Keynote Address by Ambassador M. Ashraf Haidari to Georgetown University Institute for the Study of International Migration Class of 2024
Dean Hellman,
Dear Class of 2024,
Distinguished Faculty,
Ladies and Gentlemen:
My wife and I are extremely pleased and honored to be with you today. And I am truly happy to see that the parents and family members of the graduating class are also with us. Indeed, this day is theirs too, knowing that without their sacrifice, support, and understanding, none of us could have accomplished what we have. So, my heartfelt congratulations to you all for another shared achievement today!
I am also delighted to see some of the Institute for the Study of International Migration and Georgetown Law School faculty here. As a graduate of this Program, I wish to recognize Professors Susan Martin, Elizabeth Ferris, Katharine Donato, and Andrew Schoenholtz for leading and contributing in countless ways to the Graduate Certificate Program, that you have completed.
We all have benefited from our professors’ tireless efforts and commitment to educating tomorrow’s leaders for managing global change toward sustainable peace, prosperity, and the rule of law. Your success today speaks to that and your hard work throughout your rewarding Georgetown journey, making your families and faculty proud.
You have invited me, I know, not as an ambassador, Georgetown alumnus, or some expert, but as a former internally displaced person (IDP), a former refugee, and a former asylum seeker from Afghanistan with one of the world’s largest displaced populations, 45 years after the advent of the imposed conflicts that continue claiming Afghan lives and limbs today. You are saying that the voice of the displaced people matters, and that you want to hear what we have to say.
Let me begin with the principal driver of forced displacement: the endless conflicts of geopolitics.
Almost every forcibly displaced person is a victim of protracted, new, and emerging conflicts due to fluctuating geopolitical tensions in the world. Some 2,500 years ago, the Greek dramatist Euripides wrote, “There is no greater sorrow on Earth than the loss of one’s native land.” Indeed, under normal and peaceful conditions of economic stability in one’s own homeland, no one would suddenly abandon their treasured places of origin to risk deadly treks in search of safety today and a secure future tomorrow, none of which is guaranteed anymore.
In recent years, unfortunately, geopolitical tensions have only risen, consistent with which global military spending has reached a new record high of 2.2 trillion dollars.
This is no good news for peace and prosperity in the world because it means more wars, more death and destruction, and more forced displacement as a direct impact of conflicts fueled by increased geostrategic competition and confrontation. But let us not forget the indirect costs of war that will continue affecting civilians and future generations long after conflicts have eventually ended. The global economic impact of violence is estimated to be 14.4 trillion dollars. Accordingly, the average economic cost of violence in the ten most conflict-affected countries in the world is equivalent to 41% of their GDP.
These staggering costs rob an increasing number of war-ravaged nations of the resources they need today and, in the future, to maintain socio-economic stability, to govern effectively and deliver basic public services, and to respond to and manage increased and frequent disasters that result from climate change.
That is why, today, some 300 million people around the world need humanitarian assistance and protection due to conflicts, climate emergencies, food insecurity, outbreaks of diseases, poverty, and other challenges that overlap in most conflict and fragile contexts. To be specific, 1 out of 5 children are living in or fleeing from conflict; 1 in 73 people are forcibly displaced; and the number of countries reporting cholera outbreaks has reached 29.
But in the face of this growing humanitarian crisis across the world, international aid resources have plummeted. In 2023, the United Nations (UN) received just over one-third of the $57 billion it required to respond to multiple crises around the world.
Is this not tragic in the 21st century? Especially when global military spending, which triggers wars and brings about humanitarian crises, has increased exponentially and when the economic cost of violence has run into trillions with a multiplying negative impact on war-torn societies for generations to come. Yet our world is increasingly facing severe shortages in humanitarian assistance needed to save lives in Palestine, Sudan, Afghanistan, Ukraine, Yemen, Syria, Haiti, the Horn of Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and many other unstable and fragile situations.
Thus, when conflicts drag on, when state institutions weaken and collapse, when economies crumble and jobs disappear, and when foreign aid diminishes and dries up, what choice do ordinary people have but to adapt and choose displacement as a way to survive and possibly thrive again in the future? That is why the number of forcibly displaced people has continued to rise over recent years. Today, 117 million people are living in displacement globally. And the number of refugees and other people in need of international protection has doubled, reaching 34.6 million.
But durable solutions to the mounting challenges facing the displaced people have shrunk. For example, burden- and responsibility-sharing through resettlement and complementary pathways remains dismally low, as ten developing countries host over 55% of the world’s total refugee population. For most refugees and IDPs today, displacement has become protracted and permanent because durable solutions such as resettlement, local integration, and safe and voluntary return are no longer available and easy options.
Consequently, some refugees and asylum seekers get too desperate and end up becoming victims of human trafficking, which frequently endangers the lives of refugees, whose flimsy boats often break down and sink at seas before reaching their destinations. And those who do make it to developed countries through regular or irregular migration pathways often meet new challenges on arrival and later during the settlement and integration phases. Discrimination against immigrants, the politicization of immigration by politicians—scapegoating immigrants for political gain—as well as outright deportation threats are quite prevalent in countries with higher migration intake, including the United States, Europe, Australia, and others.
As someone with lived experience of forced displacement, I know that an absolute majority of refugees and asylum seekers are naturally high achievers. All they need is freedom of mobility and the same access to socio-economic opportunities and facilities, which ordinary citizens enjoy in the host countries. Refugees hate dependency, even though “welfare trap” systems do create dependency on free or subsidized public services in some nations.
