The history of Western encounters with ‘the other’ is a horrifying collection of oppression, colonisation, extermination; of seemingly intellectual debates about race and the superiority of one race over another; of inflammatory remarks, persecution, camps. Anyone who was not Western (specifically European) and Christian (mainly Catholic) was considered vermin, subhuman, a danger to public life. It’s history, it’s part of our identity as Westerners, for which we have never atoned.
In December 1948, after the West had exterminated, in various ways and over several centuries, tens of millions of people who were ‘different’, the United Nations adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. A milestone, and an optimistic belief that you could snap your fingers and the oppression of ‘the other’ would end.
But there is a major flaw in this attempt. It was about human rights. What if countries continue to regard ‘the other’ as not human? The logical consequence is that universal human rights do not apply to these others. And even if Europe no longer openly persecutes and oppresses non-Europeans, non-whites, non-Christians, the continent’s actions clearly show that human rights are for a select few and not for all.
Polish director Agnieszka Holland was attacked when her film Green Border was released. While the film received many positive reviews and reopened the debate about what Europe is doing about its borders, there was also a lot of criticism. Criticism that mainly proved Holland’s point in the film. More than once, Holland was accused of playing into the hands of Belarusian dictator Aleksandr Lukashenko.
Green Border is set in 2021. Lukashenko had promised refugees from several countries easy access to the EU. They could take a relatively cheap flight from Turkey to Minsk and then make their way to the Belarusian-Polish border. Hundreds followed the promise, only to find that they would lose everything, even their dignity. The film begins with a flight over green forests. The trees are lush green, it’s beautiful. But soon Holland paints the forest in black and white. I no longer read film aesthetics the way I used to at university. And yet the transition to black and white here is telling. Even though what we are about to witness takes place in the present, everything that defines it comes from the past.
We follow various people: a Syrian family, the parents, three children and a grandfather, who are trying to make it to Sweden; an Afghan woman whose brother worked as an interpreter for the Polish army in Afghanistan; a Polish border guard, a father-to-be, who carries out orders out of a sense of duty, regardless of the consequences for the refugees and for himself; Julia, a widowed psychologist, who joins a group of young people who help and support refugees.
Just to be clear, the 1951 Refugee Convention states that anyone can seek asylum anywhere, that asylum seekers sometimes have to use illegal means to get out of their country and into the country where they want to seek asylum (because of specific circumstances, i.e. war, persecution, etc.), and that every asylum seeker is protected by the law in the country of arrival for as long as their application is being considered.
However, this is not always the case. Firstly, Europe is making it harder and harder for people to reach our shores by signing dubious deals with third countries. They hand over billions of euros and ask countries like Libya, Tunisia, Morocco and Turkey to ‘look after’ asylum seekers for us. We leave it to their imagination how they want to do it, so we have already funded torture centres, concentration camps and illegal pushbacks into the desert where people die of malnutrition, thirst and heatstroke.
In Green Border we see that ‘human rights’ and the Refugee Convention mean nothing. The former isn’t granted to non-Europeans, the latter isn’t applied. On the contrary, asylum seekers become a kind of football to be kicked over the border again and again. The sheer happiness of the Syrian family with an Afghan woman when they find out they’re in Poland, in the EU, doesn’t last long. They don’t know what awaits them. They’re hunted like animals and never get a chance to apply for asylum. The Polish government (led by the Law and Justice party at the time) didn’t want the people on their territory. They declared a national emergency and set up exclusion zones near the border, where no one except the army was allowed to enter. Apprehended asylum seekers are first taken to the exclusion zone and then forced to cross the border into Belarus.
This happens at night because it’s a cat-and-mouse game between Belarus and Poland. Neither country wants the asylum seekers on its territory, so they become the metaphorical football that the border guards of the two countries kick back into the arms of the other. Violence and cruelty are necessary tools. If a heavily pregnant woman refuses to get off the Polish military truck because she doesn’t want to be sent back to Belarus, it is perfectly normal for two border guards to pick her up and throw her (yes, literally) over the barbed wire. Why should they care about this black woman, let alone her unborn bastard? And why does it matter if a guard dog bites a man’s leg open, with no medical help in sight? If these people don’t like it here, they can go back where they came from.
Bashir, a Syrian who fled the country with his family, was tortured under Assad. The scars on his back bear witness. He will lose his father and his son on the way, the latter drowning in a swamp. And the viewer cannot help but think that there is no great difference between authoritarian and/or dictatorial regimes and the EU; only the means used to oppress people are different, often hidden and euphemistically described to us, the people, by politicians in suits.
What Green Border shows is that the EU is failing as an institution. There are enough people willing to help, like the young men and women who meet asylum seekers in the woods as soon as they get a pin on their phone. They provide them with warm, dry clothes, shoes, food and water, basic medical care. They can’t do much more than that, and even that can be considered aiding and abetting human trafficking. Julia, the psychologist, is arrested for this very reason, a ridiculous attempt to scare her away from future excursions into the forest.
On our external borders, a bottle of water for an asylum seeker can get you arrested. A warm jumper can get you arrested. A bandage on a bleeding wound can get you arrested. Europe does not just demonise the other. It also demonises all those who are still human. It’s not surprising that the German AfD (far-right) party wants to deport up to two million people, a number that includes foreigners and Germans alike, namely those Germans who have retained their humanity. In the words of the party’s politicians, these Germans don’t represent ‘our values’.
Green Border runs for more than two hours and has a depth that forces the viewer to think about our choices. Because they are our choices. We can’t absolve ourselves of responsibility for what happens in our name, because we are the ones who voted for politicians who promised more and more ruthlessness at our borders. Too many of us believe we’re being overrun by hordes of Muslim men who come here to brutalise our women and profit from our welfare system. The rhetoric worked and it still works. The disregard for international law is no longer confined to the political right. It has infected the left as well. It no longer matters what you vote for: as long as you still vote (I have stopped, I only vote blank now because I want to remain human), you vote for what happens at our borders. Even the Greens have massively supported the latest tough migration rules in the EU Parliament. More ruthlessness, stricter measures, new concentration camps at our borders, more deportations, even greater disregard for international law – the political left has supported all this in order to win back their voters who have moved to the right.
Green Border does something else. It shows that it can be done if there is a will. And if the people who seek our help are human. Human rights only apply to human beings, and as long as we don’t see someone as human, we don’t have to treat them as such. The epilogue of the film shows the lines of refugees fleeing Ukraine in February 2022, the welcoming atmosphere, the well-organised transport of people to different cities in Poland. The words we hear are the same ones we heard throughout the rest of the film: ‘We can’t go home’, ‘We don’t have a home anymore’, ‘It’s not safe anymore’. Almost two million Ukrainians were welcomed into Poland shortly after the Russian invasion. There were no illegal pushbacks, no human footballs, no arrests for alleged human trafficking, no violence.
Human rights are not human rights. They’re white, Western, Christian rights. Anyone who does not fit into that category will be treated the way Europe has always treated people in the past, long before 1948. This is impressively shown in Green Border. Anyone who thinks that Holland’s film plays into Lukashenko’s hands doesn’t understand the film. Because every time, every single time, we make a choice against humanity, we play into the hands of dictators. It is not Holland that is playing into Lukashenko’s hands.
We are.
And as I’m writing this, the news of another eight dead in the Channel appears on my phone.
Tomorrow, Germany’s left-wing government will close the country’s borders, initially for six months.
It’s our choice.