"review": Book of Shame 2025 Vol. 1
a collection of thoughts about and related to the Book of Shame 2025 Vol. 1: How UNHCR Fails to Protect Refugees in Libya, Tunisia, and Niger
The Book of Shame 2025 Vol. 1: How UNHCR Fails to Protect Refugees in Libya, Tunisia, and Niger
Instead of the word, "review," I wanted to write how it shames us all and how we need to understand and take action beyond what we might already understand. And maybe in this way, what I'm writing isn't so much a critical analysis of the book as much as trying to share in ways I can't yet describe, don't have words to do. And sometimes one doesn't have the words, or even if one does, others may not be listening or paying attention or patient enough to slow down to understand, but if it is possible, creativity, imagination, and determination can help find a way to action and changing something to change the communication and outcomes. And in some ways, I'm not sure that isn't unrelated to how this refugee-led book came to be, and what needs to be done to share it widely, and get the actions and outcomes that their demands ask for.
I write this also as currently in the u.s., where I live, people are being disappeared or locked up daily by people who may or may not be agents of the state, or deported to countries they've never been in, or transferred to prisons in other countries, and so much more, and that this too is connected to what I am writing about. In reading this book, I also couldn’t help thinking about how much in parallel this system of abandonment is to that which guides how homelessness in treated in many u.s. cities, including where I’ve lived, something I will try to write about in a different post.
The Book of Shame 2025 Vol. 1 is filled with testimony after testimony of intentional and designed, maybe even engineered, institutional abandonment:
"Refugees describe a protection regime that has normalized neglect as its operational reality, one that conditions displaced people to navigate unreachable hotlines, indifferent offices, and procedures that promise accountability but deliver abandonment."
When powerful states, such as most settler colonial and formerly colonizing states and all those with modern-day or past histories of imperialism, and these categories overlap, demonstrate ongoing impunity for their commitment of atrocities, brutalities, genocides, ethnic cleansing, enslavement, and more, against both citizens and non-citizens, within and outside of state boundaries, when western media continues to be another mouthpiece for propaganda, when stories that are no more than lies become taught in history classes while other stories are ignored, erased, or hidden, when actions that are committed with impunity and those against whom they are taken become normalized, so that they are accepted as well as expected by these same states, which also fund the systems of protection for refugees, there will not only be conflicts of interest, but that the same tools to achieve these means, for example, military, policing, prisons, surveillance, detention, forced labor, even para-military, may be used, and that anti-Black racism, dehumanization, the willingness to sacrifice another person for one's own gain, and the same impunity to atrocities and indifference is assumed to apply.
We must demand that this cycle be ended, that refugees receive protection, are ensured a safe refuge and access to education. These demands do not align with the aid, but not because they don't match the mandate. As the Book of Shame 2025 Vol. 1 shares, "UNHCR’s protection mandate is not to optimize state control strategies along routes; it is to supervise the application of the Convention and to defend access to rights when states balk." Yet, as Kwame Nkrumah wrote in Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism, "In the end the situation arises that the only type of aid which the neo-colonialist masters consider as safe is 'military aid'." As these testimonies show, there is little funding for ensuring protection, medical care, and asylum for the refugees but often much more funding for ensuring that they remain in a precarious situation, that they become increasingly disabled, or that they are locked up, whether by the state or by human traffickers or those seeking a ransom.
The policies and enforcement of these states—Libya, Niger, Tunisia—and the camps and conditions that refugees are detained in, together with the risks of trafficking, assault, deportation to the desert, are detailed in their testimonies and may push refugees to attempt to cross the Mediterranean, only to be picked up and imprisoned, over and over. This is European border externalization, as the Book of Shame 2025 Vol. 1 describes,
"European border externalization has been increasing since 2017 in the Maghreb and Sub-Saharan regions, with deadly consequences. UNHCR's route-based approach must be seen under this light of border externalization. To keep migrants and refugees away the EU uses a stick and carrot approach. The coercive element (the stick) involves border militarization and support to criminal actors like the so-called Libyan coast guard to violently push back human beings. The soft element (the carrot) is mostly led by UNHCR and IOM to try to convince refugees and other migrants to stay where they are - regardless of the violence they are subjected to - and not to move one inch closer to Europe, thus misleading them and exposing them to danger for longer."
