The dehumanising language used by UK and other European politicians to debate the refugee crisis has echoes of the pre-second world war rhetoric with which the world effectively turned its back on German and Austrian Jews and helped pave the way for the Holocaust, the UN’s most senior human rights official has warned.
Zeid Ra’ad Al Hussein, the UN high commissioner for human rights, described Europe’s response to the crisis as amnesiac and “bewildering”. Although he did not mention any British politicians by name, he said the use of terms such as “swarms of refugees” were deeply regrettable.
In July, the UK prime minister, David Cameron, referred to migrants in Calais as a “swarm of people”. At this month’s Conservative party conference, the home secretary, Theresa May, was widely criticised for suggesting that mass migration made it “impossible to build a cohesive society”.
In an interview, the high commissioner said the language surrounding the issue reminded him of the 1938 Evian conference, when countries including the US, the UK and Australia refused to take in substantial numbers of Jewish refugees fleeing Hitler’s annexation of Austria on the grounds that they would destabilise their societies and strain their economies. Their reluctance, Zeid added, helped Hitler to conclude that extermination could be an alternative to deportation.Three-quarters of a century later, he said, the same rhetoric was being deployed by those seeking to make political capital out of the refugee crisis. “It’s just a political issue that is being ramped up by those who can use the excuse of even the smallest community as a threat to the sort of national purity of the state,” he said.
“If you just look back to the Evian conference and read through the intergovernmental discussion, you will see that there were things that were said that were very similar.
“Indeed, at the time, the Australian delegate said that if Australia accepted large numbers of European Jews they’d be importing Europe’s racial problem into Australia. I’m sure that in later years, he regretted that he ever said this – knowing what happened subsequently – but this is precisely the point. If we cannot forecast the future, at least we have the past as a guide that should wisen us, alert us to the dangers of using that rhetoric.”Asked whether he believed that May would also come to regret her choice of words, Zeid added: “Closer examination of history and a closer examination of what happened in Europe in the early part of the 20th century should make people think very carefully about what it is that they’re saying. These are human beings: even in the use of the word migrants, somehow it’s as if they don’t have rights. They all have rights just as we have rights.”
Although the high commissioner praised the British government’s decision to take in 20,000 Syrian refugees between now and 2020, he said much more needed to be done. He pointed to the suggestion made by François Crépeau, the UN special rapporteur on the human right of migrants, that rich European countries should agree a plan to take 1 million refugees from Syria over the next five years.
Zeid added that his country, Jordan, had taken in more than 650,000 refugees from Syria and Iraq while some European politicians had descended into “xenophobia and in some cases outright racism”.
Because of the Holocaust, we can’t have nice things. We have to import the world’s trash.
