"Can Blogging End Poverty?"

I'm ripping off The Guardian's headline here.... I more or less agree with him, but HE more or less makes his point moot by participating in Blog Action Day.

In honor of Blog Action Day, I am posting a late night link (11:55pm) to a piece by David Loyn, BBC International's international development correspondent.

Save Darfur?

Alex de Waal wrote this great piece, published in World Affairs, about celebrity activism. I think his article really captures the nuances and grey areas around this issue, which I've raised here and here before.

A celebrity playing a humanitarian role, such as Farrow does, acts as a bridge between a (Western) audience and a faraway tragedy. She is a focus for empathy, an emotional interpreter. While some columnists who write about foreign atrocities freight every sentence with bombast and outrage, a talented actress tells the story with just sufficient cues for the audience to supply the sadness and anger. That’s a far more potent performance. In some pictures, Farrow looks just as frail as the Darfurian refugees.

But a celebrity also brings handicaps to her role. The size of the audience and the length of the ovation are not the measure of success. Darfur events on American campuses and at town hall meetings are routinely acclaimed on the grounds that the world must pay attention. But unlike a Hollywood opening weekend, critical acclaim and box office receipts mean nothing unless they bring leverage for effective action. On that question, the jury hasn’t yet returned its verdict, but contemporary relief operations have done the wrong thing (and done too much of it) as often as they have not done enough. For this, today’s celebrity-saturated culture of humanitarianism deserves real blame.

Full text here

Defining "refugees"

I'd like to preface this post by reminding you what the global "refugee context" is: 

I've mentioned before, in some posts here, how the legal definition of "refugee" has become obsolete in the 21st century. While on paper, the definition seems quite broad, it fails to include dozens of millions of displaced people, who, as a result, see their most fundamental human rights violated. There are 16 million refugees in the world today who fall under the mandate of the UNHCR or the UNRWA (4.6 million Palestinian refugees, out of the 16 million fall under the latter's jurisdiction). In addition to these already staggering numbers, there are an estimated 51 million displaced people who do not fall under any international legal mandate. 51 million. And that is not taking into account the vast numbers of people who flee their homelands but are never able to register as a refugee or an asylum seeker, for reasons as varied as inability to read, write and understand the process involved or too much psychological trauma to handle complicated, inefficient bureaucratic processes. It's most likely impossible to know exactly how many people fall into the latter category - but I would say there are easily a few million displaced people who have not been taken into account by the UNHCR statistics. 

Anyway, this leads me up to the story of the day, that of Pape Mbaye, a gay Senegalese man who was granted refugee status in the US on the basis of his facing persecution due to his sexual orientation. The article (unfortunately) barely touches upon the novelty of this type of refugee case, merely noting that only "a handful" of similar cases arose in the past, and is focused on the plight of homosexuals in West Africa (as far as my experience goes, I haven't encountered a single West African who is tolerant of homosexuality.... sadly).

It is nonetheless noteworthy that Mbaye was able to receive refugee status on those grounds - and given that his well-being was genuinely endangered by conservative zealotry, I think it's fantastic that the US granted him refugee status. However, for every Mbaye, there are 100,000 (or more) individuals who yearn to live in a different country, far away from the misery, oppression and persecution that pervades their daily lives. What of them? What of the hundreds of Africans who end up ship wrecked on the coasts of the small southern European island of Malta? Why must they languish endlessly in precarious conditions? What of the thousands of Liberian refugees in Ghana who cannot avail themselves of the inadequate amount of assistance that the UNHCR is able to provide them with? 

The fight for the rights of those who suffer is far from over....