Sign outside both the locations of ‘Yassin’s Falafel House’

Yassin is an inspiring example of how one person can make a major difference in promoting goodwill between people from different faith and ethnic backgrounds. In the context of widespread prejudice in the name of religion and ethnicity in large parts of the world, Yassin’s life provides valuable lessons for how such prejudice can be overcome—through ‘little’, everyday acts of love and service. 

Yassin was born in Syria in 1983 and grew up in the country’s capital, Damascus. In 2010, the Syrian secret police held Yassin for a month—he had been a critic of the government. He applied for asylum in America, hoping to return to Syria when he was no longer in danger. But things only got worse, with a war in which hundreds of thousands have been killed.

Yassin came to Knoxville in 2011, knowing little English. Life for him in his new home wasn’t easy. After filing the papers to legally obtain employment, he couldn’t find work. The small Muslim community in town offered to help him with free food and clothing. But Yassin wanted a job. He asked if he could sell sandwiches outside the mosque on Friday after prayers. Then, in 2014 he launched his eatery, which was followed by a second unit, in 2017.

In an article titled ‘How Did a Falafel House in Tennessee Become the Nicest Place in America?’ published in the ‘Reader’s Digest’ (https://www.rd.com/true-stories/inspiring/yassin-falafel-house-nicest-place-in-america/), Jeremy Greenfield shows how this first-generation Muslim refugee-immigrant in America has won the hearts of many people in the town where he now lives. Yassin, the article says, has “ become a beloved local celebrity”. His eateries, it relates, “are safe places for everyone, powerful engines of charity, and symbols of the best of America”—which is why ‘Yassin’s Falafel House’ was voted by ‘Reader’s Digest’ as 2018’s ‘Nicest Place in America’.
 
One thing that probably draws many people to ‘Yassin’s Falafel House’ is that Yassin makes them feel warmly welcomed. Drocella Mugorewera, executive director of Bridge Refugee Services, a non-profit organisation in Knoxville that helps refugees rebuild their lives in Eastern Tennessee, repeats the word that’s often mentioned when talking about Yassin: “He wants everybody to feel welcomed.”

Yassin explains that he isn’t there just to make money. He’s more than just a businessman. He is deeply engaged in social causes that benefit the local society as a whole, and not just his co-religionists. “Yassin’s Falafel House” has held fundraisers for community causes, donating a percentage of the profits of each falafel sold. Yassin has been an employer of many of the residents of the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA).  He has also hired people struggling with drug addiction and women fleeing dangerous situations. When, in November 2016, fire ripped through a nearby town, killing 14 and damaging or destroying 2,500 homes and businesses, he rented a huge van and helped arrange for essentials for the affected.

Yassin has been actively engaged in promoting interfaith and inter-ethnic harmony, including simply by providing a cheerful atmosphere in his restaurants where everyone is made to feel welcome.

When Yassin won a local Rotary Club Peace Award last year for his charitable work, he donated the $1,000 prize to the Seeds of Abraham, a local nonprofit organisation that brings together youth from different faiths to build connections that lead to understanding and peace.
In 2017, Yassin was invited by a Baptist Christian pastor  to talk to a group of children at an “in-home retreat”. He cooked the group a meal and then told them about his life. It transformed the way the children thought about their neighbours and refugees and what they should do as Americans and as Christians to welcome all who need a place of refuge. “Prior to that weekend, some of our students and families thought of refugees as these folks who were in some way dangerous. I don’t think that can stick if you meet Yassin or meet other refugees like him, because you come to know the people they are”, says Ben Winder, the youth pastor at First Baptist at the time.

Of course it hasn’t been all smooth sailing for Yassin in the face of anti-immigrant and anti-Muslim sentiments among some people in the country where he now lives. He’s probably faced considerable prejudice on these counts himself. But his way of handling these challenges has perhaps won numerous hearts over. Consider, for instance, his response when participating in a rally just before Christmas in 2017 to “welcome the stranger,” a Christian call to treat friends, neighbours, strangers and even enemies, with love and compassion, when a man draped in the American flag hollered against immigrants, who he claimed were preventing him from getting a job. When it was Yassin’s turn to speak at the rally, he invited the man up on stage so they could hold the flag high together. When the man refused, Terou went into the crowd to find him so he could introduce himself and offer to buy him dinner so they could talk. He also offered the man a job!

“I always do that,” Terou told Reader’s Digest, “I always invite anyone who hates us to the store. I want them to know us more. When you break bread, you break hate.”

Similarly, when one day Yassin learnt that the “Safe Place” sign outside of one of his locations had been vandalized with a white supremacist sticker, he didn’t call the police. He didn’t even think about pressing charges. Instead, he countered the action with love. He gathered customers, many now friends, outside his restaurant and talked about how he wanted to sit down for a meal with the white supremacists who did it, so they could learn to get along.

