The history of refugee care and protection has been also one of “refugee manipulation”. Studiess have shown how in countries such as Pakistan, Zaire, Cambodia, or erstwhile Yugoslavia the principle of refugee protection has been manipulated in considerations of power. Refugees have been used and abused in the interests of the states. Institutions have been either willing accomplices or have been ignored in these policies and acts of manipulation. On the other hand, in recent years there is increasing interest in the ethical dimension of the principles and practices of care and protection of the uprooted and the displaced. There is now interest on how war, politics, and human suffering have produced a mix of particular interests and humanitarian strategies of protection (Stedman, 2003)

In this context of growing interest in the normative aspects, legal professionals too are engaged with developing normative frameworks for the protection of the refugees and the Internally Displaced Persons (Bagshaw, 2005). At one stage it was thought that the path of human rights treaty making would ensure compliance to an un-stated normative framework, possibly because human rights by themselves would ensure the normative aspects. But the human rights treaty making path had its rise and has now gone into decline in view of its limited effectiveness. Alternative law making techniques are being discussed today.

Why should we care for and protect the victims of forced displacement? The “we” here refers to those who have not had experienced displacement themselves, yet harbour some form of an ethical commitment to the victims of forced displacement. The ethical language therefore is expected to establish some form of a connection between them and us – between those who are not forcibly displaced and those who are. Ethics in other words cannot but be dialogical. Its language in no way denies agency to the victims. CRG’s studies on the partition ‘refugees’ in the east, for example, underline a plethora of self-help initiatives undertaken by them. Ethical language therefore is a language of universality that cuts across the given boundaries of the victims’ groups and communities. One can therefore say that while ethical language has to be universal, the phenomenon of forced displacement is not. It is true that the incidence of forced displacement has been alarmingly on the rise – thanks to the forces and processes of globalization. However their number is still considerably smaller than that of the world’s settled population. Much of what the settled population groups do for the displaced population in the framework of various linkages is not be construed as ethical practice. Ethics is considered essentially about the self, which cares for and holds itself responsible to the other. Caring for the other is regarded as the means to care for the self.

Since the issue on which ethical judgement is called for may vary, the ethical connection is contingent on the specificity of the dialogic situation. There is a great diversity of situations, issues, and principles of contention in the field of forced displacement. While this plurality is helpful in building the much-needed ‘consensus’ around the principles in question, rigour and coherence in arguments and reasoning may more often than not turn out to be a liability for those who feel committed to the care and protection of the displaced persons. That is the reason why scholars like Peter Penz (2004) argue for more self-consciously uncertain and middle-level theories of ethics.

We think not unnaturally that the importance of ‘moral reasoning’ in initiating organized responses is great. But we must keep in mind that the organised and unorganised responses take on two rather distinct ethical trajectories. Most of the empirical studies on unorganised, altruistic responses in general seem to indicate their un-self-conscious character. That is to say, those who care for and protect are not bothered usually about the fact that they are actually involved in any ‘extraordinary’ act that otherwise begs ‘moral reasoning’ (Monroe 1996: 197-215). On the other hand, responses get organized, ordered and orchestrated precisely through a self-conscious act. It is by way of consciously entering into some form of argumentation and reasoning with others that we evolve the principles of care that will be “binding” on us. Pradip Bose’s review essay included in the reference list reveals the way ethical deficit is produced in the process of organised responses supposedly based on consensus on ethical principles.

Therefore, organized responses will face perpetual challenge in form of an ethics of care and protection, and our understanding of the issues in question will have to take into account this paradox. The challenge is perpetual because humanitarianism as a body of practices and ideology is always insufficient, and can meet the demands of reality only partially notwithstanding the best endeavours. We have an essay here on the ethical practices of the World Bank demonstrating the dilemma. There is no denying that what we do in the name of care and protection is structured in the power relations prevailing in the society. The question of care and protection in that sense can never be disentangled from that of power. Michel Foucault showed how in human history an ethics of care has involved some form of self-empowerment and subjectivity (Foucault in Rabinow ed. 1994:269-80). Samaddar for example, points out how our humanitarian responses geared to the objective of protecting life are scripted in and thereby reproduce, the imperial ‘power of death’ (Samaddar 2002). But the irony is that we as ethical agents always refuse to conflate what we do in the name of care and protection with what we ought to do and seldom confer moral recognition on the former. The ethics of care and protection imposes on us the painful obligation of denying the existence of power in the public sphere while at the same time this ethics is being shaped and structured by it. The attempted erasure of power from ethical considerations is a precondition of the functioning of public ethics or to put in other words, ethics as an issue in public sphere.

