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Abstract
In order to be granted refugee status under the 1951 Geneva Convention, one needs to establish a causal link between the persecution feared and one or more grounds: race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion. According to legal scholars, this “nexus clause” included in the refugee definition may serve restricted legal interpretations by states and cause protection gaps for persons in need of refuge. This paper argues that literary analyses of forced migration narratives can elucidate the inadequacy of the required reason(s) for persecution feared in the context of contemporary conflicts. The relevance of the Convention grounds in the international refugee regime is discussed through a case study of the works of Aleksandar Hemon, a Sarajevo-born author based in the United States since the onset of the Bosnian War (1992–95). Both Hemon's biographical “facts” and his personal “stories” published in the autobiographical The Book of My Lives (2013) and in his earlier fiction make clear that even within a conflict along ethnoreligious lines, refugee profiles can be more “complicated” than the human categories referred to in the legal definition. This literary case study thus corroborates the legal call for reform of the 1951 Geneva Convention as a means to ensure universal protection.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. United Nations (UN), Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, July 28, 1951, Art. 1A(2).
2. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), States Parties to the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees and the 1967 Protocol, April 2015.
3. For instance, see Guy S. Goodwin-Gill and Jane McAdam, The Refugee in International Law, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 47–49.
4. UNHCR, Handbook and Guidelines on Procedures and Criteria for Determining Refugee Status under the 1951 Convention and the 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees, 2nd ed. (Geneva: UNHCR, 2011). Guidelines nos. 9–12 (2012–16) have been published on the UNHCR website: http://www.unhcr.org.
5. Alexander Betts and Paul Collier, Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System (London: Allen Lane, 2017), 5.
6. The European Union's “subsidiary protection,” introduced in the 2004 Qualification Directive, grants inferior legal status to persons in need of protection; Jane McAdam, Complementary Protection in International Refugee Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 28.
7. UN, Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, Recommendation E – Extension of Treatment Provided by the Convention.
8. UNHCR, Handbook and Guidelines, § 62.
9. UN, New York Declaration for Refugees and Migrants, October 3, 2016, § 65.
10. Columbia University, Model International Mobility Convention, August 25, 2017, Art. 124.
11. UNHCR, Handbook and Guidelines, § 195.
12. Benjamin N. Lawrance and Galya Ruffer, eds., Adjudicating Refugee and Asylum Status: The Role of Witness, Expertise, and Testimony (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 9.
13. Roger Zetter, “More Labels, Fewer Refugees: Remaking the Refugee Label in an Era of Globalization,” Journal of Refugee Studies, 20 (2007): 172–92.
14. For instance, see Katrijn Maryns, The Asylum Speaker: Language in the Belgian Asylum Procedure (London: Routledge, 2006), 327; Jane Herlihy, Laura Jobson, and Stuart Turner, “Just Tell Us What Happened to You: Autobiographical Memory and Seeking Asylum,” Applied Cognitive Psychology, 26 (2012): 661–76, at 662; and Anthea Vogl, “The Genres and Politics of Refugee Testimony,” Law & Literature (2017): 1–24, at 2.
15. David Farrier, Postcolonial Asylum: Seeking Sanctuary Before the Law (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2011), 160–62; Agnes Woolley, Contemporary Asylum Narratives: Representing Refugees (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 209; Katrina M. Powell, Identity and Power in Narratives of Displacement (New York: Routledge, 2015), 103–04.
16. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 15–18.
17. Ruth Amossy, La présentation de soi: Ethos et identité verbale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2010).
18. Paul Thompson and Joanna Bornat, The Voice of the Past: Oral History, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).
19. “Since fear is subjective, the definition involves a subjective element in the person applying for recognition as a refugee. Determination of refugee status will therefore primarily require an evaluation of the applicant's statements rather than a judgement on the situation prevailing in his country of origin”; UNHCR, Handbook and Guidelines, § 37.
20. Ibid., §§ 94–96.
21. “Table of Discontents,” in Aleksandar Hemon, The Book of My Lives (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2013), 213–14.
22. Cathie Camirchael, A Concise History of Bosnia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
23. Goodwin-Gill and McAdam, Refugee in International Law, 6.
24. Ibid., 94.
25. Gerard Toal and Carl T. Dahlman, Bosnia Remade: Ethnic Cleansing and its Reversal (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 47.
