Refugees From Other Wars Want to Know Why White Ukrainians Get VIP Treatment
ROME—The queue outside the Baobob refugee soup kitchen in central Rome is filled with desperate migrants and refugees every single day of the week. In recent months, most are from Afghanistan and war-torn African nations like Somalia, Sudan and the Tigray region of Ethiopia. There aren’t any Ukrainian war refugees standing in the cold, though. They have been welcomed into warm homes and care facilities. “They are white, so they get special treatment,” a man from Afghanistan who worked as a translator for Italian peacekeepers in Afghanistan before the Taliban regained control over the country told The Daily Beast as he crouched beside the tent nearby where he sleeps. “But the worst part is that people who used to give spare clothes and food to us are now giving them to Ukrainians.”
The man doesn’t want his name published out of fear it will negatively impact his asylum request, which he launched more than a year ago. He and thousands of other war refugees in Italy are stuck in bureaucratic limbo that can take two or three years before they learn if they can legally stay even when they are from countries that have suffered longer wars than the four-week invasion of Ukraine, whose refugees do not have to go through the same process—even though they are not part of the European Union. Ukrainian refugees are automatically granted a right to stay for 90 days—no questions asked. If they want to extend the stay, they can apply for a 90-day extension.
While no one disagrees that Ukrainians need assistance and support as their country is besieged in this unfair war, there is a growing sense of a double standard when it comes to the color of refugees’ skin and their treatment. Andrea Costa, who runs the Baobab center in Rome, told The Daily Beast that while he agrees wholeheartedly that the Ukrainian refugees need help, so do the African and Middle Eastern refugees. And he sees hypocrisy in calling those helping Ukrainians “saviors” while those who save African refugees are often prosecuted for people smuggling, referring to a number of NGO rescue boat captains currently facing charges in Italy for rescuing migrants and refugees. “It is not acceptable to call the people accepting women and children on the border between Ukraine and Poland heroes, but to call those who help people shipwrecked in the Mediterranean sea criminals,” he says. “Wars are all the same. Refugees are all the same.”
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