Najah Rizvi LIPR Ambassador of Peace
In the early 2010s, there was a significant increase in the number of asylum applications within the EU. Although people fleeing from political unrest in the Middle East initially opted to remain in countries closer to their origins, by 2015, a sudden trend to seek refuge in Europe amounted to approximately 1.3 million asylum requests – the most in a single year since the second world war.
This phenomenon became known as the Syrian refugee crisis. While Turkey and neighbouring countries now hold the most internationally displaced Syrian people, European countries such as Germany and Sweden also host significant numbers. At the time, the rush towards the EU was partially a result of Jordan, Lebanon and Egypt taking action in preventing further asylum cases from the war-torn nation. Now, individuals from all over the global south affected by conflict and economic hardship, attempt dangerous boat journeys from Turkey or Africa in the hopes for a better future.
In the summer of 2021, however, a very different migration crisis began unfolding in the Baltic region of the EU. Almost overnight, the three countries of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia began seeing a rise in irregular crossings on their border, with Belarus (the majority of which being made by people from Iraq).
This situation differed greatly from previous migration waves on the frontiers of Europe, because it was the design of the Belarusian President – Aleksandr Lukashenko. Weeks before the phenomenon began, Lukashenko was quoted in a parliamentary meeting saying: “We stopped drugs and migrants. Now you will eat them and catch them yourselves.”
This was in response to four waves of sanctions imposed on Belarus by the EU, due to purported election fraud and human-rights abuse during the 2020 Belarusian election protests. Due to the way in which this became a geopolitical issue with neighbouring nations, the resistance shown by the Baltic states was unprecedented. The ‘crisis’ has exposed the disturbing reality of how the foreign (predominantly Muslim) asylum seeker can be ‘othered’ and dehumanised within EU borders.
On the 10th of November, 2021 The Polish Institute of International Affairs published a report claiming that the Black and Middle Eastern migrants coming into the Baltic states were a threat to security without any evidence of them being hostile.
The short text uses the word ‘threat’ in the singular and plural five times (Dudzińska, 2021). At the time, Polish news media was also reporting the issue in this way. The Lithuanian Law introduced to combat the influx of people at their borders allowed them to automatically detain these individuals and deny asylum.
Approximately seven months later at the end of June 2022, the EU’s Court of Justice found that Lithuania had violated EU law by detaining an asylum seeker. The court issued a press release stressing that an asylum seeker cannot be detained on the grounds that they are a ‘threat to security’ without evidence that they behaved in a threatening way.
Does having this ruling more than half a year later justify the actions which resulted in the loss of lives at the EU border?
In the months that followed Lukashenko’s announcement, thousands of people arrived in Belarus with a one way ticket, a tourist visa, and a hope to reach the wealthier, more welcoming countries in Western Europe, all with the collaboration of the Belarusian government.
The situation was quickly labelled a ‘manufactured crisis’, and an act of ‘hybrid warfare’ by EU nation states and their respective media outlets, created not only by Belarusian regime, but also with alleged support from the Russian Federation. As this happened, the 3 countries declared a state of emergency, blocking media coverage and rapidly moving to fortify their border.
People who attempted to cross were either illegally sent back to Belarus in mass “push-backs” (Illegal under international law), or were detained and denied basic human rights. Amnesty International published reports which describe the large-scale abuse of asylum seekers in Poland and Lithuania.
“Migration issues are the EU’s stumbling stone, and the Baltic countries have been particularly reluctant to accept foreign people on their soil prior to hosting refugees from Ukraine”. (Djatkoviča, 2022)
Poland welcomed 2.4 million refugees from Ukraine who were not considered ‘others’ in just five weeks (Bathke, 2022). If these nations had the means to accept refugees from Ukraine but chose to incriminate victims of the Belarusian scheme for illegally migrating, how can the EU claim to be a non-discriminant body in its Charter of Fundamental Rights? The court of justice ruling in the summer of 2022 is not enough to prevent the actions Lithuania and Poland are ultimately ready to take. It has been made clear that the Polish media supports the position that the authorities took at the time and these anti-immigration sentiments are widespread across the continent, despite being rooted in racially discriminatory ideologies.