We can witness the presence of a wide variety of argumentation and reasoning in justification of the advocacies for care and protection of the displaced. First of all, there is the rights-based argument. Care and protection according to this argument, will be construed as our ‘duty’ insofar as the ‘well being’ of the displaced persons becomes ‘a sufficient reason for holding us to be under this duty’ (Raz 1986: 166-8). The problem recognized by almost all the exponents of this argument is that the right against displacement is not an end in itself and cannot per se be regarded as the ‘sufficient reason’ for holding us under this duty. Sufficiency of reason does not reflect itself in the same way as in the two advocacies for the right against displacement and say, the right to life. If one’s displacement becomes a necessary condition for another’s enjoyment of the right to life – often understood as decent life, we can say that the former is derogable and the latter is not. Thus, the right against eviction that is routinely carried out in the metropolitan cities of South Asia – whether in Dhaka, Kolkata or Islamabad or elsewhere, has to contend with the argument for development and decent life defined everywhere as a ‘collective goal of the community as a whole’ (Dworkin 1977:82-5). The successful assertion of the right against displacement therefore entails some form of abrogation of ‘the collective goal’. Many of those who were evicted from the banks of the Beliaghata circular canal of north Kolkata had been living there for more than one generation. Yet all of them were the illegal occupants of land. In the absence of any legal title, they are unlikely to sustain their claim to land in the first place, in any court of law. The UN Guiding Principles (1998) too conceptualise the right as only a limited right against arbitrary displacement. While we cannot compromise with the ‘collective goal’ we can certainly reduce the sufferings of the displaced through compensation, relief and rehabilitation. Conversely and by the same logic, we should be prepared to accept that the importance of the same right will vary if it ever becomes a necessary condition for the enjoyment of one’s non-derogable rights including that to life. What if it becomes impossible to carry out displacement without simultaneously violating ‘the rights to life and freedom from cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment’? What if displacement involves violation of the victims’ right to life and livelihood? Displacement in that case is bound to be illegal for it leads to derogation of an otherwise non-derogable right enshrined in the Constitution or law. By basing on the rights-based argument, the ethics of care and protection remains beholden to the contingent nature of the relationship between the right against displacement on one hand and any of the non-derogable rights recognized by the court of law on the other. An argument is often made to locate the rights of the displaced persons within ‘a radical democratic perspective’, redefine the lines of derogability and non-derogability and thereby extend the sphere of their rights beyond the given limits of law by constantly waging and organizing political struggles (Jayal 1998). This in fact turns the rights-based argument by its head by basing rights on ethics and ethical reasoning and not vice versa.

Yet what this rigmarole ignores is the fact that ethical reasoning inexorably emerges as judicial reasoning, and therefore to be interpretable calls for a public power in as much judicial reasoning invokes a distinct type of public power. Who decides which way the issue of derogable or non-derogable nature of claim will be decided? Who will decide on issues of practical application of agreed ethical principles? Or, who will frame the structure of rights and duties whereby we can say that it is the duty of the public power to offer such and such responses to certain claims against displacement, or conversely it is the duty of the affected person/group to move out for greater public good?

This takes us to the second argument. According to it, care and protection follow not the logic of public authority, but that of the established lines of community and kinship. However, the community-based argument also has its limits: in course of organizing the responses, it not only reinforces the traditional lines of rivalry, but re-enacts the inequities and asymmetries otherwise internal to these bodies. Various reports emphasize how life in camps, allocation and utilization of aid and assistance for the displaced persons reinforce the kinship and community lineages and become the fertile ground for future tensions and ethnic strife. For a select study of the reproduction of inequalities through humanitarian efforts, post-Tsunami care is a significant case (Calcutta Research Group report, 2005).

Some think that the humanitarian argument addresses the limits of the community-based argument. A somewhat old-fashioned version of the argument looks upon care and protection as a form of ‘moral exercise’ that we require for making our individual selves ‘pure and perfect’. Helping others according to this version is a form of self-help, of achieving one’s higher moral self. The objective of self-help does not however rule out the necessity of organized responses. Learning to work with others is also a means of helping oneself and the proponents of this argument recognize the importance of institutions and organizations in accomplishing this objective. Today however, the humanitarian ethics seldom turns on one’s own self. It instead considers others as equal ethical agents in the sense that they are as much entitled to ‘purity and perfection’ as we are. Viewed in this light, our care and protection are a tribute to their ethical entitlements, of which they are otherwise deprived. In this connection Itty Abraham’s argument (2005) is worth listening to.