For those who hope for a world where people from different backgrounds can live together in peace and harmony and where prejudice in the name of religion and ethnicity are things of the past Yassin’s life provides some valuable lessons. It teaches us that:

• If we want others to appreciate, accept and respect us, we need to be pro-active and appreciate, accept and respect others first. This applies in the case of both individuals and communities.
• If we make others feel valued and welcomed, they will value and welcome us in turn. Again, this is true for both individuals as well as for entire communities.
• Acts of loving service can help build bridges of harmony between people from different faith and ethnic backgrounds.
• The best way to overcome prejudice, including in the name of religion and ethnicity, is by serving others through deeds of kindness, going beyond concern with just one’s own social group.
• Deeply-rooted prejudices, such as in the name of religion and ethnicity, can be overcome. And the only way this can happen is by living out love and compassion and being useful to others.
• Love alone can overcome hate, transform hearts and build bridges, including between people from different religious and ethnic communities. As is rightly said, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love; this is the eternal rule.”

Courtesy: New Age Islam

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Syrian refugees in Haouch El Nabi in the Bekaa valley, Lebanon. Wael Hamzeh/EPA

Despite the current optimism around the potential good these new global compacts on refugees and migrants will have, the current political situation in Lebanon – home to 1.1m Syrian refugees – shows why there is still a long way to go. Infrastructure to accommodate the refugees in host countries such as Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan is still dire and requires emergency funds to ensure basic needs are met.

In Lebanon, Syrian refugees are viewed not only as an economic burden, but a political threat so severe that their presence threatens the country’s delicate power-sharing balance. Even in the aftermath of elections in May 2018 that brought a modicum of political stability in Lebanon – although still no agreement on cabinet positions – Syrian refugees are still scapegoated by Lebanese politicians. Increasingly xenophobic rhetoric has worsened.

Meanwhile, Lebanon has stepped up efforts to return Syrian refugees, committing significant resources to ensure the return of as many people as possible. But this is highly controversial. Many Syrians fear reprisals or arrest by the Assad regime, possible conscription into the army and a basic lack of infrastructure when they arrive.

Even with the prospects of new international agreements on refugees, no discernible positive impact can be expected for Lebanon’s Syrian refugees. Lebanon has not signed the 1951 Refugee Convention, so that it isn’t legally required to protect the estimated 450,000 Palestinian refugees who also live in the country. The convention provides the legal parameters to ensure refugees are given the right to work, education, housing and non-discrimination.
 

Memory of the past

Part of the reason why Lebanon has ignored this international mandate for refugee rights is a reflection of the divided nature of Lebanese politics, which values stability between the Lebanese elite above all else. But the cost of that stability is currently being paid disproportionally by Syrian and Palestinians as they face marginalisation and exclusion.

Since the outbreak of the Syrian war in in 2011, Syrians who sought refuge in Lebanon have faced systemic marginalisation through policies that limited their ability to gain residency and labour rights. For Lebanon’s political elite, the presence of Syrian refugees represents a dangerous reminder of the Palestinian refugees who played an important role in the Lebanese civil war of 1975-1990, and are now commonly, and wrongly, blamed for being one of the causes of the conflict.

Lebanese prime minister-designate Saad Hariri has struggled to form a government. Wael Hamzeh/EPA

Lebanese political power-sharing is based on a prescriptive sectarian parliamentary balance between Christians and Muslims. The focus on a demographic balance between Christians and Muslims within Lebanon’s institutions has a direct influence on political decision making: from ensuring representation in the cabinet to enshrining the rejection of the right for Palestinian refugees to settle in the constitution.

Because of this, the Christian political elite view Syrians and Palestinians not as vulnerable groups in need of basic assistance, but as a potential seismic demographic shift. The common theory explained to me on a recent research trip to Lebanon was that if either group were to be settled in Lebanon permanently, the balance of sects would shift to favour to Sunnis and result in their dominance over the political arena at the expense of Shia and Christians.
 

What’s old is new again

It was clear that for many of the Christian political elite I spoke to, the Syrian refugees were viewed as an existential threat that could undermine the delicate sectarian balance in the country and destroy the power-sharing agreement that guarantees representation for all Lebanese groups.

In the face of all this, Lebanon’s response to the presence of refugees has been uncharacteristically cohesive. It introduced a national strategy in 2014 entitled the “policy on Syrian displacement”, aimed primarily at ensuring that Syrians were limited in their ability to settle permanently in Lebanon.

Now, arguments that have been used to marginalise Palestinians are now repeated in reference to Syrians. In May 2018, former foreign minister Gebran Bassil proposed that Lebanese women would finally be allowed to pass on nationality to their children, unless they were married to a Syrian or Palestinian. Previous arguments on why this right should be denied to Lebanese women were made in reference to children of Palestinians only.

The focus on maintaining sectarian equilibrium will always be an obstacle for international legal instruments designed to give refugees their rights in Lebanon. For the Syrian and Palestinian refugees living in the country, the power-sharing system will continue to entrap them as they face systemic exclusion, with politicians trying to make their living conditions as difficult as possible to ward off potential settlement. If stability in Lebanon continues to be managed by sectarian head counting, any mechanisms to protect refugees will not be implementable and suffering will continue unabated.
 

Drew Mikhael, Research Fellow in the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics, Queen’s University Belfast

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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It’s one thing to read about refugees in the news. It’s a whole different thing to actually go visit a camp. I saw people living in metal caravans, mixed with tents and other materials to create a sense of home. Many used improvised electrical systems to keep the power going. People are rebuilding their lives to create a better future for their families and themselves, just like any of us would if faced with a similar situation.