The role of news media in the period of time was to accurately represent what was happening on the borders. This reflects the general expectation we have of a media outlet often being the only trustworthy source of information for what is happening in the world. As we have seen above, people flying into Belarus from developing countries were victims of a scheme created by the Belarussian government in response to sanctions from the EU. The news media at the time, however, failed to highlight how the asylum-seekers were victims in this, despite meeting harsh conditions and abuse from both sides in their attempts to cross the border.
From Stuart Hall’s exploration of theories surrounding representation, we can get a clearer understanding of how the careless usage of the word ‘threat’ can affect the culture we live in.
Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices traces a history of semiotic theory to explain how meanings are constructed through the usage of words. Hall discusses Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Sassure’s linguistic model to illustrate how an object, word or thing which is labelled the signifier is connected to a concept signified by it.
Through connecting the signifier to the signified using the language we speak (langue) and communicating this to the world around us (parole) we create the shared conceptual maps which we call culture (Hall, 1997, pp. 30-35). In the example above, the signifier is the migrant or asylum-seeker and the signified is a threat.
The concept of danger, through the function of the signifier and signified is now attached to the body of an asylum seeker. By bringing this meaning into our ‘parole’ and repeatedly sharing it with the people around us, we establish a shared culture of discriminant attitudes towards asylum-seekers.
Hall added to this system of representation by making the claim that “meaning can never be finally fixed” and proposed “trans-coding: taking an existing meaning and re-appropriating it for new meanings” (Hall, 1997, p. 270). Trans-coding, as a way of subverting the effects of media stereotypes, can only go so far with the limitations of news media which I will explore throughout the text.
However, in this particular case, trans-coding (as an effort to overturn discriminatory attitudes) cannot be applied to the news media. When government institutions and spokespersons are claiming otherwise, the media can only go so far in trying to change this rhetoric in a way which would be believable. The EU Court of Justice ruling came seven months after the fact, when the issue on the borders is no longer ‘news’ and the damage of unfair reporting has been done.
Readers expect the press to publish newsworthy, relevant information on time. Traditional news reporting will typically be filtered in a number of ways to meet the aims of media outlets. Without enough listeners and viewership, radio and television broadcasts cannot function as businesses. Galtung and Ruge, in their study of four Norwegian newspapers, hypothesised that a degree of ethnocentrism is present in the reporting of international events. A level of ‘cultural proximity’ to the reader would be required for information to be registered as news.
The issue of cultural proximity is particularly relevant when considering the treatment of Ukrainian refugees. The closeness felt with a fellow Christian population allows the reader to feel that their struggle is newsworthy, that their problems are indeed something that Europeans should empathise with and as a result a hierarchy is perpetuated amongst refugees based on their ethnic background.
In addition to this, the pre-conceived notions of an international body or person must match with the information regarding this distant ‘other’ for the news to resonate. This is especially problematic, as general pre-conceived notions of international people are often misconstrued by cultural differences.
Furthermore, for events in foreign countries to become news, they should somehow connect to the reader’s world. The study goes on to factor in events connected to ‘elite nations’, ‘elite people’ and negative consequences being more likely to become news media. It can be inferred that with the variables controlling the probability of what becomes news, it is difficult to apply Hall’s ‘trans-coding’ method to re-represent the other in news media, especially with regards to the distant/foreign ‘other’. International reporting will give the most attention to somewhat ‘rare’ but also conceivable events either related to higher status nations/people or those who are perceived to be the most threatening.
Identifying the distant/foreign other as a threat is widely accepted and even expected. This tendency has already set a precedent for damaging representations of the ‘other’. For example, the reporting of conflict in the Middle East in the US has conflated ‘Arab and Muslim identities’, using the words interchangeably and in the long term building an idea of the evil Muslim ‘other’ belonging to the Middle East, Pakistan and Iran all as one similar kind of people. This has served the USA’s War on Terror, as it gives the American public an image of Arabs as all ‘fanatical, misogynistic, anti-American’, when in fact not all Arabs are Muslim and not all Muslims are Anti-American terrorists ready to attack at any point. (Alsultany, 2016, pp. 242-243)
Following an event like 9/11, the US public would already be looking for explanations as to how and why a distant ‘other’ could cause such harm to their country, bypassing what they understood to be their country’s superior defences – the same defences which protected the world from the Soviet Union’s communist regime. This stereotype is not limited to the USA, as it is in fact backed by the historical othering of Arabs and the Islamic world.
