Externalisation

Those of us who are not saints are likely to find ourselves, eventually, asking the Lord ‘when did we see you a stranger?’ (Mt 25:44) We know in principle that what we do for the poor we do for Christ, but the definite moments when it becomes clearly imperative to act on that principle come up so rarely that, in practice, we generally do less than we should. We might recognise refugees and illegalised migrants today as some of those people among whom Jesus told us we should expect to find him, but we so rarely come face-to-face with them that we are not often so moved. Moreover, the state has set up its border regime in such a way as to make it as difficult as possible for us to be good.

As far as possible, asylum seekers are prevented from reaching Britain in the first place, but are kept in Calais, so that when the French police destroy the belongings of migrants and leave them to sleep in the cold, when they sink small boats at sea and leave people to swim back to shore, it is not really treated as a political issue here in Britain, despite the fact that our government directly funds it, and created in the first place the exceptional situation whereby the border is moved to Calais for the purpose of enforcement but not for the purpose of asylum. Those asylum seekers who do manage to reach the UK are without exception detained on arrival, and generally placed in an immigration detention system designed to isolate them. As far as possible, irregular migrants and the violence used against them, paid for by you and me, are kept invisible, so that people don’t, on the whole, think of these things as being done to human beings, but keep thinking in an abstract way about ‘securing the border’. This is one of the benefits of ‘externalization’ for the authorities.

But there are limits to what the authorities can do in countries like Britain and France, with the remnants of a commitment to humans rights and a relatively open media able to report on abuses. Consequently, the policy of British and European governments is increasingly to outsource border violence to those governments and other groups which can get away with it. In recent years this has involved substantial payments to the border agencies of authoritarian and semi-authoritarian states along the north African coast through which many migrants travel in hope of reaching Europe via the Mediterranean. In September, Keir Starmer visited Rome to praise the supposed successes of these initiatives in reducing the number of those crossing the Mediterranean, and announced that £4 million would be given by the British state to the Rome Process, one of the funnels through which aid to these agencies is poured.

We find that those crossing the Mediterranean are often more frightened of being returned to these countries than they are of dying at sea, to the point of refusing to send out distress calls until they are out of Tunisian or Libyan waters. The Tunisian government has openly adopted a practice of systematic pushbacks into the desert— men, women and children are driven out into the Sahara and abandoned, often with no food or

water and with their phones confiscated.

They are left to walk for days back to the coast or die in the attempt. Several mass graves have been found in the Sahara but there is no way of knowing how many have been murdered in this way, partly because the Tunisian government makes it virtually impossible for NGOs to operate there. A recent UN report found that twice as many people now die in the Sahara as drown in the Mediterranean. In exchange for this contribution to Europe’s border security, European governments have given hundreds of millions of euros to the Tunisian government in the last few years, including €105 million in 2023 specifically to fund Tunisian border control, in full knowledge of the methods used.

The situation in Libya is, if anything, even worse. There is no centralised coast guard or border force in Libya, which has been split between two rival governments since the civil war, each of which is effectively a coalition of smaller militias; the role of a coast guard is undertaken by these various militia groups. Those migrants who are captured while travelling through Libya, or intercepted by the so-called coast guard at sea, suffer what a UNHRC report, published last year, described as ‘an abhorrent cycle of violence’. The report found ‘that migrants across Libya are victims of crimes against humanity and that acts of murder, enforced disappearance, torture, enslavement, sexual violence, rape and other inhumane acts are committed in connection  with their arbitrary detention’— sexual slavery is also systematic. It is normal for migrants detained in Libya to be held for ransom, either from their own funds or their relatives’, to the extent that forced labour and extortion have become what the report calls a significant source of revenue for Libyan militias and state institutions.

Facilitating this, European governments, including the British government, have given tens of millions of euros worth of aid to Libyan groups in the last few years to fund their actions at the border. Furthermore, European border agencies routinely share the coordinates of migrant boats with the so-called Libyan coast guard, even when merchant vessels and civilian rescue ships are much closer, because civilian ships would be unable to return rescued people to Libya under international law, as an unsafe country. As an example of what happens to those returned there, the UNHRC report cites a documented instance of a boy, a refugee detained in Ayn Zarah in Libya, who having been tortured, and in immense pain, hung himself. His body was left hanging in front of other migrants for a day and half before it was taken down by guards. There are countless similar stories. In the same month as this report was published, the British government announced another £1 million in funding for Libyan border authorities.