As a geographer, I was quickly struck by how geographically complex Zaatari camp was. The camp management staff faced serious spatial challenges. By “spatial challenges,” I mean issues that any small city might face, such as keeping track of the electrical grid; understanding where people live within the camp; and locating other important resources, such as schools, mosques and health centers. Officials at Zaatari had some maps of the camp, but they struggled to keep up with its ever-changing nature.

An experiment I launched there led to up-to-date maps of the camp and, I hope, valuable training for some of its residents.
 

The power of maps

Like many other refugee camps, Zaatari developed quickly in response to a humanitarian emergency. In rapid onset emergencies, mapping often isn’t as high of a priority as basic necessities like food, water and shelter.

However, my research shows that maps can be an invaluable tool in a natural disaster or humanitarian crisis. Modern digital mapping tools have been essential for locating resources and making decisions in a number of crises, from the 2010 earthquake in Haiti to the refugee influx in Rwanda.

This got me thinking that the refugees themselves could be the best people to map Zaatari. They have intimate knowledge of the camp’s layout, understand where important resources are located and benefit most from camp maps.

With these ideas in mind, my lab teamed up with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and Al-Balqa and Princess Sumaya universities in Jordan.

Modern maps are often made with a technology known as Geographic Information Systems, or GIS. Using funding from the UNHCR Innovation Fund, we acquired the computer hardware to create a GIS lab. From corporate partner Esri, we were obtained low-cost, professional GIS software.

RefuGIS team member Yusuf Hamad and his son Abdullah – who was born in Zaatari refugee camp – learning about GIS. Brian Tomaszewski, CC BY

Over a period of about 18 months, we trained 10 Syrian refugees. Students in the RefuGIS class ranged in age from 17 to 60. Their backgrounds from when they lived in Syria ranged from being a math teacher to a tour operator to a civil engineer. I was extremely fortunate that one of my students, Yusuf Hamad, spoke fluent English and was able translate my instructions into Arabic for the other students.

We taught concepts such as coordinate systems, map projections, map design and geographic visualization; we also taught how to collect spatial data in the field using GPS. The class then used this knowledge to map places of interest in the camp, such as the locations of schools, mosques and shops.

The class also learned how to map data using mobile phones. The data has been used to update camp reference maps and to support a wide range of camp activities.

I made a particular point to ensure the class could learn how to do these tasks on their own. This was important: No matter how well-intentioned a technological intervention is, it will often fall apart if the displaced community relies completely on outside people to make it work.

As a teacher, this class was my most satisfying educational experience. This was perhaps my finest group of GIS students across all the types of students I have taught over my 15 years of teaching. Within a relatively short amount of time, they were able to create professional maps that now serve camp management staff and refugees themselves.

A map created with geographic information collected by students in the RefuGIS program. UNHCR, CC BY
 

Jobs for refugees

My experiences training refugees and humanitarian professionals in Jordan and Rwanda have made me reflect upon the broader possibilities that GIS can bring to the over 65 million refugees in the world today.

It’s challenging for refugees to develop livelihoods at a camp. Many struggle to find employment after leaving.

GIS could help refugees create a better future for themselves and their future homes. If people return to their home countries, maps – essential to activities like construction and transportation – can aid the rebuilding process. If they adopt a new home country, they may find they have marketable skills. The worldwide geospatial industry is worth an estimated US$400 billion and geospatial jobs are expected to grow over the coming years.

Our team is currently helping some of the refugees get GIS industry certifications. This can further expand their career opportunities when they leave the camp and begin to rebuild their lives.

Technology training interventions for refugees often focus on things like computer programming, web development and other traditional IT skills. However, I would argue that GIS should be given equal importance. It offers a rich and interactive way to learn about people, places and spatial skills – things that I think the world in general needs more of. Refugees could help lead the way.
 

Brian Tomaszewski, Associate Professor of Information Sciences and Technologies, Rochester Institute of Technology

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Syrian refugees in Lebanon staying in cramped quarters, 3 September 2012. Photo Credit: Voice of America News: Margaret Besheer reports from the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli; "Syrian Refugees Seek Out Smugglers". [Public domain],via Wikimedia Commons
 

A few months ago, it appeared as if the local ceasefires and the new geo-political realignments had moved Syria towards the end of its fratricidal six-year civil war. The Syrian government and the Turkey-based leadership of a section of the armed opposition met in Astana (Kazakhstan) and discussed the technical matters of de-escalation. Iran and Qatar had produced very important breakthroughs around towns under siege. There was no easy pathway to a peace deal, but there appeared to be signs that indicated the possibility of a genuine dialogue.

Meanwhile, at Syria’s north and Iraq’s northwest, it appeared as if ISIS would be soon squashed by the massive firepower of the various global players and by the resolve of the various militaries in the region. Gains in Mosul and in the Syrian Desert towns indicated that ISIS would have few options left to exert itself. It would not disappear – for it still commands the allegiance of a large number of fighters and sympathizers – but it would be considerably weakened.

Certainly, the ceasefire dialogue in Astana and the UN-led process in Geneva indicated that the Syrian government had the better bargaining position. Its forces – aided by Iran, Russia and other regional fighting units – had defeated the rebel forces in Aleppo and seemed poised to weaken them further in Idlib. The Syrian government’s forces had removed ISIS from Palmyra and seemed prepared to break the ISIS siege on the western city of Deir ez-Zor. A study  of the battlefield in Syria indicates that between 1 April 2016 and 31 March 2017, 43 per cent of the Syrian army’s battles were against ISIS (this is contrary to the view that the Damascus government has not engaged ISIS).