Edward Said’s work on post-colonial studies traces the history of representation of the Middle East in literature which he describes as ‘Orientalism’. For Said, this phenomena is present in European literature, where the colonised near-eastern peoples are described using stereotypes extending all the way to the Indian subcontinent. The same negative stereotypes are used as a tool to legitimise the colonisation and domination of these people – a narrative built by predominantly English and French writers believed to be academic study. Rather than academia, these representations of people from the Middle East and South Asia served to justify their status as second-class citizens undeserving of liberation (Said, 1978). This historical othering alongside the ongoing vilification of Muslim people in the media has created the very deep-rooted stereotypes of this ‘Other’ in the contemporary Western World.
The term “phantom islamophobia” was used to describe the situation in Poland, where there are high levels of anti-Muslim attitudes, despite there being a nearly non-existent population of Muslims (Włoch, 2009). As we will soon see, this term could easily be applied to several other Eastern European countries, including Lithuania, Czech Republic and Slovakia, where, despite Muslims making up a very low percentage of the population, there remains a high level of anti-Muslim attitudes.
Poland’s far-right party Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (Law and Justice) has been accused of being ‘propagandists’ (Schmitz, 2021) leading a ‘state-sponsored anti-LGBTQ+ campaign’ (Umbrasko, 2022) and being opposed to letting migrants into the country.
Back in 2015 this party went as far as to claim migrants from the Middle East could bring dangerous diseases to the country without providing any clear evidence to back this (Reuters, 2015). To relay such a statement to the public is a big step further in the othering of people from the Middle East and as a result the public opposition to the relocation of refugees in the EU to Poland has grown in the time that the PiS has been in power. (Umbrasko, 2022) It is worth noting that the ‘othering’ assumed by the far-right party includes the marginalisation of the queer and trans communities.
Authorities were more concerned about controlling the narrative than dealing with the conditions some of the asylum seekers died in, due to exposure and lack of medical attention. On the Poland and Belarus border, both sides tried to control the media coverage of the situation.
While Poland called a state of emergency and under that pretense created zones where journalists, activists and monitors were banned, Belarus invited the media to show the inhumane treatment of the asylum-seekers being brutally pushed back into Belarus from the Polish border guards (Tilles, 2021). Here, representation of the other is absent at a time when attention is most needed, making the migrants and their suffering invisible to the public. This kind of control prevents the other from receiving medical aid, dehumanising the other further by removing this basic human right.
Despite being aware of state-sponsored media, the information communicated by such media is still accepted as some version of truth. Lee McIntyre argues that we could be living in an era of ‘post-truth’, where the truth is subverted by what we want to believe is true or what others want us to believe is true. From misinformation campaigns to mistakenly false claims, McIntyre suggests that the idea of a single objective truth has been replaced by alternative perspectives and opinions.
He gives evidence of growing acceptance for facts which are not backed by sufficient evidence in recent years, indicating the danger of this becoming a prominent political tool for leaders and policymakers. Rather than simply opening ourselves to alternative perspectives of the same issue, this era of post-truth may be fuelling partisan ideologies. In the study of social psychology, cognitive bias plays a large role in converting falsehoods into beliefs. McIntyre goes into detail outlining cognitive biases such as confirmation bias (searching for and remembering information which affirm our perceptions) and the repetition effect (an increased likelihood of believing things which are repeated to us) (McIntyre, 2018).
The Polish state-sponsored media takes advantage of this ‘Post-Truth’ phenomenon and the political ideology influencing the media has negative consequences for the representation of the ‘other’. Academic Terhi Rantanen argues that the ‘role of the media becomes increasingly important when nationalism goes through a period of transformation’.