In this light, I want to share with you parts of my personal story as a former displaced person, not that it is unique in any way but that it reflects the resilient and entrepreneurial character of most refugees and asylum seekers affected by complex crises without an end.
When my family and I were internally displaced from Kabul to northern Afghanistan in the early 1990s, we did not live in the IDP camp or receive humanitarian aid for long. My father, brother and I quickly managed to find work and we earned a living enough to support our family. Besides working as a street vendor, and selling men’s clothing, I realized that learning English would not only land me a job with the UN but it would also open up education opportunities abroad.
The 1990s saw a civil war fueled by Afghanistan’s competing neighbors, following the intense geopolitical rivalry between the West and the former Soviet Union, which chose to fight their hot battles in Afghanistan throughout the 1980s. The two decades of endless conflicts witnessed millions of Afghans uprooted and scattered across the world. By the mid-1990s, I had learned English enough to get my first job with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and later worked with the World Food Program (WFP). In the process, I took TOEFL, a test of English as a foreign language, and began applying for admission to American colleges. Of course, I couldn’t afford a U.S. education at all, but, in all my applications, requested a full merit-based scholarship, allowing me to get an education as a basic human right.
Finally, after many failures and negative responses, in 1997, I heard back positively from Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and gratefully accepted their offer of admission with a scholarship. The trek from Afghanistan to Pakistan and then to the United States was long and arduous. But I made it, and spent four years at Wabash, including a year in off-campus study in Switzerland, and graduated with a degree in Political Science and International Relations in 2001. In a few months, I moved to Virginia and began job hunting. But, unfortunately, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, traced to Afghanistan, occurred. In the wake of this tragedy, Muslim profiling and discrimination against immigrants increased. This made it too hard for me and many others to find work. In my case, however, I got lucky because Georgetown’s Jesuit tradition of educating and employing anyone regardless of their faith or ethnic background allowed me to get my first post-college job on the beautiful Hilltop.
In 2004 when I was still a graduate student at Georgetown, I joined the Afghan Embassy in Washington-DC and, from there, my 18-year diplomatic career began, serving in numerous leadership positions, including ambassadorship to Sri Lanka. Between 2001 and 2021, the United States led international intervention in Afghanistan, enabling Afghans, including me, to make transformational gains in democratic state-building, institutionalization of human and women’s rights, economic development, as well as addressing the humanitarian needs of returnees and the poor. Afghans remain indebted to the American people for all the support they provided to Afghanistan for 20 long years, and we salute and remember with gratitude the ultimate sacrifices of their fallen daughters and sons alongside those of ours in defense of freedom and democracy.
Tragically, however, as you may recall, on August 15, 2021, the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan, thanks to the premature withdrawal of the U.S. and NATO forces from the country. Today, Afghanistan has slid back to the 1990s when the Taliban ruled and oppressed Afghans, enforcing the world’s only gender apartheid. And as expected, the threats of terrorism, extremism, criminality, and drugs emanating from Taliban-ruled Afghanistan have notably increased since the fall of our young democracy. The convergence of conflict, gender apartheid, climate, chronic poverty, and state fragility under the Taliban has turned Afghanistan into one of the most complex humanitarian crises of our recent history.
Our population of 44 million is suffering from multiple crises with internal and external root causes tied to geopolitics, which I pointed out earlier. This grim situation is leaving an estimated 28.3 million Afghans in acute need, while 15.8 million of them are “catastrophically” food insecure. Displacement has kept pace with 3.2 million Afghans internally displaced, while 8.2 million others have fled abroad. They are residing under deplorable conditions in Pakistan and Iran, which have hardly been welcoming. Since 2021, Pakistan has forced 1.6 million destitute Afghans to return home to conditions of extreme human and protective insecurity.
On top of all this, Afghanistan is one of the twenty most climate-vulnerable countries in the world. The recent weeks have seen recurrent climate disasters across the country, decimating our impoverished villages. Since last week, climate floods have killed more than 300 Afghans and demolished over 12,000 houses, affecting 80,000 people, half of them children.
Dear Graduating Class,
Now, you have heard me speak quite a bit on behalf of the world’s displaced population. And you are certain to realize that you have much work to do to make a meaningful difference in whatever small ways possible to help address the root cause of the world’s protracted displacement problem. Of course, you are armed with the world’s best education backed by compassion and a commitment to help those in acute need. So, I ask you to begin making a tangible difference as soon as you can whether you end up in a policymaking position here in Washington-DC or a policy implementation position on the ground overseas.
In either case, you can be an impactful advocate for the right and balanced policies and strategies to help end and shorten current conflicts around the world, while collaborating with others to prevent future conflicts that would trigger further displacement. And if you end up in humanitarian jobs to save lives, “do not harm,” making sure that you put yourself in the shoes of aid recipients and listen to them, empower them, and have them lead programs and projects to address their own needs. In other words, act on “localization” to ensure maximum aid effectiveness and sustainability.
Last, I want to leave you with part of a poem, “I am a Refugee” by Ifrah Mansour from Somalia, so you may reflect on what she has to say, as you set out to help further the many causes of the world’s displaced population:
…I am a refugee, a stubborn survivor. You see, cruelty tried to break me, wars tried to erase me, bigotry tried to silence me, and politics tried to ban me; but still, like time, I stand; still like dust, I rise; and still like hope, I move; and still like love I flourish. I am a refugee, and I heal humanity. I am a refugee, a wandering, colorful, restless, foreign, alien soul. Won’t you just let me find my humanity, right here next to you?
Thank you and all best wishes for the rest of your rewarding journey!
