You may not
have heard of the Somalian refugee Guled Mire. He was in the news last month
when he appeared before a parliamentary select committee urging the government
to remove what he described as a racist restriction on refugees from Africa and the
Middle East.
He was
referring to a policy introduced in 2009 which requires refugees from those
regions to have existing family connections in New Zealand in order to be
resettled here.
Speaking in
support of a World Vision petition asking for the restriction to be lifted,
Mire said it was an unnecessary and racist requirement that shut vulnerable
people out.
It wasn’t
the first time Mire had spoken out about the supposedly racist society that
provided a sanctuary for him, his mother and his eight siblings after they fled
civil war in Somalia 22 years ago.
Only days
after the Christchurch mosque massacres in March, Mire said on TVNZ’s Breakfast programme that he had
experienced racism almost daily in New Zealand.
The
Christchurch attacks, he said, were no surprise. “I think it’s time that we
stopped living in denial about the very form of racism that has existed in this
country for such a long time. It’s nothing new to us.”
He struck a
similar note three months later when he was interviewed for a moralistic Australian-made documentary shown on Al Jazeera television. New Zealand’s Dark Days questioned this
country’s reputation as a harmonious, peaceful place and said warnings about
rising Islamophobia had been repeatedly ignored.
Mire, who
has worked as a government policy adviser and is described on a public
speakers’ website as an activist and writer, challenged the “This is not us”
speech given by Jacinda Ardern in Christchurch after the shootings.
“This ‘This
is not us’ idea is denying our lived experiences,” he told the interviewer. “That
racism, that hatred that exists in this nation, is us.” He said the Muslim community in New Zealand had been
calling out “violent extremism” for years.
This view aligned
with a persistent far-left narrative that surfaced following the Christchurch atrocities.
According to this alternative narrative, the slaughter of 51 innocent Muslims
was the inevitable consequence of all-pervasive race hatred and white supremacist
attitudes. This view overlooked the inconvenient fact that the alleged killer
was not a New Zealander and evidently acted alone.
Mire was in
the news again on Radio New Zealand this week, when he took exception to
National leader Simon Bridges’ dismissive comments about the Ardern-initiated “Christchurch
Call”. Responding to Bridges’ statement
that the government should concentrate on problems such as homelessness and the
measles epidemic, Mire said: “It’s the same sort of rhetoric used to basically
marginalise us people from minority backgrounds again and again. We’ve always
felt as though we’re not accepted as New Zealanders and comments like that
affirm it.”
But hang on.
New Zealand gave Mire and his family refuge after they fled a
dangerous, violent country. It also gave him an education and the right to
speak his mind, a freedom few people enjoy in the part of the world he comes
from. Surely that must count for something.
And before
anyone dismisses that statement as the typical racist bigotry of a privileged white guy, perhaps we should take note of the “lived experiences” of other Muslim
immigrants, some of which are strikingly at odds with the impression conveyed
by Mire.
For example,
there’s Gamal Fouda, the imam of Al Noor Mosque, where 42 worshippers were shot
in the March killings. Speaking in
Dunedin this week, the imam said New Zealand had been a shining light to the
world following the shootings.
He recalled
that when he first came to New Zealand after 9/11, he was initially afraid to
walk in the streets in his religious robes for fear of being attacked. His fear
began to subside after he was greeted by a stranger with the unfamiliar words “Hello,
bro’”.
He said he
was now proud to be a Kiwi. “This is my land. It is the place of my family and
my children. It is my turangawaewae. I love this soil. I love us because we are
one” [the italics are mine].
The imam
noted that there was still hatred and division and people needed to speak out
against racism. But otherwise the tone of his message could hardly have been
more at variance with that of Guled Mire.
Then there’s
Abbas Nazari, an Afghani who was among the Tampa refugees given a home in New
Zealand in 2001 after being refused entry to Australia. Then seven years old, Nazari
settled in Christchurch with his family and this year won a Fulbright
Scholarship after graduating from the University of Canterbury with first-class
honours in international relations and diplomacy.
He told The Guardian earlier this year that he
recalled his family being given a warm welcome by a huge contingent of locals
when they arrived at Christchurch Airport and said the warmth and acceptance they experienced then set the tone for the family’s new life.
He went on
to say: “I can’t recall any instances of racism, and that’s
the same experience for the vast majority of my family and community. I can’t
recall any instances where I was marginalised or I was on the receiving end of
a whole heap of crap at all.
“We wove naturally into the fabric of New Zealand society. So when I
hear stories of prejudice and racism, I know for sure that it exists but my
experience in New Zealand has been amazingly warm and welcoming.”
It doesn’t
sound like the same country Guled Mire describes. And then there was the story this
week about the Hutt City council election candidate Shazly Rasheed, an immigrant
from the Maldives, whose billboards were defaced with swastikas and racist
messages.
That Rasheed’s
election advertising was targeted, presumably because of her skin colour, is despicable.
But on the plus side she said she had lived in New Zealand for 20 years and
only once been racially abused, by skinheads in Hamilton.
Even a single instance of racial abuse is one too many, but otherwise Rasheed’s “lived
experience” seems at variance with Guled Mire’s too. You have to wonder whether the problem is with
him.
I think back
too to the dignified response of the Muslims who survived the Christchurch
attacks. Their reaction was not one of anger, but of sadness that this terrible
thing had happened in a country that they thought of – and still think of – as inclusive
and welcoming.
I remember
the Christchurch Muslim woman who told the BBC she and her family had come to
New Zealand because it was safe and that she had never felt threatened here. And
I recall the thousands of New Zealanders who showed their solidarity with the
Muslim community by attending public vigils, setting up tribute sites and
donating millions to a Givealittle appeal. I find it hard to reconcile all this
with Guled Mire’s view of New Zealand.
Which image
of New Zealand is the more accurate: the hateful, racist one, or the tolerant,
inclusive one? I’ll go with the latter, thanks. It’s pointless to deny that racism exists in New Zealand, but that doesn’t make this a
racist country. It seems to me that Guled Mire is himself guilty of the divisive
rhetoric he accuses others of.
2 comments:
You're not the only one Karl, finding this sort of thing divisive and gratuitous. I skim these pieces, for they dont deserve much attention. Life here is far & away better than what they left. Nowhere is perfect. Immmigration queues speak for themselves. 'Everyone is a little bit racist'...thanks 'Avenue Q". Welfare safety nets here are generous. Life is what you make it. (I'm acquainted with Abbas N..fine young man who went to school with our youngest. )
There is a history to the original intake of Somali refugees in the early 90s. The first group was selected by the Immigration Service from UN camps in Kenya as "women at risk" because they had no male relatives. When they arrived in New Zealand they demanded their previously undeclared male relatives should also be accepted, and threatened to harm themselves if the government did not agree. The then Minister Rob Talbot relented and there has been extensive "family reunification" since that time.
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