Boris Johnson, it's appeasement to Putin to turn your back on Ukrainian Refugees.
In 2018, when my dad lay dying in an ICU in Canada, the Minister of Immigration and refugees came to visit him in a personal capacity. My dad was dying, and he was aware he had little time left to live. But he chose to use the little breath remaining to him to advocate for refugees.
In 2022, Europe is experiencing its worst refugee crisis since the Second World war because of Russia's criminal war against Ukraine. So far, 2.2 million refugees have poured across Ukraine's borders to neighbouring countries that will soon become overwhelmed by the numbers of people needing help. Politically these countries may capsize like an overfull lifeboat due to the economic and sociological strains this sudden influx of refugees will produce in their society. The United Nations predicts that this war could create five million refugees displaced by the barbarity of the Russian army. For most of us untouched our entire lives by war, this is a catastrophe beyond imagining.
Yet, Britain that prides itself on its World War Two spirit of defiance against Nazism when all the nations of Europe lay subjugated under the boot of Hitler's army has done little to assist Ukrainian refugees from this war.
Neither Putin nor his army will show mercy for soldiers or civilians in this war because his battle plan is Nazism 2.0. Yet Boris Johnson fumbles and stumbles his way through providing any real support for these refugees. It's not because Johnson can't help Ukrainian refugees. It's that he won't help them because essentially Toryism has morphed into an ideology that is xenophobic, racist and bereft of compassion. But make no mistake, Britain is appeasing Putin's brutal occupation of Ukraine by not accepting refugees in large numbers.
My dad would be sickened to see this Tory government turn their backs on innocent people fleeing this new war in Europe. The war in Ukraine echoes the war he and his generation fought to rid Europe of a tyrant in the 1940s.
In 2016 my dad wrote about his experiences when he encountered the worst refugee crisis in Europe since the second world war. That refugee crisis which is still ongoing occurred due to our illegal wars in Afghanistan and Iraq produced a hellscape over the whole Mideast, including north Africa.
"My character was forged by the experiences I witnessed during the Second World War. I thought I had seen everything as that war drew to a close, in 1945. I believed nothing could surprise me when it comes to the cruelty of so-called civilized men.
But, when my unit arrived in Hamburg as part of the allied occupation army in May 1945, I was proved dead wrong. The city was masticated into rubble by an air war that had left more than 30 thousand dead. Hamburg was crammed with thousands upon thousands of refugees who fled the advancing Soviet army or were victims of Hitler's slave labour program. They lived in makeshift refugee camps or kipped in bombed-out buildings, obliterated by a continuous stream of air raids during the war.
When I saw those refugees, I knew the war stole everything from them but the will to survive. They wore dirty clothing on bodies that were thin from hunger. Whatever they had once been in the time before the war, worker, intellectual, rich or middle class was gone for them. Peace and the safety of home and family was a memory for them. I am sure they no longer even knew if what they remembered from before the war was true or not because their present reality was hell.
Britain and our allies worked tirelessly to save those refugees from a miserable life in squalid camps by settling them in our host countries. Britain settled over two hundred thousand polish refugees at the end of the war. One of them Mickey Aleksiejewicz became my best friend. When he was dying eight years ago, his mind did not wander to the land of his birth; it roamed to Scotland. Scotland was where he arrived as a refugee in 1939 after he escaped Naz occupied Poland. Scotland welcomed him as a friend and fellow citizen. Throughout his life, he never forgot that his good fortune came because others extended the simple hand of human kindness towards him.
Last November, I travelled to Calais to see the Jungle for myself. I met refugees seeking entry into Britain and a life free from the wars of their homelands. It’s not a pretty place and it reminds me sadly too much of how the world looked 71 years ago when Europe still smouldered from the dying flames of the second world war. The people in the Jungle have had their lives shorn of hearth, home, and kin by war just like those refugees I encountered in the Hamburg of 1945. Today, however, politicians in Britain have turned their back on humanity which is as brutal as averting your eyes from a sinking ship. Considering that there are over 60 million people across the globe displaced by war or brutal dictatorial regimes, we can no more ignore this tragedy than a person can ignore the cries of an abandoned child in their back yard and call themselves human. How we solve this tragedy will determine whether the 21st century is remembered as a time of harmony and progress or one of blood and retribution. "
