Today's Washington Post included an article detailing the struggles of an Indonesian man seeking sanctuary in a New Jersey Church as he faces deportation by ICE officials [1]. Saul Timisela, who arrived in New Jersey fourteen years ago, had fled Indonesia due to religious persecution. Timisela was a Christian in a country that is predominantly Muslim (roughly 7% Christian to 87% Muslim) [2]. The state is largely viewed as democratic, but local governments have passed laws based on Islamic principles that threaten the rights of Christians [3]. Christianity, specifically Evangelical, has risen in recent years among the Indonesian population, which has caused clashes between Christians and Muslims and led to a rise in sectarian violence.
In the Washington Post article, Timisela is said to have fled overseas, "after his pastor and brother-in-law were dismembered and burned in a church in an anti-Christian attack in Indonesia [4]. A Times article covering this surge of Christianity in Indonesia reported that Christian theological students were forced to leave their campus after being harassed by Muslim mobs (three students also had acid thrown into their faces) [5]. Although most attacks are against Christians, the victims are not completely free from blame: mosques have also been burned during religious violence. Although the president of Indonesia has deliberately appointed
Christians to his cabinet, his silence and the lack of punitive measures taken against perpetrators has, according to the Harvard International Review, created an environment of impunity for religious violence [6].
According to the Washington Post article, Timisela is one of 80 Indonesian Christians living in New Jersey as a result of religious persecution in Indonesia [7]. The Pastor harboring Timisela and other Indonesian Christians argues that, "These are not threatening people […] They're not terrorists. They're not people who have done anything wrong other than escaping persecution from their country during a very scary time," [8]. Yet the ICE are still after these illegal immigrants. Timisela has overstayed his visa and has already evaded deportation in an incident prior to this current case. Although it is unlikely that the ICE will raid the church, this incident raises important questions regarding what should and can be done for refugees fleeing persecution and violence.
This past summer I interned with a refugee resettlement agency. During my time there, I not only learned of the horrors our clients had undergone, but I also learned of the limitations of resettlement as a viable long-term solution to the refugee issue. What brought this issue to mind was the Naimark reading (Chapter 2, "The Nazi Attack on the Jews") and the issue of Jewish emigration during the initial phases of Nazi ethnic cleansing. Despite the horribly apparent life-threatening and degrading conditions that Jews were being subjected to, Western states refused to allow the flood of Jewish refugees to pass their borders, enforcing strict emigration quotas (68). Does this closed-door policy make Western states complicit with the Holocaust? Could these countries have handled the influx of refugees? Would a flood of eastern foreigners have lead to further racial conflict and violence, now within the Western states? Although the obvious long-term solution to the refugee question is to bring peace to their home states, the intermediary solution still seems to evade us, as Saul Timisela illustrates.
I affirm I have adhered to the Honor Code in this assignment.
Lauren Muscott
In response to your question “Does this closed-door policy make Western states complicit with the Holocaust?”
ReplyDeleteI am instinctually hesitant to level a charge of complicity with the Holocaust against the West. Besides the obvious (perhaps even emotionally motivated) reluctance to accuse the predecessors of the group to which one belongs with genocide, let’s explore what complicity would entail.
The cornerstone of an argument claiming that a ‘closed-door emigration policy’ would constitute ‘complicity with genocide’ (or, if I may take the liberty, ‘genocide by neglect’) rests on proving that those groups who could potentially take refugees are aware of a genocide taking place (or, because the term ‘genocide’ had not yet been coined, that some sort of significant humanitarian crisis was in process/imminent). While I understand why, in your last paragraph, you interpret the Naimark reference (68) as belying some degree of Western understanding of the horrors Nazi Germany was perpetrating and was planning to perpetrate (they did indeed not take the refugees), the degree in question seems curiously unclear. Browning avoids the subject, and Bergen goes beyond Naimark only in describing the “[s]oldiers from the United States and Great Britain who fought their way into Germany from the west [as being]… [un]prepared for what they found: mass graves, abandoned camps, boxcars full of corpses, and emaciated, dying prisoners.” (235) These were soldiers, not policymakers, and thus less privy to complete intel, but the point of unexpected horror holds.
Thus – I cannot, at this point, offer a conclusion as to whether Western states were complicit with the Holocaust. The evidence relating to and motivations of the major Western actors are too murky. I will state, however, that the case is, correspondingly, not completely closed.
(Thanks to Lauren Muscott and Tracey Knott for their input.)