Regime Change
Much changed in the politics of the region when US President Donald Trump authorized the missile strikes on the Syrian government’s air base on 7 April. This is not to say that the airstrikes had a major military effect on the Syrian army, but it did muddy the balance of forces in this bloody war and it will serve to extend the war and break the gestures for peace.

Just before these missile strikes, the Syrian opposition in Istanbul (Turkey) had asked for greater US involvement in the negotiations. The opposition had come to the view that US military action against the government of Bashar al-Assad was no longer possible. Trump’s missile strikes invalidated their assumption. It is now thought amongst the political leaders of the armed opposition that the US might launch a full-scale attack on the Syrian army and deliver Damascus to them.

It is a curious matter that the journalist Anand Gopal told Democracy Now  that ‘I think it’s important to understand that there’s no regime change policy from the United States towards Syria. And there never has been a regime change policy.’ This view blinds itself from the decade-long attempt by the US government to overthrow the Syrian government in order to weaken Iran and Hezbollah (as I show in my book, The Death of the Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution ). It also fails to see that ‘regime change’ is not always accomplished by the kind of massive bombardment seen in Iraq (2003) and Libya (2011). In Syria, the armed opposition knew from 2011 that it would not defeat the Assad government without the accompaniment of massive US airstrikes. This is why it has sought to encourage US intervention. Obama’s slogan – ‘Assad must go’ – and the adventures of US Ambassador Robert Ford to opposition protests suggested to the armed opposition that the US cruise missiles were on the way.

The shadowy promises from the United States prolonged this war, with the rebels unwilling to come to the table because they assumed that the maximal position (regime change) would be reality. At the same time, the US along with its Gulf Arab allies and Turkey financed and armed the opposition through Turkey and Jordan. This program was known as Timber Sycamore, which was the pipeline for millions of dollars of arms that entered not only the various rebel forces but also the black market. The hope that the US will eventually overthrow Assad remains central to the strategy of even the al-Qaeda proxy. Trump’s 7 April strike merely rekindled that hope and therefore broke the momentum of the peace talks.

The Pendulum of ISIS
Trump’s 7 April strike hit an airfield that – while bombing Idlib certainly – was also bombing ISIS positions outside Palmyra and toward Deir ez-Zor. Three days before Trump’s assault, Syrian army troops had moved closer to the significant Talilah crossroad, held by ISIS. They took the heights of al-Taj and al-Mazbad from ISIS. It appeared that the Syrian army was getting itself ready for an assault on the Talilah crossroad, whose capture would have allowed them to move on Deir ez-Zor, where 90,000 civilians are living in a wretched siege , and to the T3 airbase near Homs. The oil fields of al-Shaer and the gas fields of Arak would have been secured if the Syrian army had been able to take the crossroad.

Air cover came from the base that Trump’s cruise missiles hit, which delivered ISIS a momentary advantage on the ground. ISIS chatter now suggests that defeat in Mosul would be compensated by a victory in Deir ez-Zor. In practical terms, the Trump strike might very well have made this possible.

Meanwhile, the deeply fraught politics along the Turkish border has also allowed ISIS to breathe. Turkey’s intervention to prevent the advance of both the Syrian army and the US-backed largely Kurdish Syrian Democratic Forces has allowed ISIS to reorganize its forces to delay the fall of Raqqa and to go south to seize Deir ez-Zor. An ISIS suicide bomber killed dozens of refugees from this war zone on 2 May in Hasakeh province. These refugees sought to go into the zone controlled by the Syrian Democratic Forces. Such attacks are intended to sow fear amongst the population and in the ranks of those who are fighting ISIS.

Security Zones
The armed Syrian opposition has decided to no longer attend the Astana ceasefire talks, whose fourth round opened today. They now sniff the possibility of regime change in Damascus. Trump’s action indicates that peace is not necessary if victory remains a prospect.

Russia’s President Vladimir Putin spoke to Trump on 2 May. Putin asked Trump to endorse the Russian proposal for the creation of ‘security zones’ across Syria. Where a power is relatively dominant, it will guarantee the peace in that zone, and the various powers would ensure that attacks across zones would be curtailed. The four ‘security zones’ would be managed by the Russians, the Iranians, the Turks and the Americans. This framework resembles the Allied-occupation zones in Germany after World War 2. In their read-out of the phone call, the White House called these ‘safe, or de-escalation, zones’ – translating the Russian proposal into the language of ‘no-fly zones’ and ‘safe zones’ familiar to the American policy makers. In fact, Putin said openly that these ‘security zones’ would be ‘no-fly zones.’

At Astana, the main agenda item will be these ‘security zones,’ with a detailed document now doing the rounds of the participants. It is hoped that a final document – with the technical details for the boundaries, checkpoints, and monitoring procedures – will be ready by 22 May.

