The impossible refugee of Western desire ….
-- Suvendrini Perera
October 19, 2003 marks a pitiful anniversary. It is now two years
since 353 asylum seekers drowned in the waters somewhere between
Australia and Indonesia. This tragedy, recalling the deaths of
over two hundred asylum seekers from Sri Lanka off the Sardinian
coast a few years ago, is said to mark the largest recorded toll
of asylum seekers at sea.
Of the dead, 146 of the dead were children and 142 were women.
They drowned during an endless night, sometimes before the eyes
of helpless relatives, after their overcrowded and unsafe boat
broke into pieces around them. The Australian navy, which is engaged
in an extensive surveillance and blockading operation to prevent
asylum seekers' boats from entering Australian waters, was apparently
nowhere within reach. This boat came to be known as SIEV X because,
while the navy kept close watch on and monitored the progress
of a number of other Suspected Illegal Entry Vessels en route
to Australia, nothing seems to have been known about the voyage
of SIEV X until after it was too late. The few survivors were
picked up the next day by Indonesian fishermen.
The high death toll of women and children from SIEV X is not
a matter of tragic coincidence or individual bad luck. It is a
direct consequence of racialised and gendered Australian policies
for asylum seekers, policies that are increasingly being adopted
as models in other Western states. The effect of these policies
is to produce a climate of increasing borderpanic in which asylum
seekers are painfully caught at a point of intersection between
the "War on Terrorism" and the war at home. Indeed,
the bodies of asylum seekers and refugees are the very media through
which the 'War on Terrorism' is normalised into war at home: through
the new forms of control it seeks to exercise over the bodies
of asylum seekers, the war abroad becomes the war at home.
Sanctioned and nourished by the fervour of war, heightened forms
of surveillance at the border combine with new powers of monitoring
and policing within. The hunt for hidden enemies in our midst
imparts new zeal to the racialisation, criminalisation and targeting
of suspect groups. Old and current racisms couple in new combinations,
and domestic agendas mesh with transnational ones. The boundaries
of national belonging and citizenhood are reconfigured through
initiatives like the "Patriot Acts" in the Unites States,
the White Paper on Citizenship in the United Kingdom, new agreements
to deter asylum seekers throughout the European Union and ever-expanding
measures for "Border Protection" in Australia.
The enabling condition for these activities is the elevation
of security to the paramount principle of governance, a development
that is reinforced through creations like the U.S mega-department
of "Homeland Security." In an essay written in the weeks
after the 9/11 attacks, Giorgio Agamben draws on an unpublished
1978 lecture by Michel Foucault to discuss the ascendance of security
as a form of power that supplants the role of both law and discipline:
Today we face extreme and most dangerous developments
in the thought on security. In the course of a gradual neutralization
of politics and the progressive surrender of traditional tasks
of the state, security becomes the basic principle state activity.
What used to be one among several definitive measures of public
administration … now becomes the sole criterion of political
legitimation.
The "neutralization of politics" in the name of security
ensures that the question of the refugee cannot be posed as a
political issue. Instead, it is framed in terms of humanitarian
concern, a category that is itself subsumed by security. Security
and humanitarianism operate not as opposed or contradictory principles,
but as two faces of the same coin. The "battlefield detainees"
of Guantanomo Bay and the asylum seekers held in Australia's offshore
detention camps in Nauru and Papua Guinea both occupy "spaces
of exception" that confound the distinction between the "terrorist"
and the "refugee"; between innocence and criminality.
The intimate exchange between security and humanitarianism as
paired forms for managing refugees and asylum seekers is explored
below through a discussion of the National Geographic documentary,
In Search of the Afghan Girl.
The truth of The Afghan Girl
The deaths of women and children from SIEV X occurred at the edges
of Australian society, in the border territory that is both just
inside and outside our field of vision. These are figures that
are actively obscured, made invisible, through an ensemble of
gendered and racialised practices that produce them as incidental
casualties of urgent state responsibilities -- the roadkill or
"collateral damage" of the rush to border protection
and the preeminence of security. At the legal and official level
minimal attention can be paid to these expendable deaths, with
even less discussion of where responsibility lies. These deaths
must be quickly repressed from public memory to maintain Australia's
self image as a decent and humanitarian nation; in their place
remain vague impressions of some narrowly averted invasion by
sea. As the Minister for Immigration memorably commented, this
tragedy could yet have "an upside" to it .
