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Published on Thursday, 05 June 2008 19:00 | posted by Geraldine | |
How do you put a face to people who don’t
exist? Living in the shadows of the
world are millions of men, woman and children who belong to no country. Stateless, they are legal ghosts lost in
limbo. By Geraldine Royds
A professional photojournalist,Greg Constantine has devoted his life to
documenting the lives of people living on the margins of society.
Born
in the USA, he has worked on stories about North Korean
refugees in Asia, Cambodians living on a rubbish dump in Phnom Penh, recently paroled women in Los Angeles and communities struggling to survive on the US
Mexico border.
Since 2005,
Greg has been based in Southeast
Asia. In early 2006, he began work on his most
recent project, Nowhere People, which focuses on
the hardships of stateless ethnic minority groups.
It's estimated
that more than 15 million people, in 60 countries are not a recognized person
of state. They are stateless for a variety of reasons - racial, ethnic,
religious or political persecution or just a quirk of fate. Denied citizenship, they are unable to access legal, civil and economic rights leaving
them open to social injustice and human rights abuses.
Greg
Constantine’s photographs document the consequences statelessness has on the
lives of people who, unwanted and unwelcome, are some of the poorest and most
vulnerable people in the world.
In a video he madefor the television network, Al Jazeera, Greg talks about the Rohingya refugees,
a Muslim minority who fled their native Myanmar (Burma) in the 1990’s following brutal persecution by the
Burmese Army. With the Bangladeshi government unwilling to resettle them and
the abuses continuing at home, they are caught in a no man’s land with limited
access to food, shelter and health care. Although some have been repatriated, many
against their will, the remainder live in unbearable conditions in provisional
camps in Bangladesh.
Filipino and Indonesian
immigrants make up one-third of the population of Sabah in easternMalaysia.Originally welcomed as cheap labour on the
palm oil plantations, they increasingly found themselves discriminated against. They were denied access to schools and health care and eventually, strong local resentment led to government crack downs.With families separated by mass deportations,
many children - estimates range between 10,000 and 30,000 -have been left to fend for themselves on the streets. With no
knowledge of where their parents are and unwanted by Malaysia, the Philippines and Indonesia, the children of Sabah
are condemned to a life of poverty and social exclusion.
About
half a million Urdu speaking Pakistani’s, known as the Bihari’s, have been stranded in Bangladesh since it’s independence in 1971.A prosperous
community under Pakistani rule, they were accused of collaborating with the
Pakistani regime during the war of Independence. In the political persecution that followed, they lost their land, businesses and jobs and
were forced into temporary camps to await repatriation to Pakistan. Thirty five years later, they
are still waiting. Living in squalid shanty camps they are still not recognized as citizens of either Pakistani or
Bangladesh.
About
8000 Hmong refugees, 25 percent of them under the age of five, live in a
barbed-wire enclosed camp in northern Thailand.When
the refugees first arrived, they lived in the forest on the outskirts of the
town working on local farms or trading at the market.The Thai authorities pressurized local
residents to stop helping them and in 2007, they relocated them to a guarded
camp where there are no school facilities for the children or job opportunities
for the adults.Refugees who have been
forcibly returned to Laos report continued abuses there, intensifying the
stress and anxiety of an already traumatized population.
Greg Constantine’s photographs
have been used to support the work of organizations like Refugees International,
Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).