All this is being done, at least in part, on our behalf and with our tax money. It would not be accepted if it was happening in this country, but because it is being done far away, to people who are not deemed to matter, it is barely even reported on. It happens with the tacit acceptance of people in this country because we allow migrants to be marginalised— because, for the sake of a sense of security here in the centre, we are willing to overlook the violence at the border.

This article was first given as a reflection at a monthly vigil outside the Home Office on Marsham Street, during which we name and mourn those killed each month crossing European borders. I hope that we thus play some small part in opposing the border regime. Christians in this country have an obligation to rehumanise in the public mind those who are dehumanised by state policy. We have as much as we can to bring people who are marginalised into the centre of our communities. We have to keep talking about these things in the centres of power, of government, of the media, of the churches, of our own communities.

Our religion, after all, began with a crucifixion. It was such an awful and humiliating form of death, as far as the Romans were concerned, that the crucified person suffered a sort of social death as well— they were placed in a state of exception, as someone you couldn’t relate to socially in a normal way. On the edges of settlements, they were marginalised in every possible sense. And when God came into the world that was where he chose to place himself, and for two thousand years we have been putting the cross right at the centre of our worship— that is what Christianity is. We are hypocrites, then, if we centre the cross but don’t centre those being crucified at this moment. If there’s any comfort to take from all this it’s the certainty that, however successful or otherwise we are at this work of social rehumanisation, God will always be successful, because he himself won that victory on the cross. As Reverend Munther Isaac said at Christmas, God is under the rubble. God is in the deserts, in the detention centres, and at the bottom of the sea. If we want to find him, that’s where he’ll be. Jesus remains at the cross.

Revolutionary Naivety

from Issue 77, Advent 2024

It felt like an exciting and inspiring time. I had been involved with Christian Climate Action for several years and was now getting involved with Extinction Rebellion (XR)— at, or even before, its beginning. The organisers seemed to have a well-organised and thoroughly researched plan to bring about the kind of revolutionary change that was — and still is — needed to respond to the climate and environmental emergency.

Of course, growing in understanding of the full urgency and scale of the climate emergency was not exciting. It was horrifying. What was exciting, however, was the possibility that this could really change things. The change needed to protect the life of God’s Earth is a move toward a post-growth, post-capitalist economy. Perhaps something akin to the model described in Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics— a space between ecological and social boundaries where just relations between humans and all life on Earth could flourish, and where all of creation could receive the love, respect, and protection it deserves as God’s gift.

Hindsight is a fine thing, of course. By the summer of 2019, there were loud voices calling on XR to avoid scaring people too much, and to be cautious about raising unrealistic hopes that would inevitably be disappointed. I did not really expect such revolutionary change, but I thought it was worth trying, and it seemed like the best opportunity I had seen— or had the chance to be part of— in my adult lifetime to create that change. In any case, I was convinced that taking part in XR was, for me, a necessary response to the climate emergency.

At its peak, XR seemed to me like a real Pentecostal miracle— an authentic expression of the life and work of the Holy Spirit. And I still believe that. Looking back now, on one hand, it seems to me that the (Divinely) providential combination of XR, Greta Thunberg and the School Strikes, and David Attenborough’s TV show Climate Change— The Facts (which aired during the most famous XR Rebellion— pink boat in Oxford Circus and everything) did have a massive and almost revolutionary impact on national and global consciousness regarding the need to respond to this emergency. But on the other hand, it has obviously not brought about the more fundamental, non-violent, revolutionary change we were hoping for.

So my question is: What do we do after a ‘failed revolution’? What are the choices, the right path? Where do we go after mighty struggles seem to have ended in defeat? How do we deal with the emotional fallout? It could be disappointment, or a temptation to despair. It could be grief. Or simply exhaustion. It could be like the miners’ strike of 1984 and the Thatcher years, or the Extinction Rebellions of 2018-2020. Or the Latin American liberation struggles of the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. The list goes on. My last proactive involvement in the ‘climate emergency movement’ was in autumn 2021, when I participated in two weeks of Insulate Britain (IB) blockades on the M25 and at Dover Port. After that, I had to stop, mainly because of personal and family challenges. But I also started questioning whether the strategies XR and IB were using had run their course, at least for the time being.

