wfn.org | Churches demand governments help refugees

[a.whitefield@quest.org.uk]

March 18, 1997
ANGLICAN COMMUNION NEWS SERVICE
The Anglican Communion Office, London, UK
Director of Communications - Canon James M Rosenthal
Tel: [44] (0)171 620-1110   Fax: [44] (0)171 620-1070

(97.3.2.1)

EUROPE: Churches demand governments help refugees

(edited from Cedric Pulford, ENI) Church organisations from across
Europe are calling on governments to ratify an international convention
on displaced people which has been gathering dust for more than six
years. 

Only seven countries - and no leading Western nation is among them -
have ratified the United Nations-supported 1990 convention to improve
the official status of migrants, according to Patrick Taran, secretary
for migration at the World Council of Churches (WCC).

Mr Taran was speaking after the first Pan-European Ecumenical Conference
on Uprooted People, held in London from 6 to 9 March. The conference was 
jointly sponsored by the WCC and the Conference of European Churches
(CEC). 

Participants at the gathering expressed concern at trends by governments
in every region of Europe to close their borders to non-nationals, and
the increasing pressure to repatriate refugees despite continuing
conflict in their countries of origin.

Refugees, migrants and displaced people, in country after country around
the world, were facing an "onslaught of inhumanity" in which governments
adopted restrictive measures "with the support of their peoples,
[making] migrants the scapegoats for the ills of society", Mr Taran
said.

About 130 participants, including delegates from eastern Europe and 
countries of the former Soviet Union as well as many displaced people, 
attended the conference on uprooted people. A public rally on Saturday 8 
March addressed by three bishops - an Anglican and a Roman Catholic
bishop from Britain and an Anglican bishop from The Gambia - drew an
audience of more than 200 people. 

The events were organised to mark the launch in Europe of the WCC's 
Ecumenical Year of Churches in Solidarity with Uprooted People.
According to A Moment to Choose, a WCC resource book, uprooted people
are "those forced to leave their communities; those who flee because of
persecution and war, those who are forcibly displaced because of
environmental devastation and those who are compelled to seek sustenance
in a city or abroad because they cannot survive at home". 

According to The World Refugee Survey 1996, the global population of 
"refugees and asylum-seekers in need of protection and/or assistance"
totals 15.3 million people, mainly located in three areas: the Middle
East 5.5 million, Africa 5.2 million and Europe 2.5 million. 

Participants called on their churches to become "the church of the 
stranger", welcoming migrants and absorbing them into church activities. 

Explaining the work of the churches, Mr Taran told the press conference: 
"The churches are in the front-line, but the churches can't work in 
isolation. 

"The globalisation of economic and political policies call for a global 
response. We want to offer an alternative vision to that governments are 
adopting." He pointed out that much of the North's surplus food was
exported to the South, forcing local farmers off the land and swelling
the uprooted population in cities "seeking visions of Dallas and
California". 

The conference sent a message of solidarity to Inderjit Bhogal, a
Methodist minister, who began a 270-kilometre walk on 10 March in
protest at the treatment of asylum-seekers in the United Kingdom.

Mr Bhogal was born into a Sikh family in Nairobi in 1953. He came to
Britain in 1964 and became a Christian while a teenager. He was later
ordained into the Methodist Church.