And still, as the Book of Shame 2025 Vol. 1 also shares,
“Protection is not a logistics problem and refugees are not flows to be managed. Protection is a legal obligation stemming from the Geneva convention binding to signatory states and, specially, to UNHCR. It is grounded in non-refoulement, access to territory, fair procedures, and civil, socio-economic, and mobility rights.”
This book is not a memoir, it is not a history book, yet it includes intimate stories of bodily theft, of human trafficking increased and made more possible by the organizations and states who claim to be using funding to stop it, of institutional abandonment, of determination and despair, of physical, sexual, and psychological assaults, of the weaponization of food, refugee status, safety and the threat and action of arrest, deportation, separating children from their mothers all to repress dissent, peaceful protest, and efforts to secure safety that is part of a mandate, help children access education that is denied for years, and be treated as the whole human beings that they are, carrying with them the whole devastatingly heartbreaking histories of what happens wherever there is anti-Black racism to those who are fleeing war and related conflicts, often proxy wars, deepened by neocolonialism, to those fleeing persecution, seeking asylum for themselves, their families, while continuing to lose family members and people in their community due to the denial of medical care, indifference, corruption, abandonment, and more, when there continues to be global impunity and the absence of accountability for those who dehumanize, arrest, and torture predominantly people of the global majority, that is, those who are Black and brown, because they are allowed to in order to get what they need, and that these same states who have gotten away with this are also connected via agreements, memorandums, and other relationships, and many times the same as those who are funding the UNHCR and each of these states to externalize border control, even if it means that no one is protecting those who most need protection, even if it means that increasing numbers of people are not protected by the UNHCR, which describes itself as, “UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency works to ensure that everybody has the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge, having fled violence, persecution or war at home.”
This book is not a memoir, it is not a history book, it is a refugee-led effort by refugee-led collectives to share the stories and histories of people while also providing the contextual history of the UNHCR’s failure to protect, to ensure the right to asylum and finding safe refuge for refugees in Libya, Tunisia, and Niger. Each person who shared a testimony, a complaint, a story is a human who deserves the right to protection and a safe place to live.
One last quote from the concluding thoughts in Book of Shame 2025 Vol. 1,
"...UNHCR must stop treating routes as the unit of analysis and return to rights and protection as the units of accountability. The current route-based approach has developed into an operational framework instrumentalized by xenophobic states to whitewash containment policies with empty promises of protection along the routes and “safe pathways".
OkayAfrica describes the Book of Shame 2025 Vol. 1 as "arguably the most important book published this year." Please read their brief and informative interview with David Yambio, founder of Refugees in Libya, that was conducted following the publication of this book.
Amuna Wagner
A digital version of this book can be downloaded at the Refugees in Libya website and a physical copy is also available to order with a minimum donation.
Please read this book, follow their social media accounts (@RefugeesinLibya, @RefugeesTunisia, @RefugeesNiger), and find ways to amplify their demands, including their daily protests and other actions being taken in Africa, Europe and elsewhere.
Thank you for reading. In solidarity.
I shared two links below, one to support the work of Refugees in Libya, and the second is a piece by its founder that I have previously shared and continue to think is a must-read. Please support both if you can, and get this book.
supporting each other..
Please support this campaign if you are able. Please follow the link to find out how and why your donation matters and is needed. Please copy & share the link with your community: https://www.refugeesinlibya.org/donate.
In May 2025, David Yambio shared a piece that I previously referred to as must-read. In it, he writes that "Europe has outsourced its cruelty. And what shocks me most is not the brutality itself. It is the ease with which it is denied." This piece, which continues to be relevant, is also available as a PDF. If you haven't yet read it, please read at the link below.
Refugees in Libya
Though I expect this post to be read after this event, tomorrow, October 18, is a day of action in Rome that is part of a campaign to stop the renewal of the memorandum/MOU between Italy and Libya that is set to renew on November 2 of this year. Learn more, and follow on social media, where these actions need broad and urgent support:
Refugees in Libya
