Refugees Across the Globe – A Never-Ending Story
How many families were evicted then! Ritesh Batra was raised in Bombay by his paternal grandfather. His grandfather told his grandchildren many and colourful stories about his former homeland, but he remained silent as if under a spell about the violence that accompanied the expulsions. “Last summer, my grandfather often mourned the partition of India. For him, however, it was not a national tragedy, but a completely personal one.” His other maternal grandfather, also exiled from Pakistan, founded an optical company in the Indian city of Lucknow, which he named Lahore Optical in honour of his former homeland. And although the shop is attacked every now and then during anti-Pakistan riots, the family does not give in and keeps the name. They proudly present on the Internet the information that the company was founded in 1936 in Lahore – in the lost homeland.
The dramatic consequences of civil warsShortly after the division of India, during the Cold War, bloody conflicts and proxy wars erupt. Old colonial empires fall apart. The fall of former powers is accompanied by wars of independence and ethnic cleansing, for example in Indochina, Korea and Afghanistan. In distant Geneva, during a conference in 1954, the division of Vietnam – along the 17th parallel – into a communist northern zone and a pro-Western southern zone was decided. As a result, over a million Vietnamese fled from the north. Many of them evacuated on French and American warships to the south of the divided country. The refugee issue remains a burning problem until the outbreak of the Vietnam War twenty years later. In turn, during the Korean War, millions of Koreans fled, becoming refugees in their own country. To this day, the arbitrarily drawn border between North and South Korea separates people who have had no chance of contact with their loved ones since the division.
The conflict on the Korean Peninsula ended after three bloody years with a truce in 1953. But the war in Afghanistan, which began in December 1979 with an attack by the Soviet Union, continues to this day (in 2020, an agreement was signed between the United States and the Taliban ending hostilities – [editor's note]. According to estimates by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), more than 6.3 million Afghans have fled the fighting between Soviet troops and Islamic mujahideen, 3 million of whom have fled to Iran and 3.3 million to Pakistan. Since the final withdrawal of Soviet troops in the spring of 1989, various warlords have been fighting among themselves for power in the country. However, the civil war also has ethnic roots – and particularly affects the Hazara people. They are persecuted because of their Turkish-Mongolian origin and Shiite religion by the predominant Pashtuns. This persecution was described by Khaled Hosseini in the novel The Kite Runner. The novel's plot takes place in the 1970s. in Kabul. A boy named Amir befriends Hasan, the son of his parents' servants. They are Hazara minorities. When Asef, Amir's sociopathic schoolmate, catches both boys playing together, he treats Hasan like a weirdo and calls him racist names. Afghanistan is the land of the Pashtuns and only they can call themselves true, pure Afghans! "Afghanistan for the Pashtuns, that's what I believe. That's my vision," says Asef. The Hazaras are defilement of Afghanistan, they are polluting the pure blood. He, Asef, will write to the new president of the country right now with a request to rid Afghanistan of these "filthy" Hazaras!
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Dramatic images of people stranded on the waves of the South China Sea herald another bitter conflict of the Cold War. After the fall of the US-backed South Vietnamese regime in Saigon, three million people flee the victorious communist Viet Cong army, initially by land. With the capacity of neighbouring Asian countries to accept refugees quickly running out, more than half of the Vietnamese refugees – many of them ethnic Chinese – try to escape by sea. They desperately set off on rafts, cutters and fishing boats, where as so-called boat people they are exposed to attacks by Thai pirates. Some 250,000 people die trying to escape.
The Vietnam War is the first armed conflict of the 20th century, the course of which can be followed in real time on television screens by viewers from all over the world. World public opinion is beginning to become aware of the global scale of migration movements and international conflicts. This makes the initial skepticism and faint-heartedness finally give way to a willingness to help. Rupert Neudeck - a German refugee from Gdańsk - organizes a relief movement using his rescue ship Cap Anamur.
