Refugees like me rarely get to tell our side: what everyone gets wrong about the ‘refugee crisis’

Steve Ali
Steve Ali26 August 2020

In my life, I’ve experienced vastly different cultures: the one I grew up with, and the one I fled to when war stole my homeland. This has taught me that everything has a narrative. The same story can be told in multiple ways. As we grow up, we learn to question the stories we’re told. As a Syrian refugee living in London, I’ve found one narrative to be the most creative of all: the refugee crisis. What I know to be the harrowing journey of desperate souls has been painted as an invading mission. What I know to be dinghies sinking under terrified children has been twisted into a force to rival Britain’s Navy.

Journalists help us to decipher fact from fiction by presenting all sides of the story. But one side is conspicuously missing from coverage of refugees: that of refugees themselves. How many of the articles on Channel crossings quoted an actual refugee? Journalists in the age of social media are expected to deliver instantaneous news and have little time to seek out grassroots perspectives from ostracised communities.

But there is also a sinister side to this bias: our administration is pursuing a pro-nationalist, anti-free movement policy built on a narrative of “taking back control”. They have good reason to spin the arrival of refugees (who make up 0.26 per cent of the UK’s ­population) into a crisis of biblical ­proportions. Priti Patel is repeatedly quoted saying “this is exactly what [British people] mean” when they “say they want to take back control of our borders”. To someone who grew up with state-controlled media, this feels agenda-driven, if not infantilising of the British people. I used to watch Assad on state TV, telling Syrians to “take back control” from the “terrorists” challenging his dictatorship.

One day, someone will tell the story of a Sudanese child who drowned in his own dreams of safe haven while Britain’s Home Secretary inspected border troops on the coastline. This is not the story of Britain — a country that has always welcomed those who drew a cruelly short straw in life.

What does Mr Johnson know about the choices available to a refugee: Mine kept me alive 

Obviously politicians politicise. That’s their job. But it is journalists’ job to let people reply. Refugees are rarely given this chance. Are we so alien, we don’t even qualify for right of reply?

Priti Patel, Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak can never tell you much about displacement because they have not experienced it. When I read Rishi Sunak saying, “France is obviously a safe country,” I wonder— how much does Mr Sunak know about being a refugee in France? It is not a walk down the Champs-Elysées. The brutality we face from French police warrants an article of its own.

When I see headlines quoting Boris Johnson calling Channel crossings “stupid, dangerous, and criminal,” I wonder— what does Mr Johnson know about the choices available to a refugee? Does his life experience really authorise him to tell me my choices were “stupid”, when they kept me alive? Mr Johnson seems to be curiously ill-briefed. Legally, it isn’t criminal. It’s a human right, enshrined in the same law that underpins the West’s narrative of its own moral fibre. Reading these quotes when you are a refugee feels like having someone explain your profession to you. It’s the ultimate “mansplaining”. But it also leads to the deportation of people who are suffering immensely.

If you support this, at least get both sides of the story. There is a way. Refugee Media Centre is a digital network of displaced people volunteering quick responses to journalists. This is us taking back control of our story, even if we’ve lost it over our lives. “

Steve Ali is a writer and silversmith from Damascus, Syria www.refugeemediacentre.org