The armed Syrian opposition leadership rejected the proposal for safe zones. Ahmed Ramadan, leader of their delegation, told the Associated Press that the armed opposition was not happy with the idea of local truces. They wanted to secure a nation-wide policy. Ramadan’s delegation is in Astana, although they have not come to the table. The UN’s envoy Steffan de Mistura has urged Ramadan and his team to come back to the talks and not to ‘destroy the possibility of good news related to this issue.’
It is important to indicate that the Trump attack has also strengthened the sectarian world-view of the Saudi royal family – one of the main patrons of the armed Syrian opposition. On 2 May, the Saudi crown prince and defense minister Mohammed bin Salman told Saudi news media that his kingdom would never be able to have a dialogue with Iran. ‘How can I come to an understanding with someone, or a regime, whose principles are extremist?’ Iran, he argued, represented the Shia quest to ‘control the Islamic world.’ What Prince Salman indicated here was less the reality of Iran’s situation and more the paranoia of the Saudi government. Iran has been willing to meet with the Saudis to find a way to de-escalate the conflict in Syria and elsewhere. It has already been working with Qatar to do so, and is an active player at the Astana meetings. Recalcitrance may be found less in Iran and more in Saudi Arabia, which knows that Washington, DC will back its obstinacy to the hilt. Prince Salman’s comments have been well received by the armed opposition in Syria. They see this as confirmation that neither Trump nor Prince Salman is eager for peace in Syria. Both would like to see that war go on.
This article was made possible by the readers and supporters of AlterNet.

Vijay Prashad is professor of international studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut. He is the author of 18 books, including Arab Spring, Libyan Winter (AK Press, 2012), The Poorer Nations: A Possible History of the Global South (Verso, 2013) and The Death of a Nation and the Future of the Arab Revolution (University of California Press, 2016). His columns appear at AlterNet every Wednesday.

This article was first published on AlterNet.

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Photo Credit: By Voice of America News: Margaret Besheer reports from the northern Lebanese city of Tripoli; "Syrian Refugees Seek Out Smugglers". [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

A year and a half ago, the Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir chanced upon a sight that would become iconic: the prone body of 3-year-old Alan Kurdi, washed up from the angry Mediterranean Sea. Demir would photograph the small body, hands along his sides, his feet askance, his red shirt a beacon of distress. That photograph of the toddler would zip around the world from this beach in Bodrum (Turkey). It would be painted as a mural in Frankfurt (Germany) and in Duhok (Iraq). It would be on the front page of newspapers that September of 2015.

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei was photographed lying on a beach in Lesbos (Greece) like Alan Kurdi for the Indian magazine India Today. ‘You see so many children come off these boats. They are like angels – they are the most vulnerable,’ said Ai to CNN in January 2016. ‘There are two worlds – a world of adults and a world of babies, and they are not connected.'

The tragedy of Alan Kurdi could very well have focused world attention on the refugee crisis. A great deal of moral outrage followed, including phone calls from European leaders to Turkey’s Recip Tayyip Erdoğan. They wanted Turkey to do something to stop the flood of refugees from Syria into Europe. Money flooded into charity organizations in the name of Alan Kurdi. Social media lit up Demir’s photograph. Sadness and anger defined the emotional range. Something had to happen. That was the sentiment.

Nothing came of it. There was not enough political will to stop the cause of the flight, namely – in Alan Kurdi’s case – the war in Syria. Nor was there enough genuine feeling to fund the dismal refugee camps along the Turkish-Syrian border. The UN has now asked for $3.5 billion to fund the basic needs of the three million Syrian refugees in Turkey. A fraction of this will come from the donor states. In 2016, the year after Alan Kurdi had died, the U.N. was only able to raise 59 percent of the requested amount.

There was even less sentiment to welcome Syrian and other refugees from the desolations of war and starvation into areas of greater stability. Repellent forms of cruel populism across the West made demons of the refugees, refusing to allow that it is Western policy that has contributed so fundamentally to the plight of these fleeing people from Afghanistan to West Africa. False news reports – such as by the German paper Bild – vilified refugees as rapists, echoing Donald Trump’s rhetoric of ‘Mexican rapists’ and ‘bad dudes’ among the refugees. Hateful rhetoric saturated the airwaves from Holland’s Geert Wilders to Trump. In all this, the image of Alan Kurdi made no impact.

Walk in Their Shoes
For Tima Kurdi, the aunt of Alan Kurdi, there is no day that goes by when she is not seized of the terrible misfortune that struck her family in September 2015. Demir’s picture of Alan defined the refugee crisis for a few months, but Alan was not the only one to die that day from Tima’s family. Alan (age three) died alongside his brother Ghalib (age five) and their mother Rehana. The three of them died, leaving Abdullah—Rehana’s husband and the children’s father—alone. The three were buried in Kobane (Syria), from where they hail. Abdullah recalled how their small overfilled boat capsized in the waves, and how his family slipped from his hands. Tima, who had sponsored them from Canada, despaired at the loss.

‘This tragedy will scar my heart forever,’ Tima told me. Abdullah now lives in Irbil (Iraq), a guest of the Kurdistan regional government. Tima, Abdullah and other members of their family have set up the Alan and Ghalib Kurdi Foundation , which they hope will provide assistance to some of the 20 million refugees in the world.

Tima, who works at a hairdressing salon with her husband Muhammad in Coquitlam-Maillardville (British Columbia, Canada), has traveled to the refugee camps in Turkey. She has talked to people there and felt their frustration as her own. Tima speaks with great emotion when it comes to the question of flight and the anti-refugee backlash in the West. When she hears people complain about refugees she feels angry, she tells me. ‘You have no idea why they flee their country unless you walk in their shoes’, she says. ‘Then you will see.’

