The refugee crisis isn’t about refugees. It’s about us: Ai Weiwei
Our prioritisation of financial gain over people’s struggle for the necessities of life is the cause of this crisis
I was born in 1957, the same year China purged more than 300,000 intellectuals,
including writers, teachers, journalists and whoever dared to criticise the
newly established communist government. As part of a series of campaigns led by
what was known as the anti-rightist movement, these intellectuals were sent to
labour camps for “re-education”. Because my father, Ai
Qing, was the most renowned poet in China then, the government made a symbolic
example of him. In 1958, my family was forced from our home in Beijing and
banished to the most remote area of the country – we had no idea that this
was the beginning of a very dark, long journey that would last for two
decades.
In the years that
followed, my father was sentenced to hard labour cleaning latrines in a work camp
in north-west China. He was also forced to criticise himself publicly. From my youth, I
experienced inhumane treatment from society. At the camp we had to live in an
underground dugout and were subjected to unexplainable hatred, discrimination,
unprovoked insults and assaults, all of which aimed to crush the basic human
spirit rooted in my father’s beliefs. As a result, I remember experiencing what
felt like endless injustice. In such circumstances, there is no place to hide
and there is no way to escape. You feel like your life is up against a wall, or
that life itself is a dimming light, on the verge of being completely
extinguished. Coping with the humiliation and suffering became the only
way to survive.
I share this personal
background because it sheds light on my emotional connection to the current
global refugee condition,
which I documented in the film Human Flow. My experience clarifies why I identify so deeply with
all these unfortunate people who are pushed into extreme conditions by outside
forces they are powerless to resist. During two years of
filming, we travelled to 23 nations and 40 refugee camps. Some of the camps are
relatively new, coping with those who have fled from the war in Syria. Other camps
– such as the Ain al-Hilweh camp in Lebanon – have existed for decades and have now sheltered
three generations of refugees.
In the months since
the film’s release, some of the areas we covered have deteriorated even
further. The Rohingya refugee situation in Myanmar, for example, has
erupted in a wave of more than half a million newly displaced people, adding to
the already existing 65 million refugees worldwide...
read more:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/feb/02/refugee-crisis-human-flow-ai-weiwei-china