To locate a national identity within a global context, distinctions are made from surrounding countries. The inclusion of some and exclusion of others is considered in marking what forms the boundaries of the nation. Poland and Lithuania in collaboration with Frontex and the EU have begun construction on a continuous border wall across the edge of EU territory which will connect to Bulgaria and Greece.
The so-called ‘Eurozone’ and ‘migration crises’ mark critical moments in Europe’s recent political history and share similarities to the extent that they both have increased political conflict, mobilised large parts of civil society, and put renewed attention upon the notion of ‘solidarity’. Both Western and Eastern Europe have experienced a rise in right-wing populist parties over the last decade. Central to many of these parties is an emphasis on a supposed threat from Muslims and Islam. National states have called for a tighter regulation of migration inflows accompanied by a rebirth of nationalism and authoritarian patterns of governance.
In an article by TVP released on the 21st of January 2022, the following was reported about the migrants crossing into Poland from Belarus:
At the post of the “Polish Border Guard in Czeremcha a group of 49 aggressive foreigners (citizens of Iraq, Sri Lanka, Syria, Turkey and Yemen) forced their way across the border,” the Border Guard added.
The article uses the words ‘aggressive’ ‘illegally’ ‘tactics’ and ‘aggression’ to describe how the ‘foreigners’ attempted to cross the border. Representing the asylum-seekers with these words is a form of othering designed to make these individuals sound dangerous.
The word ‘aggressive’ implies that the migrants behaved in a threatening way. Throwing ‘stones and logs’ is the only example of threatening behaviour written in the article. Meanwhile, the guards are shown as being armed with guns, clearly in the dominant position. Another problem is the use of the word ‘foreigner’, a vague term which implies that these people crossing the border may not be legitimately claiming asylum or refugee status within the EU.
The likelihood of someone coming from Yemen having the right to claim asylum in the EU is quite high considering the success rate of asylum applications in the Netherlands for Yemeni refugees was 95.2% in 2021, for example (World Data). The asylum-seeker, through this article, signifies a very exaggerated degree of danger, power and criminality when in fact they are a vulnerable human being risking their life. There is little depth to this image, to make it as difficult as possible for the reader to empathise with the asylum seekers.
Ultimately, the usage of the language in this article illustrates the migrants as threatening individuals deserving of military confrontation to minimise the damage they could potentially incur on the populace. The individual words used by a news article can warp the concept in the audience’s ideas considerably, without explicitly lying about what happened.
In an article from the Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, criticises the language used by UK media outlets on the refugee/migrant issue (2015) claiming that the term ‘crisis’ is often used without explicitly stating what part of the problem forms the crisis and for whom.
This ambiguity leaves the reader believing that they should be concerned about migration, but there’s plenty of room to make assumptions as to what is at stake. It could mean that human migration affects the general public on some level or perhaps it is a crisis for the ones taking dangerous migration routes. Nevertheless, without a clear idea of what the ‘crisis’ is exactly, one can only infer that migration is a very alarming matter which should be met with immediate action.
Another criticism is the exclusion of information regarding what migrants or refugees are escaping from. It is difficult to understand whether somebody is a genuine asylum-seeker, victim of human trafficking, criminal, economic migrant or refugee without understanding the reason for their migration. The article explores in depth the re-categorisation of the people from ‘migrant’ to ‘refugee’, describing how the two terms evoke very different understandings of the individuals involved, particularly in reference to whether they’re deserving of international protection (Goodman, Sirriyeh, McMahon, 2017). Refugees, like those fleeing the war in Ukraine, are deserving of international protection.
As discussed above, the politics of migration is so volatile in Europe that even a small group can set off tensions. In the case of what happened on the border with Belarus, there is widespread support for the harsh policies which dehumanise asylum-seekers to the point where violent abuse becomes a standard procedure. Historically, human migration has been met with issues of racial prejudice and othering.
What is not commonly recognised, however, is the degree to which these issues are still present in developed nations. Informed audiences are becoming increasingly aware of the biases and stereotypes present in news media. This distrust with what is supposed to be the main source of reliable information is contributing to our search for alternative truths, further exaggerating partisan divides. If we continue to let the existing structures control the representation of the foreign Muslim ‘other’ in news media, we are at risk of rapidly increasing tensions both nationally and in the global context.
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