So now what? Last year, I read for the first time Gustavo Gutiérrez’s famous book A Theology of Liberation. Published in 1970, during the struggles for liberation, justice, and freedom in Latin America, it kicked off the whole liberation theology phenomenon. A recurring theme of the book is that those who work only on the level of ‘charity’ or even ‘reform’ for the poor and oppressed are naïve. What is really needed, according to Gutiérrez, is revolution.

I’d like to agree with that. However, the Latin American liberationists discovered they were not just struggling against the ‘powers and principalities’ (Ephesians 6:12) in the form of local elites and dictators. They were also up against the overwhelming power of the USA and its allies, including the UK.

Shortly after Gutiérrez’s book was published, socialist Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile. Three years later, on 11 September 1973, he was deposed in a CIA-backed coup and replaced by the military dictator Augusto Pinochet. Similarly, the revolutionary Sandinista government took power in Nicaragua in 1979, but the US responded by funding the Contra guerilla war and imposing an economic blockade, successfully undermining popular support for the Sandinistas, who were eventually defeated in the 1990 elections. Elsewhere, the US funded and supported military dictatorships protecting extreme capitalism across Latin America. This includes the attempted CIA-backed ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion and coup in Cuba, as well as the ongoing economic embargo.

In their own terms, the Latin American liberation struggles and their support from liberation theology appear to have failed. The same could be said of XR. On the other hand, Latin America is generally democratic today, and left-of-centre governments have been elected to support the poor, the indigenous, and the working class. Relatively speaking. Alongside that, the central themes of liberation theology— ideas like structural sin and the option for the poor— have become mainstream in Catholic Social Teaching and official Catholic doctrine. Similarly, although XR did not fully succeed, it did have a massive and positive impact.

What does all this mean? The struggle for life, justice, peace, and freedom must continue, for sure. But what is the best way to direct our energies on behalf of God’s suffering people— the oppressed and impoverished among the growing wealth of the elites— and on behalf of God’s suffering Earth?

For myself, I see questions of strategy. There are also questions of personal calling, gifts, strengths, and weaknesses. Of emotional and spiritual pull. As well as personal, family, and other circumstances. Some might say I’m just experiencing burnout. Perhaps it’s more a question of cycles, like the liturgical cycle, rather than a linear view of time where campaigns have a beginning, a middle, and end in success or failure?

For Christians, of course, we look to Jesus. As Dorothy Day said, even Jesus failed. He ended up crucified. Most of his friends left him, denied him, or betrayed him. It was the women who remained with him till the end. But that was followed by the seemingly miraculous success of the Resurrection! Yet even after that, life went on. The Romans continued to occupy, oppress, kill, and enslave for three more centuries— ‘a time, two times, and half a time’ in the language of the Book of Daniel— until that empire collapsed. And history goes on.

I take comfort in what happened after the crucifixion and resurrection. The disciples took shelter and went home. Even after the resurrection, they had to wait for the revolutionary, spirit-led day of Pentecost. And after Saul’s dramatic conversion, he spent months processing what had happened. Perhaps this is what happens. After being in the middle of dramatic events, everything needs to be processed. We need to find our feet again.

Maybe the ‘80-20’ rule can help too. In Catholic Worker terms, this might mean a good balance is 80% of energy in the daily work and life of hospitality, with the remaining 20% in resistance or activism, trying to work for change on one level or another. In hospitality work, it’s possible to see, feel, and experience the direct and immediate benefit of, for example, giving a meal to a hungry person, or a home to someone who is homeless. A human being, a sister or a brother in God’s family, has clearly benefited. With activism, the benefits can be enormous, but often the outcome is disappointment, or it can feel like all that work and effort was ultimately futile in terms of seeing positive change. For three years of my life, the balance of energy was probably the other way around. So I, and others, need time to recover and regenerate. After all, even the army has tours of duty and time off afterward.

On the other hand, the climate and environmental emergency continues. Carbon emissions still rise. Many species are rapidly approaching extinction and some have already disappeared. The risk of crossing irreversible tipping points grows every day. Right now, I can only do what is at hand and pray to God for further miracles and Pentecostal days.

