Dialogue: Asylum-seekers easy meat for the politics of hatred

Politicians who demonise asylum-seekers to score points should recognise that they are playing with people's lives, writes RUDD LUBBERS.

Recently, I began a new job as the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. I used to be a politician.

As Prime Minister of the Netherlands, my responsibility was to look after the Dutch people. As head of UNHCR, I have 21 million people of concern worldwide, most of them refugees.

Close to a million, however, are asylum-seekers - people who may be refugees but whose status is not yet determined.

Although I have a strong legal mandate to protect refugees, I have no enforcement capacity. I depend on the good faith of the politicians who control the 150 or so countries where refugees and asylum-seekers are living.

But, just five months into this job, I am finding that commitment worryingly eroded. I am concerned about the tone of the political debate in a number of industrialised countries - rich nations that can afford to be more generous to refugees.

In some countries - Sweden and Switzerland, for example - despite the pressures of increased numbers of asylum-seekers, politicians have avoided the temptation to stoke the fires with inflammatory rhetoric.

Unfortunately, this has not been the case in other countries, where certain politicians seem intent on using asylum-seekers, and the many refugees among them, to further their own electoral ambitions.

Asylum-seekers have become a campaign issue, with Governments and opposition parties vying to appear toughest on the "bogus" asylum-seekers "flooding" into their countries.

In some nations - Australia, Austria, Denmark, Italy and Britain, for example - individual politicians and media appear at times to be deliberately inflating the issue.

Statistics are frequently manipulated, facts are taken out of context, and the character of asylum-seekers as a group is often distorted to present them as a threat their detractors can then pledge to crush.

Politicians taking this line used to belong to small extremist parties. But nowadays the issue can steer the agenda of bigger parties.

Their opponents - finding their party presented as weak in the face of the foreign hordes at the gates - respond by seeking tighter laws, making it harder for foreigners of any sort to enter their territory.

It becomes a numbers game: reduce arrivals at all costs.

Asylum-seekers make a perfect target for people who want to invoke the age-old prejudice against foreigners. Asylum-seekers can't answer back.

Illegal, bogus, flood, fraudulent, criminal, scrounger, trafficking - all these words are commonly paired with asylum-seeker. Such words drip into the public consciousness until they become self-fulfilling - the opinion they help shape stimulates increasingly restrictive policies.

In some countries, large numbers of asylum-seekers are kept in detention, perhaps for years.

Sometimes they are put in real prisons, next to criminals. Elsewhere, they are routinely herded into detention centres, which cost a fortune. The asylum-seekers are then blamed for the cost. Children are born in detention.

Sometimes, detained asylum-seekers go on hunger strike or riot, allowing themselves to be branded as troublemakers. Elsewhere, with benefits cut below national social security levels, some resort to shoplifting, begging or prostitution. This is then publicised out of all proportion, continuing the cycle of demonisation and criminalisation.

I recently went to Iran and Pakistan, each of which hosts at least 2 million refugees, mainly Afghans. It is a huge number, and the refugees have been in both countries for the best part of 20 years.

In Pakistan, I visited the infamous Jalozai camp, where thousands of Afghans are crammed in inhumane and insanitary conditions.

When this camp appears on television screens in industrialised countries, there is - rightly - shock, sympathy and condemnation.

But when one of these Jalozai Afghans is found hiding under a Eurostar train or arrives in a wealthy country on a leaky fishing vessel, he will suddenly cease to be an object of sympathy and fall into that sweeping category of people branded "bogus and illegal".

I had a difficult time explaining to Pakistani ministers why they should treat people in Jalozai better, when some public figures in far richer industrialised countries treat asylum-seekers like a modern-day version of the plague.

So I am asking those in the political arena to remember that they are not just scoring a point against opponents when they play with asylum-seeker statistics and stoke fears of the foreigners in our midst.

They are, in fact, indirectly potentially endangering lives all over the world. I ask them to tone down their rhetoric.

We also need to look behind the numbers.

The top two groups of asylum-seekers today are Afghans and Iraqis. Afghanistan is largely controlled by the Taleban and Iraq is ruled by Saddam Hussein. Both countries have been subjected to international sanctions. Can asylum-seekers from such places really be so easily dismissed?

Immigration and improving asylum systems are valid subjects for debate. Many asylum-seekers do not in the end qualify as refugees. They can - perhaps should - be helped to return to their home countries.

To relieve pressure on asylum channels, new, separate systems are needed to deal with people moving for purely economic reasons. The asylum system itself needs to be fast, fair and efficient.

But distortion, exaggeration and hyperbole are no way to approach an issue that is not simply about numbers - real or distorted - but about saving human lives.

Genuine refugees should not become victims yet again. Surely there are other ways to win elections.

* Ruud Lubbers is the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.