In the particular context of South Asia, we can find two major ethical presuppositions: First, displacement in South Asia cannot be fathomed without the understanding that home is not simply where we live or to which all of us are entitled like we are to many other sites of our social existence, but that it is often the fountainhead of several of our ethical entitlements. Any involuntary displacement is a disjuncture between home and home, between what we are and what we want to become, between our senses of lack and fulfilment. Second, should a conflict arise between our and their moral entitlement, humanitarian ethics settles for a minimal path. It means practically, that those of us who have the commitment to and power of taking care and protecting the displaced persons will do so minimally, that is, in a way that does not sacrifice anything of comparable moral importance, that is to say, our own right to life and livelihood Possibly both these understandings are valid beyond South Asia too. (Singer in Markie ed. 1998:800).

The variations in the tenor and accent of our ‘moral reasoning’ can hardly escape our attention. The way in which the rival realities of community, nation, state, and immigration are entangled in a matrix of power is evident in the article by Catherine de Wenden (2001) reproduced in this collection. It is these interrelations and the inter-conflicts that make ethical judgements so complicated and predicated on many a factor beside the moral. Of course they need not be blown out of proportions either. The rights-based argument may well be linked with the humanitarian argument or for that matter, the community-based argument. In many ways, the arguments cut across each other and are not mutually exclusive. While in our ‘moral reasoning’, we face the challenge of extricating ethics from power, most of the studies in this respect point out how the practices of care and protection continue to be governed by power and security considerations. The camps and shelters built for the displaced persons represent sites where war is continued ‘by other means’. The budgetary allocation is paltry and irregular. The camp-dwellers are deprived of the non-derogable freedoms the Guiding Principles propose to secure. Search for any durable solution in such condition ironically makes us confront power and negotiate its terms.

This module will discuss the related issues at length, and will engage with the central question, namely, as asylum, protection, rehabilitation, and resettlement become highly charged political issues across the globe, raising a host of difficult ethical and political questions, what responsibilities will nations, states, communities, and individuals have towards the displaced, immigrants arriving at the borders, and other victims of forced migration including the trafficked human beings? How shall we place the issue of responsibility along with rights, belonging, etc. in the map of our guides to actions? And can we say that these will have no constraint of power on them? What bearings will these have on our idea of democracy? (Gibney, 2004) Once we focus on this central question, we shall then understand that our attempts at disentangling ethics from power too are a power game. And, possibly such attempt as disentanglement is partially possible when ethics is not seen as sentiment or even as moral reasoning, but as considerations towards practical steps for caring for the selves. If we judge in this way, we shall have the space in our actions for our own desire to cling to what we hold to be true. In this tension-filled relation between ethics and truth there is scope for negotiation, partial disentanglement of ethics and power, and the scope of truth procedures to guide our actions. In this context it is important to note the call by the philosopher Alan Badiou (2001) for understanding ethics in relation to our understanding of evil and the production of truth procedures. Morality would have little place in these appreciations and considerations.

References

Abraham, Itty (2005): “Refugees and Humanitarianism”, Refugees Watch, No. 24-26, October, www.mcrg.ac.in/rw%20files/RW24.doc
Badiou, Alan ((2001): Ethics. London: Verso
Bagshaw, Simon (2005): Developing a Normative Framework for the Protection of Internally Displaced Persons. New York: Transnational Publishers.
Calcutta Research Group report (2005): http://www.mcrg.ac.in/tsunami.htm
Dworkin, Ronald (1977): Taking Rights Seriously. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.
Foucault, Michel (1994): Ethics: Essential Works of Foucault 1954 – 1984, Vol. 1, ed. Paul Rabinow. London: Penguin.
Gibney, Matthew J. (2004): The Ethics and Politics of Asylum. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Jayal, Niraja Gopal (1998): ‘Displaced persons and discourse of rights’ in Economic and Political weekly, XXX (5), 31 January.
Monroe, Kristen Renwick (1996): The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Penz, Peter (2004): ‘Development, displacement and International Ethics’ in Omprakash Mishra (ed.), Forced Migration in South Asia – Displacement, Human Rights, and Conflict Resolution New Delhi: Manak Publications.
Raz, Joseph (1986): The Morality of Freedom. Oxford: Clarendon
Samaddar, Ranabir (2002): ‘Caring for the refugees: Issues of power, fear and ethics’ in Three Essays on Law, Responsibility and Justice, SAFHR Paper 12. Kathmandu: South Asia Forum for Human Rights.
Samaddar, Ranabir (2003): “In life, In Death: Power and Rights” – Seminar, Annual Number 2003; http://www.india-
seminar.com/2004/533/533%20ranabir%20samaddar.htm
Singer, Peter (1998): ‘Famine, affluence, and morality’ in Stephen Cahn & Peter Markie (eds.), Ethics: History, Theory and Contemporary Issues. New York: OUP.
Stedman, Stephen John and Fred Tanner, Eds. (2003): Refugee Manipulation. Washington DC: Brookings Institution.
Wenden Catherine de, “How Can One be Muslim in France?”, Refugee Watch, 13, March 2001