Abdullah, Rehana and their two children fled Kobane, which had been overrun by ISIS. According to Rehana’s father, Sexo Seno Kurdi, ISIS killed 11 members of their family in the city, which was destroyed when ISIS was forced out by the Syrian Kurdish militia YPG. Almost the entire population of Kobane, a key city in Syrian Kurdistan, fled for the relative safety to other Kurdish cantons or Turkey. Violence in Syria, says Tima, comes from a ‘hundred troubles’ – echoing an Arabic phrase. Whatever the cause of their flight – whether violence from ISIS, al-Qaeda, this proxy or that, the government – the fact is that the people flee because they must. They do not choose to leave. They are forced to flee.

Enough is Enough
I’m talking to Tima Kurdi around the same time as the Atlantic Council in Washington, DC, releases a new report on the battle for Aleppo. The Atlantic Council has long called for regime change in Syria. This report comes out just when new ceasefires have been negotiated and when parts of the armed rebels have decided to hold talks with the Syrian government. The only real fighting groups amongst the rebels that remain of consequence are ISIS and the al-Qaeda portmanteau group Tahrir al-Sham, as I reported  a few weeks ago. None of this mattered to the Atlantic Council.

The Council calls for three strategies to undercut the peace initiatives afoot in Syria. First, to provide ‘robust support for local allies on the ground’, namely the elusive ‘moderate opposition.’ As Tima Kurdi said to me, ‘there are no moderate rebels in Syria.’ Those days are long gone. Second, for ‘direct kinetic action’ which is military jargon for armed action by the United States. Third, for the creation of safe zones within Syria, which is precisely what a ceasefire initiative and peace process would create.

Point one and two are anathema to Tima Kurdi, who urges support for the peace process to ‘stop the war in Syria.’ ‘Western people have no idea of what is going on in Syria,’ Tima Kurdi says. They see things as ‘black and white’, with ‘President Bashar as the one responsible for everything’. But, she notes, ‘it is not about President Bashar or ISIS or al-Qaeda’ but the fact that this war is futile. That is the essence of the matter. Calling for more war is not going to help anyone.

The call for war is not mere words. In an important report , Diana Bashur found that the very Western countries that are loath to take in refugees from the Syrian conflict make immense profits from arms sales to the regional powers that are involved in the proxy battlefield. For example, Bashur found that the countries that are part of the ‘Friends of Syria’ group earned 31.88 billion in weapons sales to states that armed the Syrian rebels, while these same ‘Friends of Syria’ states spent only 10.45 billion on hosting Syrian refugees. These numbers are inflated by Germany. If it is removed from the list, then the United States, France, the United Kingdom and Italy made 27.92 billion in arms sales while spending merely 1.18 billion on refugees. These are scandalous figures. Front-page news should be made of such facts.

Arms dealers and arms exporting countries are making a phenomenal amount on this war, while the cost of it is borne by families such as the Kurdis. Who is good or bad on the battlefields of Syria is perhaps not as important as who is making these vast sums of money arming all sides of the conflict. ‘I don’t support one side or the other,’ Tima Kurdi said. Rather, ‘let the suffering Syrians rebuild our lives’.

This is a powerful message from a Syrian woman who has endured a great tragedy. The world stopped before the photograph of her nephew and shuddered. It was a vivid symbol of the meaninglessness of this conflict and its social costs. Tima Kurdi wishes to give voice to the Syrians who want to salvage as much of their lives as possible. But for that to happen the various powers need to take seriously the pathways to peace.

Courtesy: AlterNet

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Laia Ortiz discusses how Barcelona is trying to forge its own progressive integration policy for refugees, despite the constraints put on it by the Spanish government and the European Union.

Laia Ortiz is the Deputy Mayor for Social Rights at the City of Barcelona, and a close ally of Mayor Ada Colau. She discusses how Barcelona is trying to forge its own progressive integration policy for refugees, despite the constraints put on it by the Spanish government and the European Union.

Laia Ortiz is the Deputy Mayor for Social Rights at the City of Barcelona.

Courtesy: The Conversation

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Konitsa Refugee Camp protests in northern Greece, 1-3 September, 2016. Lampros Raptis. All rights reserved.

At the start of September 2016, I – along with thousands of other Syrians currently living in refugee camps – took part in street protests, peaceful sit-ins, strikes and marches in the cities where the camps are throughout the whole of Greece. You may not have seen information about the strikes or protests in the news. It is difficult for us – with little support, contacts and power – to get the information about this out, to talk directly to the people of Europe. We have kindly been given this platform in openDemocracy in order to address you, the people of Europe, directly. 

We have been demonstrating because we need to ask for three things: (1) that the EU opens the Greek borders; (2) that better care is provided for refugees such as ourselves in the camps; and (3) that we be treated with dignity – as human beings, not as animals – and that we are able to achieve a future where we can live as we hope, in peace and in dignity. 

The most important aim of the strikes and protests is to send the message to the Greek government and the EU that we need you to open the border, to let us into the rest of Europe. Everyone of us is asking that the borders be opened, or else that you find other ways for us to continue our journey. We recognise that there are steps being taken to reunite families and help minors trapped here without their parents or families – through the UN relocation and family reunion programme – but it is slow and we do not know how long it will take before we will see our families and loved ones again. As such, it has to be made faster.

