Have you ever wondered
if our fears concerning migrants and refugees
are based on facts?
Or have they been media manufactured?
Let me share with you some of my personal experiences
of media, migration and fear.
When I was a teenager my parents moved house
and I didn't like it.
I became withdrawn, I just stayed at home and read.
My worried parents nudged me to audition for a job
as a presenter on a radio station.
And I did it, I got the job and my parents regretted it
because I have not stopped talking ever since.
(Laughter)
Being live on-air at the young age of 18
was terrifying.
I got to make so many of my mistakes in public.
But it was also character building and exhilarating.
I made lifelong friends and learned a lot.
My editor taught me the importance of integrity,
not only as a journalist but as a human being.
I loved being a radio journalist.
Almost exactly five years later, on a beautiful April day,
A solitary sniper shot quickly turned into a gunfire,
which soon became heavy shelling.
Within days there was no way in or out of Sarajevo.
The siege lasted 1425 days.
It's the longest of this kind in the history of modern warfare.
11,541 of my fellow Sarajevans
died during that time.
My life was worthless
to the Serb nationalists on the mountains,
shooting down on my city.
To them I became imaginary threat
and they decided, for the sake of their deranged nationalism,
that I and my city
should no longer exist.
It is very difficult for me to describe to you
what's the fear of a life under the siege,
under constant sniper fire and heavy shelling,
with no food, no water, no electricity.
With every day of the siege I also became less human
to the people that I went to school with,
and I worked with, I fell in love with.
The fear that I felt was very very different
because there is no safe space.
So, when you're not afraid for yourself,
you fear for your friends and your family.
Hundred thousand people died during the war in Bosnia.
Many more were wounded and raped and tortured.
And half of my country ended up in exile or displaced.
Soon after the war began,
because I was a journalist and spoke English,
I started working for international war correspondence.
I truly believed that if we reported our war,
that would bring it to an end
18 months into this hell,
they helped me escape the siege of Sarajevo.
And I found myself in London.
Now, I was a refugee.
And I survived.
But my entire life and my identity had been taken away from me.
I gradually started rebuilding my life and recovered.
But even in a super diverse metropolis such as London,
people would tell me that I don't look like a refugee,
really nice people.
And I would politely asked them, "What does a refugee look like?"
And they are a little bit embarrassed to tell me that they don't know.
What does a refugee look like?
Is there such a thing as a refugee look?
If you have met a refugee or a migrant in person,
that experience will inform your views.
And it can be positive, it can be negative.
Yes, not all refugees and migrants are nice people,
it's not a personality competition.
However, if you have not met anyone in person,
and if you just rely on reported images,
This is what you are exposed to:
Every day, we are exposed to a torrent of negative media images
of floods that turn into tides
of refugees and migrants who are coming here to take our jobs,
to take our hospital beds.
Oh my God! Our borders are out of control!
And they're coming to get us!
And this is not a new phenomenon.
Oxford Migration Observatory analyzed 58,000 newspaper articles,
published in a period of two years.
This is 43 million words.
And what they found
is that the word most commonly associated with the term immigrant,
is illegal.
In 2003, this was front-page news:
"Asylum seekers ate swans".
And this story had no eyewitness accounts
no police reports,
and it was absolutely baffling where they came up with this story.
However, because the press is so poorly regulated,
complaining about such lies does not repair the damage.
So after a long complaints process,
the newspaper didn't have to make an apology,
but they had to print a correction
in a tiny little corner of page 41.
The swans' story is very popular.
It comes back every few years.
In 2010, asylum seekers had been replaced
by Eastern European migrants.
Now this kind of negative stereotyping
is present in our daily lives all the time,
and it goes unchallenged,
and voices of refugees and migrants are hardly ever heard,
and this creates this climate of fear,
the narrative in which we blame immigrants for all evils in our society.
It is no wonder that the public is fearful of immigration.
Poll after poll shows that British public
overestimates the number and the impact that immigrants have in our society.
And obviously, then, politicians have to react
to this fear that people are experiencing.
Unfortunately, they do not provide the public
with reassurance, nor with facts.
Instead, their responses and actions reinforce those fears.
So they talk about controlling borders,
they talk about reducing numbers,
they take actions that limit people's rights,
and also they restrict access to services.
And what this does
is just reinforces the fear that it becomes bigger and bigger.
Now the damage that this does to all of us
is best summed up in the words of my favorite Jedi Master Yoda:
"Fear is the path to the dark side.
Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate.
Hate leads to suffering"
Now, this worries me.
And it makes me feel a little less human again.
It worries me that when campaigners and advocates,
such as myself,
when we try to talk about facts
and provide context for the reasons why people migrate,
we are dismissed as politically correct, naive and emotional.
