Russia's war on Ukraine highlights need for global effort to offer protection for all refugees

No one leaves home unless home is no longer an option. Almost 20 million more people have become refugees or asylum seekers since the end of 2020 - taking the overall number of people who are currently displaced to more than 100 million globally. It's almost unbelievable to me that so many people have been forced to make the same decision we did 22 years ago.

Watching the latest forced displacement of people unfold in Ukraine, it feels like we've been fighting the same fight for all these years: repeating history, going in circles, as if we've acquired collective dementia.

Except, when I fled, no one could see or hear me. It was the 1990s, before the advent of iPhones and social media, before we could tweet our war.

But it is disheartening to see differential treatment meted out to refugees from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East as compared to Eastern Europeans. This is not about driving division. It is about wrestling with the truth. The Morrison Government's response to take in 6,000 Ukrainian refugees was welcome and commendable. It indicates that we can have a humane refugee policy that speaks to our values when we want to.

But it would be remiss of me to not point out the differential treatment afforded to people like me and people who don't look like me. UNHCR statistics show that as a white, blond, blue-eyed refugee from the heart of Europe, I was given eight times more help and support than a refugee from Rwanda, Sierra Leone, or Afghanistan during the 1990s.

I waited about five years in a refugee camp and would have had the option of resettling in Sweden, Germany, or the United States. Refugees in other parts of the world are born into refugee camps and some never leave.

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This is because the West saw themselves in refugees from Yugoslavia. We were people who lost our holidays in Dubrovnik, our alpine lodges, our Walkmans, CDs and VCRs, who wore ripped jeans, hosted U2 and Madonna, the Winter Olympic Games in 1984, the Eurovision Song Contest in 1990, and won tennis, soccer and basketball championships represented by the likes of Monica Seles.

All refugees are kin. When bullets kill us, we lie in the same mass graves. All refugees, no matter what race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality, or location, are "us", and should be afforded equal opportunity to reach safety.

I cannot erase the images of border guards spraying Syrian refugee kids with teargas and bashing them with batons. Or Hungarian journalists tripping over refugees as they ran for safety. Walls and barbed wire fences springing up seemingly overnight along European borders.

It is time for all nations to open their homes for refugees to find safety from wars and other crisis situations. If we have learned anything from the Syrian exodus in 2015 or the more current crises in Afghanistan, Myanmar or South Sudan, the responsibility to protect should not rest solely with neighbouring countries like Jordan, Lebanon, Pakistan, Bangladesh or Kenya. They should not bear the overwhelming responsibility for housing the world's displaced.

I applaud Poland, Moldova and Georgia for welcoming refugees at their borders, but shouldering the humanitarian fallout from wars is a global effort, and offering protection to refugees is every nation's responsibility, including ours. It is in our national interest to be seen as good international citizens.

We saw the world come together with a collective effort to impose economic sanctions on Russia. That same collective effort could offer durable solutions for refugees regardless of their origin.