Grandstand. The war in Ukraine is generating an unprecedented outpouring of generosity. Hundreds of French people spontaneously cross the borders to pick up by car, coach or train Ukrainian families fleeing the destroyed cities, distribute food to them, treat them, comfort them, before welcoming them into their homes, not only in their country, but in their own homes.
After two years of health crisis, generalized caution, grotesque control, where we were forbidden to go out, forbidden to travel, forbidden to kiss, forbidden to share, forbidden to welcome home beyond the family circle the stricter, where we feared that the elementary gestures of our humanity would be lost forever, isn’t this resounding demonstration of solidarity worth noting? Better still, this testimony of courage and hospitality comes in the middle of a presidential campaign where several candidates have sought to wave the worst red flags, to exploit distrust of foreigners, to inspire national withdrawal.
Curiously, some representatives of major refugee aid associations cringe. Indeed, the tens of thousands of Afghans, Syrians, Sudanese, people fleeing from all sides the brutality and the miseries of the world, have never aroused such emotion. We denounce double standards, we cry racism, we accuse a culpable preference for the white refugee, Christian moreover.
Compare what is comparable
Doesn’t it occur to those malcontents that perhaps their own hard work over the past few years has paid off? Thanks to them, the issue of refugees in France has become central to our daily lives. We have been fed with pleas for asylum, exposed to so many images of desperate human beings, of children playing in the dust of grim encampments. No one can any longer ignore the realities of war and its disastrous consequences. By dint of seeing refugees abandoned along the Canal de l’Ourcq in Paris, disoriented in all the stations of France, piled up in front of our prefectures, what progress we have made, and first of all in the appreciation of our shortcomings! The word ‘asylum’ has entered common parlance, the hopeless reality of asylum has entered common consciousness.
Yes, Ukrainians are European. The Russians too. They are part of another Europe, which is not yet united by treaties but which shares a long, brilliant and painful history and which extends, according to the famous expression “from the Atlantic to the Urals”. The non-European refugees who arrived in France by land know this better than anyone. They measured, under their soles, the territorial continuity of Europe: many arrived by crossing Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Hungary, Poland… sometimes even Ukraine. They would gladly have stayed there – but these Europeans rarely gave them asylum.
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