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.[i]
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.[ii]
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.[iii]
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.[iv]
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."[v]
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.[vi] 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.”[vii]
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.[viii]
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.'"[ix]
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."[x]
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.[xi]
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."[xii]
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.[xiii]
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."[xiv]
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."[xv]
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.
[i] Extensive information on SIEV X can be found at http://www.SIEVX.com.
[ii] 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.
[iii] 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.
[iv] 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.
[v] In Search of the Afghan Girl,
http://www.abc.net.au/documentaries/stories/s676998.htm
Accessed September 18, 2003.
[vi] Cathy Newman, “A Life
Revealed,” National Geographic Magazine. http://magma.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/afghangirl
Accessed September
15, 2003.
[viii] 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.
[ix] Lisa Malkki, “Refugees and Exile: From
'Refugee Studies' to the National Order of Things,” Annual Review of
Anthropology 24 (1995) p. 518.
[x] Slavoj Zizek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and
New York: Verso) 2002, p. 94
[xi] Agamben, Homo Sacer Sovereign Power and Bare life.
[xii] Giorgio Agamben, Means
without End: Notes on Politics Trans.
by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: Minnesota
University Press) 2000:22.3.
[xiii] Perera, "What is a Camp?"
[xiv] Agamben, Means without End, 22.3.
[xv] 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.