If ever there was a time to establish a World Parliament, it is now, in order to legislate strict punishment for hate crimes committed by local nationals against innocent migrants crossing borders for productive, law-abiding activity. No longer can distinct countries be trusted to enforce their own laws within their own borders.
Starting right here at UNM, we saw the notorious “Namaste Kicker’s” assault on so many students from India in 2007, with UNMPD and APD sitting on their heels.
If you think that was an isolated nightmare for Indian students in the United States, you are wrong. Since then we have had, at least, the murders of two Indian graduate students in an LSU apartment house; an Indian former College of Staten Island professor beaten to death on the street while taking a walk with his family by their home; and a Sikh-American Columbia University professor and physician beaten up on the street in Harlem.
In such cases, even where perpetrators have been caught, we’re talking acquittal or suspiciously lenient sentences.
Expanding out to New Mexico and the Southwest, undocumented workers crossing over from Mexico have been shot at by stateside rednecks, especially after the onset of intimidating behavior by the “Minute Men.” Has even a single white American received the death penalty for murdering one of these innocent human beings?
Instead, such murders typically remain unsolved; why would American law enforcement feel like solving them, when it is hunting migrants itself with guns?
Beside the United States, Europe is experiencing attacks on migrant workers all over. Even in Greece, which so many of us think of as the cradle of civilization, you have the neofascist Golden Dawn party actually rising in popularity and in seats in their Parliament by physically bashing immigrants from Africa and Pakistan with bats wrapped in the Greek flag.
Britain spawned the world’s original skinheads in East London neighborhoods. They have, since the 1960s, been running roughshod, attacking immigrants from countries Britain once colonized. But Britain has never apologized for colonization, much less offered reparations, so the attitude of such nativist predators remains unadjusted.
Erstwhile colonizer France has seen a resurgence of the extreme right wing, which since the 1990s has been implicated in attacks on immigrants from Algeria, a largely Muslim country once colonized by France. For these heinous crimes, the conservative party Front National has been rewarded with more and more votes each election. And what is the government doing about this? It is bowing to public opinion (read: tyranny of the majority) and has moved to ban “Islamic” headscarves in public universities.
You would think that next door in Germany, they would have learned a big lesson after their Nazi period. Wrong. Skinheads there have been murdering immigrants from Turkey in gruesome ways such as setting fire to their houses. Instead of focusing on catching the perpetrators, the German police have, in at least one notable string of murders, delayed too long by asking a lot of suspicious questions about one of the victims.
You might think that at least up in Finland, there would be a much admired Scandinavian largesse toward those they have adopted.
Wrong again. Vietnamese immigrants have been targets, with one of their Buddhist temples being firebombed.
Russia does not share this history of colonizing third-world countries, but its government-ignored abuse of non-whites on its streets is without parallel. Thus, college students there from countries like Africa have been attacked — even murdered. In response, officials have suggested that these students stay indoors for a few days, remarking that “Russia is for Russians.”
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Such smugness would not be tolerated in our country, since peoples’ rights in the United States are based upon a Bill of Rights that does not say “citizen” but “person.”
Down in Australia, the level of abuse against the upwards of 100,000 Indian students has been so high, a huge protest rally was held by these students. The response by their government was platitudes pointing out that the percentage of such incidents is low, that a lot of these hate crimes were merely “opportunistic.”
At least in the above countries, such crimes make the news. In those parts of Asia where most people are poor and attending solely to survival, atrocities are glossed over by low-income police. An example has been the gratuitous killings of Bangladeshi Muslim migrants sleeping on the streets of Mumbai by the Shiv Sena, or Army of Shiva. Instead of being banned, this group was then elected to govern the Indian state of which Mumbai is the capital.
In the Middle East, little progress is being made in getting justice for their rapes of Filipino maids. What do you expect in officially Muslim states where it is not just the cultural norm, but the law, that a rape victim not only be blamed, but that she also be stoned?
Given this pattern all over the globe, it is time for human rights activists to pull their heads out of the sand and acknowledge that intrastate law enforcement is not going to do much about it. For one thing, many officers are in elected positions, and they know these extra-nationals cannot vote.
Also, don’t have false hope that the UN might someday have teeth; it has been castrated enough by the superpowers. We now need a court system empowered to issue warrants worldwide. We need arrests stemming from a uniform supranational code based on a bill of migrant rights. We need the same hate crime enhancement applied everywhere. We need convictions that are the same no matter how big and powerful the host country or how small and narrow-minded the hosting village. We need arresting and transporting marshals that belong to no single nation.
This is the only way to pave over the sociopolitical cracks through which such victims fall and stitch back these bleeding cuts in our humanity.
