Cast Away: The Accounts of the Refugee Experience

Introduction

Charlotte McDonald-Gibson has been reporting on almost every aspect of the European migration crisis, and her book Cast Away offers a rare and a detailed glimpse into the life, dilemmas and the choices the refugees had to make at each stage of their agony. An eye-opening, shocking, meticulously reported and very well told account of five refugee families converging on Europe in the past five years. She puts their incredibly precarious journeys and stories into the context of movements in their own countries and in Europe that add up to a global refugee crisis. This collection of true stories takes place starting in 2011 with the European Refugee Crisis. African and Arabian civil wars, oppressive dictators and deportations force these people into refuge status.

They main characters are: a formerly wealthy orphaned from Nigeria; a doubly educated Syrian; a man avoiding Libya military conscription; educated newlyweds deported from Ethiopia to homeland Eritrea where employment is limited and often not supportive; and the family who are of Palestinian descent and had a comfortable life in Syria. The wealthy and marginally employed both find themselves imprisoned, cheated by smugglers, abandoned, terrorized by unsafe boats, repeatedly turned away from paid-for flights, forced into refugee camps and most horribly for the families separated with little communication available. An amazing aspect was how they all seemed to be able to find a source for forged documents, and money to pay for them. This is also the story of how the European Union struggled with the situation. Some of their ideas backfired, some worked.

Various Pds: Salient Aspects & Relevance

The book can mainly be divided into three periods the highly emotional stories of the individuals undertaking these desperate journeys; the background that gives you a much better understanding of the set of circumstances over the 2011-2014 period that has resulted in individuals undertaking these journeys and of course, Europe’s mismanaged response to one of the largest humanitarian crisis of our times. In other words the periods can be illustrated as follows:-

• Hope for a better life.
• The journey across the Mediterranean.
• The unwelcoming shores of Europe.

Hope for a Better Life. It’s incredible how one should have to ponder whether it would be safer for them to cross the Mediterranean or remain in a country devastated by war (or dictatorship). The increase in the refugees is a direct consequence of 2011, the year of the Arab Spring, hailed by the EU as a revolution against oppressive regimes. And these refugees have names, and they have stories to tell that deserve to be heard. And this is what this book proposes itself to do. “For decades,” writes the author, “hopes of a better life had pushed people to Europe's unwelcoming shores,” some were in the expectation of finding employment and others wanted to escape the confused conditions of civil war or to avoid military conscription. They see Europe as giving them peace and security to raise their families. Many of them had good jobs in their home countries – in computers, teaching, engineers. It surely takes courage to uproot and go to Europe, into a new culture with new languages to learn like Swedish or German (both of which were accepting migrants/refugees at the time this book was written).

The Journey Across the Mediterranean

The book provides an eye-opening view at what refugees go through for a chance at a life free from war. We read of desert routes through the Sahara, of people smuggling, of flimsy boats and the reasons why so many have turned to dingys. This is the story of small towns who, having lost their own ways of life through various reasons, have turned to the lucrative business of people smuggling. Migrants are not, of course, always refugees. They are not all Syrians fleeing war; many are people looking for a new future, a better future, away from religious extremism, corrupt governments and poverty. It is also a story of corruption, bribery and profit and of the scale of the migration and of the futility of trying to curb it from Europe when it is evident that no one has any interest in stopping it from the places that the migrants are leaving from.

The Unwelcoming Shores of Europe

The increase in the refugees is a direct consequence of 2011, the year of the Arab Spring, hailed by the EU as a revolution against oppressive regimes. Yet “when it came to helping the victims of this noble pursuit of democracy, their [the European countries’] response did not match their rhetoric”. Europe doesn’t seem to remember its own dark days, it has not learned anything from history.

And it’s indeed the EU’s fault if the smuggling industry has grown to its current capacity – through extortion and exploitation – because there was no legal avenue to apply for asylum. The treatment of many refugees in Europe has been dishonourable, remarkably their illegal confinement in unfortunate conditions in several countries, but this is not akin to the dangers they faced before arrival. After reaching Europe, McDonald-Gibson's case studies incline towards stories of greater or smaller success in gaming immigration laws in order to reach the more prosperous EU states.