26. Xavier Bougarel, Elissa Helms, and Ger Duijzings, The New Bosnian Mosaic: Identities, Memories and Moral Claims in a Post-War Society (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 2.
27. Hariz Halilovich, Places of Pain: Forced Displacement, Popular Memory and Trans-Local Identities in Bosnian War-Torn Communities (New York: Berghahn, 2013), 10–11.
28. For instance, see Fran Markowitz, Sarajevo: A Bosnian Kaleidoscope (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2010).
29. Robert J. Donia, Sarajevo: A Biography (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2006); Ivana Maček, Sarajevo Under Siege: Anthropology in War Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009).
30. The 1951 Convention moreover contains a cessation clause that could be activated once the persecution circumstances have ceased to exist; Eric Roxström and Mark Gibney, “The Legal and Ethical Obligations of UNHCR: The Case of Temporary Protection in Western Europe,” in Problems of Protection: The UNHCR, Refugees, and Human Rights, ed. Niklaus Steiner, Mark Gibney, and Gil Loescher (New York: Routledge, 2012), 76–119, at 97–98. For an analysis of temporary protected status (TPS) for Bosnians in the United States, see Maria Cristina Garcia, The Refugee Challenge in Post-Cold War America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 88–89.
31. UNHCR, Handbook and Guidelines, § 66.
32. Ibid., § 80.
33. Donia, Sarajevo, 290–91; Toal and Dahlman, Bosnia Remade, 124.
34. Among others, see Sonia Weiner, “Double Visions and Aesthetics of the Migratory in Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project,” Studies in the Novel, 46 (2014): 215–35; Ioana Luca, “Bosnian Migrations, Cosmopolitan Memories: Aleksandar Hemon,” Journal of English Language and Literature, 61 (2015): 193–217.
35. I refer to Corina Crişu, “Bosnian Ways of Being American: Aleksandar Hemon's Nowhere Man,” in When the World Turned Upside-Down: Cultural Representations of Post-1989 Eastern Europe, ed. Kathleen Starck (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars, 2009), 24–35; and Wendy Ward, “Does Autobiography Matter?: Fictions of the Self in Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project,” Brno Studies in English, 37 (2011): 185–99.
36. Nataša Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism: Colonial Discourse and Europe's Borderline Civilization (London: Routledge, 2008), 181–87; Frauke Matthes and David Williams, “Displacement, Self-(Re)Construction, and Writing the Bosnian War: Aleksandar Hemon and Saša Stanišić,” Comparative Critical Studies, 10 (2013): 27–45; Audrey J. Golden, “Remaking the Record: Emigrant Fiction and Restorative Justice in the Former Yugoslavia,” Law, Culture and the Humanities, 13 (2017): 145–66; Catharina Raudvere, Contested Memories and the Demands of the Past. History Cultures in the Modern Muslim World (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan 2017), 179–94.
37. Eleanor Wachtel, “An Interview with Aleksandar Hemon,” Brick, 93 (2014): 20–35, at 29.
38. Timothy Boswell, “The Audacity of Despair: An Interview with Aleksandar Hemon,” Studies in the Novel, 47 (2015): 246–66, at 260.
39. Hemon, Book of My Lives, 43, 48, 56. The parentheses about his friends contrast with the occasional insertions regarding the fate of Serb leaders such as Vojislav Šešelj, Karadžić, and Mladić “(now on trial in The Hague)”; ibid., 63, 78.
40. Ibid., 166.
41. Ibid., 167.
42. Ibid., 7.
43. Ibid.
44. Ibid., 9–10.
45. Aleksandar Hemon, Nowhere Man (New York: Talese-Doubleday, 2002), 24.
46. Hemon, Book of My Lives, 10.
47. Ibid., 11–12.
48. Ibid., 33–34.
49. Hemon, Nowhere Man, 60–61.
50. “Unlike ourselves, those people knew what they were talking about: they had developed ideas, they spoke from defined intellectual and political positions, their principles were a category different from confused late-adolescent feelings”; Hemon, Book of My Lives, 54.
