in The Unsettling of Europe, where I included a chapter on death, dying and bereavement. At that point I was particularly interested in thinking about where individual migrants choose to be buried, and what this might imply for ideas of the ‘final journey’. But of course many refugees and migrants are deprived of such choice. With no prospect of his body being taken back to Sudan, Abdulfatah Hamdallah was buried on French soil. Mercy Baguma may find a final resting place in Uganda, depending on Covid-19 restrictions. One might dismiss these as individual tragedies affecting family members, except that they speak to broader issues of neglect.
At the same time, one can find examples of charitable initiatives by individuals, such as Boubacar Wann Diallo, himself a refugee from Guinea, who has made it his business to identify migrants whose bodies wash up near his home in Nador, a city on the Mediterranean coast in northern Morocco, and to give them a proper burial, since few next of kin can afford the costs of repatriating the body. Again, however, it is important to point out that the risks that these migrants took are a direct result of the EU’s decision to encourage Morocco to deter migrants from accessing the Spanish enclave of Melilla.
What about life before death? This is an opportunity to think of refugees beyond the circumstances of their premature death: of refugees as complete human beings, with hopes and aspirations, skills and capabilities. Contributions to refugee history – by which I mean the growing scholarship and this website – are making an important intervention in this regard.
Who was Mercy? Who was Abdulfatah? Snippets in British newspapers disclosed that Abdulfatah Hamdallah had travelled from Sudan to Libya and then made his way from Italy to France, where he eked out an uncertain existence for three years. Mercy Baguma came from a privileged background. Friends spoke of her as a hardworking woman who lost her job in the UK thanks to the change to her immigration status which made it impossible for her work or claim benefits. But these are tiny fragments of a life. It is striking that both of them had a connection to the UK by virtue of having been born in countries that were colonised by Britain, although this appeared to escape the attention of journalists who reported the story. I’m also struck by the fact that Abdulfatah and his siblings who remained in Libya were bent on sending remittances back to Sudan – another dimension of life before death.
I conclude, therefore, by insisting on the fundamental need to think of refugees as human beings. They should not be defined by displacement, still less as figures that only register on the radar – sometimes literally so – when they face peril of a new kind or indeed succumb to a premature death.
Further reading/listening
The responses of Daily Mail readers to Abdulfatah Hamdallah’s death are reported in this article in the London Economic. Extensive coverage of the impact of EU migration policy in Libya can be found in The New Humanitarian. The ‘Vietgerman’ podcast Rice And Shine has an episode (in German) on the deaths of Nguyễn Ngọc Châu and Đỗ Anh Lân in Hamburg on 22 August 1980.
Nadine El-Enany, ‘Aylan Kurdi: the human refugee’, Law Critique, 27 (2016), 13-15
Peter Gatrell, The Unsettling of Europe: the Great Migration, 1945 to the Present (Allen Lane, 2019)
Alistair Hunter, 'Deathscapes in diaspora: contesting space and negotiating home in contexts of post-migration diversity', Social & Cultural Geography, 17, no. 2 (2016), 247-61
Avril Maddrell and James D. Sidaway, eds, Deathscapes: Spaces for Death, Dying, Mourning and Remembrance (Routledge, 2010)
The image accompanying this post shows ‘Passages’, Dani Karavan’s memorial to Walter Benjamin at Portbou, Spain.