Finsbury Park is a beach!

Henrietta Cullinan's interview with Br. Johannes Maertens for our Easter 2023 newsletter

Firstly, what do you do?

I try to do… pastoral presence. Or prayerful presence. That means, practically, that I am [based] around Finsbury Park, mostly focused on Eritrean and Ethiopian refugees. We call them Habesha. But for other people too. I mean, I don't wear a sign that says, ‘Refugees Only’.

People talk to me because they're interested in why a monk in a habit is walking around there. Most of the Ethiopians and Eritreans know what I'm doing there, so they automatically come to me if they have problems they need help with. So, I try to be present. It’s not just being there on the street. It’s not just being there in the cafes or in the station. It’s a quality of being. And that’s the most difficult part… to be there and to be… to use a modern term … ‘mindfully present’. It’s not always easy. Because the rhythm of the city, of London, is quite overwhelming, even for people who walk. Even if you’re just going somewhere you’re swept into that rhythm. And I struggle with it. Sometimes in the summer I have less of a problem because I can go into the park. I can force myself to sit down on a bench. And wait and see if somebody comes and speaks to me.

So what do you when it’s cold and rainy?

I go to one of the cafes where people know they can come and get help. They know that I'm there most afternoons. And that works mostly for casework Finsbury Park, East End Prints support. For the ‘pastoral presence’, to be there for people, to talk with them about things other than practical help, the park in summer provides a better [environment]. The park is more [conducive] to what they would call ‘chilling’.

There is much less constraint in the park. People come to the park because they have time [on their hands]. In the street they might be on their way home, to work or to school. The urgency with which you move in the street is different from in the park and so the kind of talks you have will be different.

What other factors influence your work?

The time of day has an enormous influence. There’s a completely different vibe in the evening. The chance [of meeting someone] is greater. I talk with two or three people at the same time who might be slightly under influence of a substance, while during the day I might just speak with one person. Most people are either busy or sleeping in the morning.

And would you say that your habit is part of your space?

Well, my habit is literally the space which I inhabit. And the habit, when I wear it, and I wear it often, determines a part of the space and I know it’s not just clothes, it’s also identity. It’s also inviting or not inviting people to have a conversation about something that points to the non-material world, that is also the idea. I mean that consciously I wear it to invite people, not necessarily to a conversation, but simply to think about the non-material world. And for some people that works. For other people, that works also, but in a negative way, right?

Tell me why the people that you work with congregate around Finsbury Park. What's special about that location?

Well, principally, the park is a meeting place for very different groups of people. Because it’s such a green, wide, open space. In the summer it attracts people who are looking for a bit of space. In the summer you could even almost say it’s a beach. It’s like coming to the beach for people who don’t have the money to go to the seaside. You do see people sunbathing on beach towels.

In the winter, of course, the park is completely different. Then it is mostly a meeting place of different like-minded groups. The largest group that comes to Finsbury Park once a week would be the football fans. Because it is on the way to the Arsenal stadium the surrounding pubs, the Arsenal fans are very present, which is a completely different public from the one I actually work with.

Tell me a bit about not having a hub or a house in which to do your work?

Not having a house for me personally is a big poverty. Even if I live here and, as you can see, I have a big room and I have all the facilities I need, what I don't have is agency over the space. I have agency over my room, but not over the space. And is that important? It is if you want to do hospitality. I live in relative poverty for the moment, I mean financially. The most painful poverty is the poverty of not being able to offer hospitality. It is new for me because I’ve been doing ‘hospitality’ for almost 25 years. Not being able to give somebody a bed or a room for one night even…Yeah, that is a very, very big poverty for me.

I need to learn from this in the sense that there are many people in the world who are on the streets or sofa surfing, staying with other people or living in a room somewhere at somebody else’s apartment. And they cannot give hospitality either.

I won’t say that giving hospitality is a luxury. Not at all, because there are many people who offer hospitality, who are not rich. Probably more people who are not educated offer hospitality than people who are rich. But it is a poverty that is difficult to accept. Especially when you know that there are rooms available in several places. You know that there are places where rooms are free and you don’t have agency.