51. Ibid., 49–50.
52. Ibid., 56.
53. Ibid., 107.
54. Ibid., 62.
55. Ibid., 108.
56. Ibid.
57. Wachtel, “Interview with Aleksandar Hemon,” 32.
58. Hemon, Book of My Lives, 109.
59. Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life, trans. and ed. Jonathan Mayne (New York: Da Capo, 1964), 9.
60. Peter Gatrell, The Making of the Modern Refugee (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 292.
61. Hemon, Book of My Lives, 110.
62. Ibid., 116.
63. Ibid., 118.
64. Ibid., 63. These “relatively rosy times” are also depicted in Aleksandar Hemon, Love and Obstacles (New York: Riverhead, 2009), 66.
65. Kovačević, Narrating Post/Communism, 181.
66. Raudvere, Contested Memories, 187.
67. Hemon, Nowhere Man, 68.
68. Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project (New York: Riverhead, 2008), 21.
69. Hemon, Love and Obstacles, 59.
70. Hemon, Book of My Lives, 66.
71. Ibid., 74.
72. Ibid., 70.
73. Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain [1924], trans. Helen T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Knopf, 1927).
74. Hemon, Book of My Lives, 107.
75. Ibid., 113.
76. Ibid., 116.
77. Ibid., 17.
78. For instance, see Aleksandar Hemon, The Question of Bruno (New York: Talese-Doubleday, 2000), 197–98; Hemon, Lazarus Project, 17; Hemon, Love and Obstacles, 182.
79. Hemon, Question of Bruno, 101.
80. “I realized I could make up my entire life; there were no witnesses in the 1990s in Chicago of who I used to be”; Wachtel, “Interview with Aleksandar Hemon,” 25.
81. Boswell, “Audacity of Despair,” 257.
82. Ibid., 256.
83. Ward, “Does Autobiography Matter?,” 186.
84. Ibid., 197.
85. Crişu, “Bosnian Ways of Being American,” 24.
86. Hemon, Book of My Lives, vii.
87. Ibid., 98.
88. Ibid., 206.
89. Ibid., 119.
90. Ibid., 16–17.
91. Ibid., 21.
92. Ibid., 23.
93. Ibid.
94. See also Wachtel, “Interview with Aleksandar Hemon,” 30.
95. Hemon, Book of My Lives, 24.
96. Lania Knight, “A Conversation with Aleksandar Hemon,” Missouri Review, 32 (2009): 84–101, at 97.
97. “What's the difference between Bosnia and Yugoslavia? Huge. Do they have television? Yes.… What language do people speak there? It's complicated”; Hemon, Question of Bruno, 149.
98. “What is your name? Vladimir Brik. Vladimir what? Brik. What kind of a name is that? It's complicated, I said”; Hemon, Lazarus Project, 285.
99. Ibid., 15.
100. Ibid., 11.
101. Ibid., 13.
102. See also Luca, “Bosnian Migrations, Cosmopolitan Memories,” 206.
103. Hemon, Nowhere Man, 178–79.
104. Ibid., 146.
105. Ibid., 149.
106. The ground “membership of a particular social group,” regularly invoked in gender- or age-related persecution, is less relevant in the case of Hemon.
107. Aleksandar Hemon, “Identity and Narration,” Concilium. International Journal for Theology (2015): 73–79, at 79.
108. John D. Porteous and Sandra E. Smith, Domicide: The Global Destruction of Home (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2001).
109. Martin Coward, Urbicide: The Politics of Urban Destruction (London: Routledge, 2009).
110. For instance, see David J. Cantor and Jean-François Durieux, eds., Refuge from Inhumanity? War Refugees and International Humanitarian Law (Leiden: Brill Nijhoff, 2014).
111. UNHCR, Guidelines on International Protection No. 12: Claims for Refugee Status Related to Situations of Armed Conflict and Violence under Article 1A(2) of the 1951 Convention and/or 1967 Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees and the Regional Refugee Definitions, December 2, 2016, § 33 (emphasis added).
112. Cantor, Refuge from Inhumanity, 6.
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Jessy Carton
Jessy Carton holds a Ph.D. in Literary Studies from Ghent University (2015), and is a former protection officer at the Office of the Commissioner General for Refugees and Stateless Persons in Brussels. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Literary Studies, Ghent University, and a visiting scholar at Columbia University, New York City. She is currently conducting a research project on refugee narratives in contemporary literature.