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    Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Time
    Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Time
    Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Time
    Ebook147 pages1 hour

    Rescue: Refugees and the Political Crisis of Our Time

    By David Miliband

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    About this ebook

    We are in the midst of a global refugee crisis. Sixty five million people are fleeing for their lives. The choices are urgent, not just for them but for all of us. What can we possibly do to help?

    With compassion and clarity, David Miliband shows why we should care and how we can make a difference. He takes us from war zones in the Middle East to peaceful suburbs in America to explain the crisis and show what can be done, not just by governments with the power to change policy but by citizens with the urge to change lives. His innovative and practical call to action shows that the crisis need not overwhelm us.

    Miliband says this is a fight to uphold the best of human nature in the face of rhetoric and policy that humor the worst. He defends the international order built by western leaders out of the ashes of World War II, but says now is the time for reform. Describing his family story and drawing revealing lessons from his life in politics, David Miliband shows that if we fail refugees, then we betray our own history, values, and interests. The message is simple: rescue refugees and we rescue ourselves.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster/ TED
    Release dateNov 14, 2017
    ISBN9781501154409
    Author

    David Miliband

    David Miliband is President and CEO of the International Rescue Committee (IRC). From 2007 to 2010, Miliband was Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of the United Kingdom, driving advancements in human rights and representing the UK throughout the world. Miliband graduated from Oxford University in 1987 with a first class honors degree in philosophy, politics, and economics and received a master’s degree in political science in 1989 from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, which he attended as a Kennedy Scholar. President Bill Clinton’s called him, “one of the ablest, most creative public servants of our time.” Rescue is his first book.

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      Rescue - David Miliband

      INTRODUCTION

      The first refugees I ever met were my parents.

      My father came to the United Kingdom as a refugee from Belgium in 1940. The day the Germans invaded, he and his father fled their home in Brussels. Walking and hitching rides, they made it to the port of Ostende and got on the last boat out of Belgium. In Britain, my father flourished. He learned English, graduated from secondary school in west London, qualified for the London School of Economics, and after a year of university joined the Royal Navy. He worked at sea on the cans—headphones used to listen to intercepts of German messaging. As a boy, I would feel great pride when he told me stories of the D-Day landings: he said that wherever you looked in the dawn light on June 6, 1944, there were boats of all shapes and sizes, so many that you could hardly see the sea.

      My mother has her own refugee story, one that starts in Poland. She survived the war with her mother and sister, hiding first in a convent and then with an incredibly brave Warsaw family who welcomed her in. In 1946, her mother sent her to the United Kingdom to start a new life. Her father, David, was killed in the war. No one really talked about him when I was young. However, recently a German history group wrote to say that there was new confirmation that David Kozak had been sent from Auschwitz to Hailfingen concentration camp near Stuttgart toward the end of 1944. He died there in 1945.

      My parents did what is most important to so many refugees: they gave their children the security they themselves had never had. My dad was nine when Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany; sixteen when the Nazis invaded his homeland and he fled to Great Britain; twenty-one when the war ended. The rise of fascism was the shadow over his childhood. My mother was five when she first had to go into hiding, seven when she was saved by the Warsaw family who pretended she was a relative, twelve when her mother put her on a boat to Britain with a group of Polish Jewish orphans. They were promised, and given, a new start in life by a prominent British rabbi, Solomon Schonfeld.

      My parents ensured that I had none of these concerns. We were a middle-class, albeit foreign, British family. We were conscious of being Jewish but were not conspicuously so: no synagogue, no bar mitzvah. When I was nine in 1974, the big question for me was how Holland had lost the football (soccer) World Cup final to West Germany (which won 2 to 1). In a middle-class family, I was protected from the harsh winds of the Margaret Thatcher revolution in the United Kingdom: when I went to university in the mid-1980s, we were protesting against the introduction of university tuition fees, not paying them.

      This personal backstory deeply affects how I see the refugee crisis. It makes real the idea that it could be me. For me, my family’s experiences have turned refugees from a faceless category into blood and spirit. It demonstrates how our lives depend on the decisions of strangers.