Konitsa Refugee Camp protests.

Lampros Raptis. All rights reserved.Secondly, we need the camps to take better care of us. If you saw some of the camps in Greece, you would see that many of the camps are not able to provide even the basics: food, clothes, money, medication, care for children. In the majority of camps, all these things are lacking or are not of an acceptable, human standard. We are all asking that we are taken better care of. We need normal food and the opportunity to cook for ourselves, like normal people. We need housing. We need clothes, proper medication and healthcare. The clothes that we have are of poor quality and we need shoes, jeans, shirts, jackets – especially now that summer is ending and winter comes.

And most importantly we need money, or some way of earning money and supporting ourselves. Many of us want to work, we want to support the local economy, but we are denied this opportunity. Many of us are well-educated, and skilled workers. But now we are broke and we need to ask for so many things, as we have no money to buy things we need.

Konitsa Refugee Camp protest. Lampros Raptis. All rights reserved.

As well as facing difficulties with food, clothing, medication and shelter, we face other problems. We have all faced a difficult journey from Syria to Greece. We have lost our homes, the streets and the towns we grew up in. We have lost family members. We have lost contact with many of our friends and lovers, many we may never see again, many we know have died. We have paid thousands of dollars to leave Turkey, to travel over seas in a dinghy, and have suffered violence and brutality at the borders of Europe. Many of us need psychological care and support. And many are suffering from psychological pain and boredom, since the authorities are not able to tell us how long we have to stay in Greece, with some preferring to return to the war in Syria than to live a hopeless life in Greece.

Yazan Al-Shrif, the author of this piece.

Finally, we ask to be treated in a way in which we can achieve a future where we can live in dignity. We are humans, but in many cases we are being treated like animals. We want to reach other countries in Europe, where there are opportunities, where we don’t have to live in camps and survive off basic aid.

From September 1 – 3, 2016, I took part in the nation-wide protests in the Konitsa Refugee Camp in Northern Greece, along with 130 refugees from our camp. Even as demonstrations took place in the whole country, it was difficult to convince our camp to take part in the protest. We don’t believe that the media care about us, and it is hard to convince journalists and newspapers to cover our stories, even though we desperately need people to listen to us.

Konitsa Refugee Camp protests. Lampros Raptis. All rights reserved.

But we organised. We coordinated through Facebook, to keep up to date with how protests were going elsewhere. We shared pictures and experiences of protests throughout Greece. Although we heard about some police violence and intimidation at demonstrations in Thessaloniki, we made sure to talk to the police in Konitsa beforehand and to get help from the local people to ensure that the protest was peaceful and lawful. In the end, we staged a sit-down protest in the town square, followed by a march through the town. We took steps to reassure the town that we would not trash anything or do anything that could be bad or negative for the people of Konitsa. We went out onto the street. We held banners thanking the people of Greece but also making clear our problems, and stating our requests for opening the borders, providing better care in the camps, and enabling us to achieve a dignified life and future. These are just the start of a number of demonstrations which will continue until we can convince people to listen and change the situation.

Konitsa Refugee Camp protests. Lampros Raptis. All rights reserved.

I am a human, speaking to you. I am a Syrian refugee. I am 17 years old. I have family waiting for me in Germany and I cannot reach them. I am part of the UN reunification programme but I do not know how and when this will happen. Legal support is little, information is sparse, and until I hear more about my future, I am forced to wait and wait – for many weeks, months and maybe years. I am trapped here, without news, without purpose, without my family. 
We need to spread the word about our situation. If there is anything you can do, do it; just do it. I am a human, speaking to you.

All photos and media are to be accredited to Lampros Raptis.

Yazan al-Shrif is a 17.yr old Syrian refugee waiting at Konitsa Refugee Camp in Greece, to be reunited with his family through the UN reunification programme.

This article was first published on Open Democracy

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Fr Cedric Prakash, a senior human rights activist from Gujarat is now in Beirut, Lebanon, from where he will be contributing a regular column for SabrangIndia

Tasnim is just about seven years old. It’s been a year now that her parents Zemzoun and Mohammed fled with their five children (Tasnim, Ghofran, Rawan, Razan and Khaled) from war –ravaged Syria to the safer and more secure environment of neighbouring Lebanon. Tasnim does not remember very much about the day they had to leave the comfort of their small home just outside Damascus; ‘it was very painful and difficult’ she says and then just tunes off clearly trying to forget the way her family had to come away from the place they once called ‘home’ .
 
The   reality of Tasnim –is easily the story of two million Syrian refugee children who today live in neighbouring countries. The Syrian conflict will soon enter its sixth year. In 2015, the number of refugees fleeing Syria surpassed 4 million and Lebanon became the country with the highest per capita concentration of refugees in the world.
 
At the end of November 2015, the number of UNHCR registered Syrian refugees in Lebanon was 1,070,189 while the exact number remains unknown: the reported number strictly reflects those registered with UNHCR. Lebanese authorities estimate the number of unregistered Syrian refugees to be as high as 500,000[1].
 
