Thursday 25 / April / 2024
The Swiss resort of St Moritz is known for the glittering social scene which accompanies its winter sports season, in particular the White Turf racing meetings, when horses, wearing special shoes, compete on a course on the frozen lake in February each year. Even cricket is played on it, too. Then the Alpine World Ski Championships will also be taking place here next month.
However, non-sporting events are also arranged and, over the years, it has been interesting to attend lectures given at various hotels by such people as Kofi Annan, the former Secretary General of the United Nations (who said St Moritz was the sort of place to come to forget about the rest of the world’s problems), former Wimbledon champion turned author and trainer Boris Becker (who came to check out the location for his next wedding) and a very jolly Sami Sawiris, the Egyptian businessman behind the Chedi chain of hotels, the one he set up in Andermatt having just been voted Hotel of the Year 2017 by GaultMillau Switzerland.
Earlier this year, the guest speaker at one of the six five-star hotels in the St Moritz area was Prince Asfa-Wossen Asserate, the great nephew of the last emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie I. A former student at the universities of Tübingen and Cambridge, the 68-year-old, who is now a German national, has worked a consultant for various German companies, advising them on exporting to Africa and the Middle East. He is also the author of a number of books, mainly to do with the history of his homeland. I must say that, in his brown suit and waistcoat, complete with pocket-watch and chain, Dr Asfa-Wossen had the air of an English country squire.
The lecture was actually more in the form of an interview, enabling him to reply to questions in great detail about a whole range of matters concerning Africa, for example, how more babies were born in Nigeria in one year than in the whole of the European Union, and that Botswana was the only African country which had introduced system of National Insurance and that, of all African countries, Ethiopia had only spent a few years under colonial, i.e. Italian, control. Naturally the huge wave of refugees who have made their way from Africa to Europe over recent months was also mentioned. Among these, too, are many Eritreans, whose country only became independent from Ethiopia in 1993.
Never did I think that, barely a few months later, I would be talking with a group of such refugees in tropical heat surrounded by wild animals. I should explain that the heat on this occasion was not from a fire on the east African savannah, but from a wood-burning stove in a typical Swiss guesthouse used to accommodate refugees; and the wild animals were not leopards and hyenas but stuffed trophies of foxes, deer and marmots from the mountains and dense local forests, mounted on the walls. It was to here that the refugees, and not just Eritreans, but Afghans and Tibetans, too, had been sent.
Over the summer, an open-air lunch, with food prepared by the refugees (and delicious it was, too,) had been arranged to enable locals to meet up with the asylum-seekers. It was as a result of this, that I was able to take out groups of up to five of them at a time on walks in the mountains. Without a car to get up so far, up it would not have been possible for them. At the same time, too, it was an opportunity for me to find out about their preoccupations and their hopes for the future. When I asked what they had done as a job in Eritrea, one told me he had been a cattle herdsman, in fact passing by a herd of cows grazing on the alpine meadows, I was asked how much a cow cost in Switzerland. Having covered a story about the Zug Bull Market not long previously, I was able to tell him about CHF3,000 (OMR1,400). They told me they had left their homeland because of the compulsory military service there, which they said meant they were actually used as cheap labour for government projects. They told me how they had paid a lot of money to people-traffickers to cross the Sahara to get to the Libyan coast and then head to Italy. When I asked one how long it had taken him to get to Europe, he said about one year, as he had been held in a Libyan prison for nine months before being able to escape.
It is not surprising that, as in other European countries, the subject of asylum-seekers is a recurring theme in Swiss press, not least because it is not easy to find appropriate accommodation for them. Indeed, last year, both Simonetta Sommaruga, who heads the Swiss Federal Department of Justice and Police, which is responsible for matters pertaining to asylum, and Thomas Aeschi, an MP representing the small but rich canton of Zug, where finding accommodation for refugees has been particularly acute, both flew to Asmera, the capital of Eritrea, to see if the situation there was really as bad as the UN maintains, returning to say it looked very much like any other large African city with colourful, bustling markets, implying there was no real need for Eritreans to seek asylum in Europe at all.
Researching myself about this capital city of some 600,000 inhabitants, I came across an interesting video of when Britain's Queen Elizabeth II toured the city with its elegant palm-tree-lined boulevards and impressive Italian architecture accompanied by Haile Selassie in an open-top car in 1965.
This week, on seeing the asylum-seekers again. I felt that, although the months they have spent in Switzerland have been a perfect time for them to recuperate from their arduous journeys, now they want to know, and without further delay, if they can stay and make use of the German they have been painstakingly learning and perhaps take on an apprenticeship or employment, rather than just keep busy by clearing snow, as they currently are.
It was reported this morning that another 550 refugees had been rescued from a tempestuous Mediterranean by the Italian coast guard; and it is only January. - Special to Times of Oman
(The writer is editor at Switzerland's Zug Post)