      In February 2017, I went to Khazer camp in Iraq, around 30 kilometers (18 miles) from Mosul, to meet people fleeing from the so-called Islamic State (I use the Arabic term Daesh in this book) as Iraqi forces retook the city. I met Nabil and Amira. They were sitting on a mattress in a tent—their new home in the camp.¹

      They had nothing beyond the clothes they wore and carried, plus their memories and their fears. They told me about their daughter, still trapped in Mosul. She was married to a man who used to work for the Iraqi military. For that reason he had been forced to live underground in Mosul for more than two years for fear of being found by Daesh and executed. I couldn’t hear their story without thinking of the perils faced by my own mother.

      In another tent I met the Ibrahim family—a husband and wife with three wide-eyed daughters. We ran a hundred meters to the Iraqi troops, but it felt like it took a year to get there, they told me. My thoughts turned to my dad and granddad making the 71-mile trip from Brussels to Ostende to board a boat to Britain.

      Today’s refugees are a different religion from my family. Their circumstances are different, and world politics are different. But they, too, are fleeing war and persecution. They, too, have lost all the security they ever had, left everything familiar—home, culture, family, work—and risked their lives to reach safety. And the questions raised by their desperate flight are the same: How to eat, sleep, survive? How to start anew? Whom to trust?

      One question stands above all others. It is a question to us who are not refugees: What are the duties of the rest of the world toward the innocent victims of war? What are our duties to strangers? That is what this book is about: the lives of 65 million people displaced by conflict and persecution in places such as Syria, Afghanistan, and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and what our responsibilities are to them.

      The Crisis

      Crisis is an overused word, but the massive forced displacement we see today, the sheer number of people driven from their homes by war or oppression, deserves that description. This is a global crisis.

      We are witnessing the largest flow of people fleeing for their lives since the Second World War. In total, they account for 1 in every 113 people on the planet.²

      If they came together as a single country, it would be the world’s twenty-first largest³

      (about the size of the United Kingdom).

      In the pages that follow, you will meet South Sudanese fleeing violence in the world’s newest nation to find safety across the border in Uganda, Syrians seeking respite in Jordan from the bombings by their own president, Nigerians seeking protection from the terror group Boko Haram. The scale of forced displacement is both a symptom and a cause of a world in disarray.⁴

      A symptom because it is a product of failed governance within nations and failed promises in the so-called international community; a cause because of the political instability that can come in its wake.

      These refugees and displaced people are fleeing wars within states. Since the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War at the end of the 1980s, the number of civil wars has risen tenfold from the average between 1816 and 1989.⁵

      If the crisis were a blip, it might be considered immoral to hunker down and hope that the storm passes, but it would not have a global significance beyond that. However, civil wars have become increasingly long, and they are devastating for civilians caught in the cross fire. I believe we are seeing a trend, not a blip, driven by long-term factors that have not yet played out.

      There are a growing number of countries where political institutions are unable to contain the needs and aspirations of different ethnic, political, or religious groups within peaceful boundaries. The result is conflict that combines with poverty and weak governance to create huge movements of people. Meanwhile, international institutions of political coordination and consensus building, led by the United Nations, are weaker, relative to the problems that need to be tackled, than at any time since they were created after the Second World War. The political scientist Ian Bremmer has called it a leaderless world.⁶

      Another way of looking at it is that with the dispersion of economic power there are too many leaders today and no one in charge.

      This crisis is large scale and not going away. It has deep roots and complex consequences that challenge the way aid has been provided to refugees in the past. If the refugee crisis is not managed better, it will cause more instability as well as more suffering.

      Rescue Us

      Refugees and displaced people have lost everything. But the refugee crisis is not just about them; it is also about us—what we, living in far greater comfort, stand for and how we see our place in the world. It is a test of our character, not just our policies. Pass the test, and we rescue ourselves and our values as well as refugees and their lives.

      I lead an organization dedicated to helping refugees and displaced people called the International Rescue Committee (IRC). We have 27,000 staff and volunteers working in thirty war-affected countries. More than 90 percent of the IRC’s staff are from countries that are directly affected by conflict and disaster. We don’t have to persuade them to go toward danger and tumult; they are working to make a difference in their own communities. They deliver humanitarian aid: health care, water and sanitation, education, employment, protection from harm. In twenty-six US cities we also help resettled refugees start new lives: meeting them at the airport, helping their kids into school, finding them work. The work of my colleagues is a daily lesson in ingenuity and commitment across the arc of crisis, from harm to home.

      The work of the IRC stands on the shoulders of some of the giants of the Western world in the twentieth century. In his native Germany, Albert Einstein was accused of treason by the Nazis. His theory of relativity was branded Jewish physics. His books were burned in a

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