And in preemptive strike, we are often told
that it is not racist to talk about immigration.
And for once I agree.
It is not racist to talk about immigration.
I talk about it all the time.
It is how we talk about refugees and migrants
that makes a difference.
In April last year, just after the mass drowning off the coast of Italy,
The Sun columnist, apart from other derogatory remarks,
referred to human beings as cockroaches.
Why should this worry us, this kind of language?
Isn't this what freedom of speech is all about?
Allowing all kinds of views to be aired and debated?
Well this worries me, because dehumanization
is stage three of the eight stages of genocide,
as classified by professor Gregory Stanton the founder of Genocide Watch.
Stage 1 is classification:
we divide ourselves into "us" and "them".
Stage 2 is symbolization:
we give names and other symbols to different groups.
We call each other Jewish and German, Tutsi and Hutu, Serbs and Bosnians.
Now, classification and symbolization do not necessarily lead into genocide,
unless they lead into dehumanization.
What does this fear-mongering mean,
not only for refugees and migrants,
but for all of us?
What are the things that we're not talking about,
while we are focusing on these imaginary fears?
What are the consequences of those silences for our democracy?
Now, I don't get to talk about facts a lot,
so please indulge me.
Let's have a look at some of the facts
that are readily available to all of us right now,
as well as to journalists, on our phones.
The fact is that in 2015, 244 million people,
or just 3.3 percent of the world's population,
lived outside their country of origin.
This is an increase from 2.6% since 1995.
The fact is that no country is overrun or lost control of its immigration,
including Qatar, where currently 88% of its population are immigrants.
The fact is that there are sixty million displaced people
in the world right now,
and they're the ones living in fear for their lives.
The fact is that developing countries
host over 86% of the world refugee population.
And the fact is that more than half of them are under 18 years old.
The fact is that about two-thirds have lived now for more than five years
in exile, with no prospect of return.
Unfortunately, another powerful fact is that facts are boring,
especially for the media:
there is no drama, and positive stories do not sell.
But let me be a journalist for a second again.
Can we just blame the media?
Our recent history is full of examples
of where hate and exclusion and dehumanization
led to the worst atrocities that we can imagine:
Holocaust. Genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda.
Going back further into our past,
one of the interesting examples
was something that was found
as one of the very rare documents
in Shakespeare's handwriting.
And it was recently exhibited in London.
And Shakespeare wrote a speech in a play,
in which he made a passionate plea
for humane treatment of asylum seekers
who had been accused of stealing Londoners jobs.
And this was the time when French Huguenots
were coming and seeking protection in the capital.
1600.
And what struck me about this story
is not only how great Shakespeare is,
and that he's on my side,
but also that the play was not staged at the time,
because of the fear that it might incite unrest.
More recently, in Germany, "Der Spiegel" came on the fire
because some of its readers,
based on no evidence, accused them of making up
all these positive stories about refugees.
So pollsters discovered that only one-quarter of Germans
believe that the media paint a correct picture
of the level of education and share of women and children
amongst incoming refugees.
So, did we cross to the dark side?
What can we do?
Well I do what I do because I have hope,
and the source of my hope is not blind faith in humanity.
The source of my hope are brilliant people I meet everyday,
refugees and migrants as well as citizens,
whose small acts of kindness
make a huge difference for these people.
On one hand, I couldn't convince the media to change this way of reporting,
on the other hand, I could no longer live with the fact that facts don't work.
So I decided to try something different:
with my colleagues, I have founded "Women on the Move Awards".
So every year at the Royal Festival Hall,
we celebrate amazing migrant and refugee women leaders,
we create a space for them to tell their stories,
and to be celebrated and recognized for the contribution that they make.
We invite other powerful women to share their power and to support them
and amplify their voices.
We celebrate journalists who do their job with integrity,
and report human stories and facts.
And we also celebrate champions, remarkable people,
whose small acts of kindness make integration work in everyday life.
So these champions this year rose to a challenge.
They decided that they can think differently
about their duty and responsibility to welcome refugees.
They decided that they actually have the power to protect,
and they have the right to welcome people.
And up and down the country they're now organizing money
in order to sponsor and bring in more refugees safely.
So going back to my original question:
do we think that our understanding
of migrants and refugees is based on facts?
My invitation to you is not only to see the facts,
but to see refugees and migrants as human beings, on the move,
as resilience survivors, as soon-to-be citizens.
My invitation to you is to see ourselves
as citizens who have the power to protect,
and the right to welcome them.
When we do that, when we see migration as the fact of life,
we will stop fearing it
and we will have the confidence to organize it.
Thank you.
(Applause)