January 29, 2009 | Read Time: 2 minutes
A powerful experience or a grotesque poverty theme park?
Opinions are divided about an effort to get participants at this year’s World Economic Forum, in Davis, Switzerland, to empathize with impoverished refugees.
A so-called refugee run has been set up at the Alps event to allow the wealthy and powerful to experience, if only for an hour or so, what it feels like to live in a refugee camp, cross a minefield, and face an attack by violent rebels.
The simulation was sponsored by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and developed by the Crossroads Foundation, a Hong Kong charity.
For Andrew Ross Sorkin, a reporter for The New York Times, navigating the refugee run at Davos was an eye-opening experience.
“In three different rooms, tents were set up, with chained-link fences and barbed wire surrounding the area to simulate a refugee camp. All participants were assigned roles; I was a 40-year-old farmer with a bad left leg and tuberculosis. Actors dressed in army fatigues played the rebels. The lights would go out, and in the pitch black the rebels would push people around and point guns and lights in their faces. I know it may sound hokey, but it wasn’t,” he writes on the newspaper’s Davos Diary blog.
But others find the effort very questionable..
“Did the words ‘insensitive,’ ‘dehumanizing,’ or ‘disrespectful’ (not to mention ‘ludicrous’) ever come up in discussing the plans for ‘refugee run’?” asks William Easterly, a professor of economics at New York University, on his Aid Watch blog.
“Of course, I understand that there were good intentions here, that you really want rich people to have a consciousness of tragedies elsewhere in the world, and mobilize help for the victims. However, I think a refugee theme park crosses a line that should not be crossed,” he writes.
What do you think of the refugee run? Click on the comment button to share your views.
