So what are we looking at?
Fences, BIG fences going up fast- built by convicts. Why the fences? Why STOP refugees who have no desire to stop, people who have TICKETS to RIDE out!!?
Hungary’s President Viktor Orban had no problem expressing his reasons for stopping Refugees intent on reaching Germany and the promise of hope offered by Angela Merkel when he stated in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine newspaper “We shouldn’t forget that the people who are coming here grew up in a different religion and represent a completely different culture. Most are not Christian, but Muslim,”
To diverge a bit let’s look at Apartheid http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/apartheid – an Afrikaans word that means literally “apart-hood” and is most commonly associated with South Africa and is system of racial segregation. It has come to symbolize any state authority that sets apart an ethic group with a systematic segregation.
In 1973 the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (ICSPCA) http://www.refworld.org/docid/3ae6b3c00.html declared apartheid to be not only a violation of the UN Charter but also declared apartheid criminal. It is an interesting sidebar to note that there were 4 votes against the Convention and those came from Portugal, South Africa the United Kingdom and the United States. It went into force in 1976 and by 2008 it had been ratified by 107 UN member States.
To date, no member state has ever been prosecuted for the crime of apartheid, not while apartheid was practiced in South Africa or at any time since. That said, Apartheid is both recognized by Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions as a “Grave Breach” in times of war, Article 85, 4.(c) https://www.icrc.org/applic/ihl/ihl.nsf/7c4d08d9b287a42141256739003e636b/f6c8b9fee14a77fdc125641e0052b079?OpenDocument as well as numerous other International instruments of law outlined in the UN White Paper authored by John Dugard in 2008 titled Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid http://legal.un.org/avl/pdf/ha/cspca/cspca_e.pdf So we can say with authority that Apartheid is criminal and prosecutable.
Now, let’s have a look at the refugee camp paradigm which has been in place basically since World War II. UNHCR and The International Red Cross use the camp system as a way to immediately house large numbers of people, hopefully for a short term, until they can return to their native countries. Until 2000 UNHCR believed a camp solution was best and resettlement was the least desired path for a refugee. Repatriation was desired as the primary goal. It became clear to UNHCR that repatriation in many modern situations was not feasible and today there are camps that have seen generations consigned to a life apart, most notable would be the Palestinians http://www.unrwa.org/palestine-refugees who have been confined and segregated since 1948. The Dadaab Refugee complex in Kenya is the largest camp in the world, established to deal with the Somalian civil war crisis in 1991 it originally housed 90,000 refugees and in February of 2012, after twenty years of existence, was home to 463,000 refugees some of whom were third generation as their parents were born in this camp.
How does racism in Hungary, now spreading through the Balkans, refugee camps and apartheid fit together?
The EU embarked on a policy of apartheid when it built its Wall of Deterrence based on the Dublin Regulations: keep Refugees out of Europe, resettle a very few, and place the rest in encampments or detention.
This is a defacto system of apartheid.
Encampments are not places of opportunity, education or hope. They are not places to raise families, build dreams, or even simply work. They are places of isolation, despair, poverty and marginalization. Few opportunities for resettlement are available, asylum is offered only if you are IN the country in which you seek asylum and those Dublin Regulations are designed to keep a refugee out.
James Hathaway correctly noted the implementation of a system akin to the Dublin Regulations in 1997 would FAIL when he noted “Refugee status ends only when the violence or other human rights abuse that induced flight is eradicated,” http://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2621&context=articles page 143
Eighteen years later the writing on the wall is well writ, a system of encampments, detention centers and closed borders without addressing the root causes of a refugee crisis creates oppressors and the oppressed with desperate humans willing to undertake desperate measures in the desperate hope of a slim chance.