Yet, even as the navy was forbidden to produce "humanising
and personalising" representations of Iraqi and Afghani asylum
seekers, the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq return the images and
stories of distressed women and children in need of protection
to our TV screens and newspapers. The invisibility of the faces
and stories of domestic asylum seekers is countered by the extreme
visibility of other faces and stories of women like these -- with
one significant difference: they are women in far away places.
The stories of these distant women are invoked, with formulaic
outrage, in speeches justifying "intervention" in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Through these means the erased body of an essential
"refugee woman" returns to the centre of national consciousness.
This body of difference in turn becomes a unifying figure that,
paradoxically, functions as a contradictory presence/absence to
maintain the self-image of the "homeland" at the centre
of today's borderpanic.
In search of the Afghan Girl, a widely screened U.S documentary
exemplifies the ways in which the gendered refugee body circulates
as public spectacle in the West. "The Afghan Girl" refers
to a much publicised cover photograph first published in the National
Geographic Magazine in 1985. The subject is a young girl photographed
in a Pakistani refugee camp during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
(a period, it bears repeating, when U.S foreign policy actively
fostered the conditions for rise of the Taliban, thus setting
the stage for the present war in that region). In the wake of
the 9/11 bombings and a new war in Afghanistan, photographer Steve
McCurry set out to rediscover the original of his famous work,
in the words of a promotional website, "the enigmatic Afghan
girl with the haunting green eyes that captivated the world."
Sponsored by the National Geographic, this photographic hunt
for the source returns inevitably to the form of the colonial
expedition of discovery. McCurry travels in a strange land, through
dangerous terrain, accompanied by a cast of native informants
who are sometimes devoted and sometimes duplicitous. Supporting
him is the full arsenal of Western technology, aimed to guarantee
the authenticity of his quest. The trail leads, to quote the website
again:
after one false start to a remote village in
Afghanistan where Sharbat Gula now lives with her three daughters,
completely unaware of her international fame … [T]he latest
scientific techniques … were able to confirm her identity. Leading
scientists in the field of iris recognition - the most accurate,
non-invasive identity verification technology in existence today
- and the FBI's facial recognition experts both agreed beyond
doubt that Sharbat Gula was the woman from the 1985 cover picture.
Here the colonial discovery plot is intersected by the contemporary
demands of security. The Afghan Girl's identity is authenticated
not by reference to the evidence of her own memory or the testimony
of local knowledge, but by a series of technological investigations
performed on her body by an extraordinary range of experts called
to certify her identity. Reports are presented from a forensic
expert for the FBI; by scientists specialising in iris recognition
technologies; by a medical doctor; and finally by a sculptor commissioned
to construct a likeness suggesting what the original of the photograph
ought to look like fifteen years later. Like any potential (illegal)
entrant at the border, the Afghan Girl must be subjected to validation
by state authorities before her claims to humanitarian sympathy
can be entertained.
These extravagant processes for authenticating Sharbat Gula read
almost as a form of parodic excess, parallelling the state's obsessive
processes for selecting out the "genuine refugees" at
its borders. Simultaneously these and related technologies --
linguistic verification; facial reconstruction; medical testing;
genetic matching; iris recognition - are essential to processes
of racial profiling and the targeting and criminalisation of specific
suspect groups already within national limits. The role of the
FBI expert, represented on the National Geographic website under
a floodlit official seal, is particularly telling in this context.
Bathed in the sanctifying light of U.S authority, the quest for
The Afghan Girl is a project that mirrors and parallels other
missions conducted under the sign of "Homeland Security."
The film's recourse to technologies of border protection and
airport security to verify the truth of The Afghan Girl are neither
explained nor justified by National Geographic. Rather they appear
as given, completely naturalised practices in the process of McCurry's
womanhunt. Revealed here is an underlying correspondence between
the projects of humanitarianism and security, as refugee bodies
become available as sites for disciplinary and salvaging operations
alike. The rationale for the elaborate search for Sharbat Gula,
employing the technologies of surveillance and identification
developed to track down (racialised) criminal bodies, is that
the authenticated spectacle of this Afghan Girl seventeen years
on is bound to inspire an outpouring of sympathy from Western
donors for Afghan refugees, girls and women in particular.
As the emblematic refugee girl/woman located in some distant
camp, The Afghan Girl with the captivating green eyes is an appropriate
object of compassion and aid in the West. The specificities of
her original displacement and subsequent history hardly merit
a mention. The Afghan Girl inhabits what Lisa Malkki describes
as a "floating world either beyond or above politics, and
beyond or above history -- a world in which [refugees] … are simply
'victims.'" Severed from her history, The Afghan Girl is
coopted into the War on Terrorism from an older and still unfinished
war about which it is no longer convenient to remember too much.
Instead, The Afghan Girl's successful "discovery," aided
by all the resources of Western technology, implicitly endorses
a parallel narrative of "rescue" from darkness and obscurity
by the forces of Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Although seemingly
dislocated from time and isolated in her singularity, the Afghan
Girl functions indirectly to reinscribe neocolonial and orientalist
discourses. Her green-eyed gaze legitimises the West's multiple
interventions -- humanitarian, military, legal, sociocultural,
economic, political -- in the war on Afghanistan.
At the same time, the authenticated body of The Afghan Girl is
a site where the principles of security and humanitarianism meet.
Indeed, The Afghan Girl must be seen as the emblematic figure
of a war where food parcels and bombs were alternatively unleashed
over the heads of the population. As Slavoj Zizek writes of this
bizarre bombardment, "military action against the Taliban
is almost presented as a means to guarantee the safe delivery
of humanitarian aid. We thus no longer have the opposition between
war and humanitarian aid: the two are closely connected."
In this scenario, as Zizek further points out, the U.S and its
allies have already subsumed the role of international agencies
like the Red Cross; acting not as one of the warring parties,
but as the supreme agents of global order, dispensing now punishment,
now aid as they see fit.
The intimate relationship in which security and humanitarianism
become almost interchangeable operations of the same transcendent
actor is also reinforced in another register in the making of
In Search of the Afghan Girl. The National Geographic's website
on the story provides multiple links to corporations specialising
in airport security and identity confirmation/verification technologies,
suggesting the forms of (official or unofficial) sponsorship that
underwrite and sustain the project.
Zizek's discussion of the coincidence of militarism and humanitarianism
in the war in Afghanistan draws on Agamben's theorisation of the
refugee as homo sacer, the figure devoid of citizenship, and therefore
of human rights, reduced to the state of naked or mere life, outside
all political community. The National Geographic material reveals
the complex histories of colonial representation that are simultaneously
referenced by the gendered figure of the refugee. The Afghan Girl
circulates in the West as complex object not only of power, but
also of fantasy and longing. Framed by her aestheticising representation,
this green-eyed girl/woman in a faraway camp is also the longed
for refugee of Western foreign policy, in contrast to the invisiblised
and expendable girls and women seeking entry at our borders. Authenticated
by forensic investigation and the most advanced security technologies,
The Afghan Girl reproduces the impossible refugee of Western desire:
a green-eyed other that is almost the same; far away yet instantly
available through technological mediation; infantilised; enigmatic;
certified genuine.
In Lieu of a Conclusion …
Apart from the location of this impossible refugee of Western
desire, what spaces and strategies can be mobilised to bring home
the figure of the refugee and the asylum seeker to the West? Part
of the answer lies precisely in that double-edged site, the border.
The border area between national and international, between law
and security, is a contradictory space where competing discourses
come into conflict, where new tactics and negotiations sometimes
emerge, and where the limits and underlying complicities of these
categories are exposed. It is in this context I interpret Agamben's
assertion that the concept of the refugee must be "resolutely
separated from the concept of human rights" and understood
as a "limit-concept that at once brings a radical crisis
to the principles of the nation-state and clears the way for a
renewal of categories that can no longer be delayed."
As the Australian state deterritorialises and denationalises
areas of its territory, placing them now inside, now outside,
the reach of law, the capriciousness and contingency of the nation
are inexorably revealed. This inside-outside space is a site where
the stateless refugee and the denationalised citizen can meet,
in Agamben's construct (following Tomas Hammar) of the "denizen."
The "denizen" is a meeting point between two categories,
those noncitizens who can neither be repatriated or naturalized
and those "citizens of advanced industrial states [who]…
demonstrate, through an increasing desertion of the codified instances
of political participation, an evident propensity to turn into
denizens." These two denationalised groups begin to confound
the lines of demarcation between citizen and noncitizen, "so
that citizens and denizens -- at least in certain social strata
-- are entering an area of potential indistinction." In the
category of the "denizen" the separation between citizen
and noncitizen is challenged by a new form of political identity
that rejects the identities assigned by the nation-state and the
dividing line of the border.
I want to close by suggesting the possibilities of the "denizen"
as a category that has the potential to allow a double movement:
to bring home the refugee at the border, even as we also simultaneously
deterritorialise the notion of home.
Excerpted from a longer essay, "The Gender
of Borderpanic," forthcoming in Women, Crime and Globalisation
ed. Maureen Cain and Adrian Howe.
NOTES
Extensive information on SIEV X can be found at http://www.SIEVX.com.
Giorgio Agamben, "On Security and Terror," Trans. Soenke
Zehle, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung September 20, 2001. http://www.egs.edu/faculty/agamben/agamben-on-security-and
-terror.html.
Accessed September 9, 2003.
See Suvendrini Perera, "What is a camp?" in Suvendrini
Perera and Anthony Burke ed. Borderphobias: The Politics of Insecurity
Post 9/11, Borderlands 1.1.
http://www.borderlandsejournal.adelaide.edu.au/issues/vol1no1.html.
On "spaces of exception see Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer Sovereign
Power and Bare life. Trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford
University Press) 1998.
At the height of the naval blockade, the Immigration Minister's
Media Advisor instructed the navy's Public Relations Office that
no "personalising or humanising images" of asylum seekers
were to be taken. See David Marr and Marian Wilkerson, Dark Victory
(Crows Nest: Allen and Unwin, 2003), p. 135.
In Search of the Afghan Girl, http://www.abc.net.au/documentaries/stories/s676998.htm
Accessed September 18, 2003.
Cathy Newman, "A Life Revealed," National Geographic
Magazine. http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/afghangirl
Accessed September 15, 2003.
See http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/afghangirl/zoom7.html
And indeed, this belief was justified. According to the figures
cited on its website, the National Geographic's readers have donated
some US$ 22 million so far, in response to the magazine's Afghan
Girls appeal.
Lisa Malkki, "Refugees and Exile: From 'Refugee Studies'
to the National Order of Things," Annual Review of Anthropology
24 (1995) p. 518.
Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New
York: Verso) 2002, p. 94
Agamben, Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare life.
Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics Trans. by
Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: Minnesota University
Press) 2000:22.3.
Perera, "What is a Camp?"
Agamben, Means without End, 22.3.
Agamben, Means without End, 22.3.
__________________________________________________
Suvendrini Kanagasabai Perera is a fellow in
the School of Communication, Arts and Critical Enquiry at La Trobe
University, Melbourne, Australia. She has published widely on
the issues of race, ethnicity and multiculturalism. Most recently,
she coedited (with Anthony Burke) a special issue of the electronic
journal Borderlands, titled Borderphobias: The Politics of Insecurity
post 9/11, Borderlands ejournal Vol. 1 No. 1 (August 2002). Her
essay "A line in the Sea: on the Tampa refugees in Australia",
was published in Cultural Studies Review as well as Race and Class
in 2002.
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