Children and youth figure prominently in the flow of Syrian refugees. Based on recently published figures by UNHCR on Lebanon, half of the total number is children below the age of eighteen; of these, there are more than 477,000 Syrian children who are school-aged ^[2]. As of October 2015, more than 70% of them were out of school.
 
The Government of Lebanon launched a strategy in 2014 for educating refugee children in the country: Reaching All Children with Education (RACE), which aligns the country’s refugee response with the Lebanese Government’s Education Sector Development Plan. RACE promises to provide access to formal education to a great number of Syrian refugee students. This program, even if implemented perfectly to plan, will reach less than half of the school-age Syrian children in Lebanon.
 
Another essential problem that RACE does not promise to solve is aligning Syrian refugee students’ educational capacities with the requirements of the Lebanese curriculum. Syrian children face significant language barriers in adapting to the Lebanese curriculum, which provides certain subjects in English and French. These obstacles, in addition to the lack of available spaces, transportation costs, discrimination and bullying, social and economic issues, as well as unpredictable enrolment regulations^[3], are the entrenched barriers to Syrian children’s successful enrolment and attendance in both formal and non-formal education provided through public schools.
 
According to UNHCR, more than 67 percent of the Syrian refugees in Lebanon are living in the North and Bekaa regions due to their proximity to Syria. The ratio of Syrian refugees to Lebanese citizens in the Bekaa is now as high as 1:2. Unlike refugees living in the Beirut and Mount Lebanon governorates, a large proportion of refugee families in the Bekaa region are staying in makeshift camps, leaving them vulnerable to poor weather, hygiene and protection concerns.
 
Security incidents are more frequent in the region due to the proximity to the Syrian border, which presents additional challenges for humanitarian access and delivery of assistance to refugees living in the Bekaa.
 
Children are often forced to start working in order to help provide for their families, and usually take jobs or work daily/seasonally in the agricultural sector. Many of the children are exposed to pesticides, toxic chemicals, heavy loads and exhausting hours.[4]
 
According to a study conducted in 2014, over half of the Syrian children living in the Bekaa had only attained basic reading and writing skills or elementary education before starting work.[5] The Bekaa region has the highest number of out of school children (85%) in the country, largely due to the lack of proximity to schools.[6]
 

But Tasnim is one of the more fortunate refugee children of the Bekaa region as she studies today in the Al-Andalus school which is administered by the Jesuit Refugee Service (JRS) since October 2015. She is delighted about this. She enjoys learning and playing in school. She looks forward to the daily snacks and the other facilities given to her in school. She revels in the warmth, affection and acceptance lavished upon her by her teachers.
 
 Tasnim sits on the front bench of her class. Some visitors come in. They ask those ‘normal’ questions which a little child is subjected to: “When you grow up, what would you like to become?” Answers are the usual ones which a child would give perhaps anywhere in the world:” policeman’, ‘teacher’, ‘cook’ etc.
 
The question is directed to Tasnim, in an answer which belies her seven years and surprises everyone she looks at the visitor, with her arms folded she coyly says “Doctor!”. Later on, she is asked the ‘why’ of her desire. She does not hesitate in saying ‘I want to heal others; I don’t like seeing people dying, killing one another.
 
She also shares her longing to go back home to Damascus. She remembers her grandfather with a glisten in her innocent eyes. She loves him very much and she enjoyed playing in his house; besides, she says her grandfather used to play with her too. Then one day he became very sad, she says, because his son (her Uncle) was killed. She began feeling very sad too because he was sad. She misses her grandfather very much and wishes that he would come and live with them in Lebanon.
 
In the Bekaa valley there are thousands of refugee children who have to labour in muddy fields picking up fruits or vegetables or just doing almost anything to eke out an existence. A few months ago the New York Times (November 5, 2015) carried an insightful story entitled ‘The Displaced: Hana’.
 
This is the story of Hana Abdullah, another Syrian refugee child in the Bekaa valley a little older than Tasnim. But Hana is not as fortunate as Tasnim –as she slogs for long hours to help her family survive.
 
Though Tasnim is in school and is cared for, her father Mohammed finds it really difficult to make both ends meet. By profession he is a carpenter; back home in Syria he earned a decent wage and was able to provide his family with a comfortable life. The past five years have meant a dramatic change in his fortunes. He had no alternative but to flee with his family to Lebanon. He desperately tries to make both ends meet by doing odd jobs- that does not happen daily. No one speaks about a ‘just wage’ for a refugee. His wife Zemzoum looks after the children and the handles other household chores
 

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As the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches, we would do well to resist the urge to close our borders and cover our ears

Singing is perhaps not something that people associate with the Holocaust. But a wealth of music was played and songs sung while victims were interned in the ghettos and camps. Perhaps this marked a desire to maintain continuity with the past, or perhaps it represented a kind of “spiritual resistance” to the systematic dehumanisation. Whatever the reason, the victims left an enormous corpus of music and songs.

Victims sang about their worries, their captors, their lives before internment and their inner emotional worlds. When faced with what must have been a devastating and bewilderingly sudden change to their world, it seems as if they sang endlessly. We need only glance at the enormous body of songs in Yiddish compiled by collectors such as Shmerke Kaczerginski to get a sense of their richness and ingenuity.

One of the ways in which scholars have tried to make sense of the lived experience of the Holocaust is through an emphasis on first-person testimony. But as the numbers of those who survived the camps dwindle, we are facing a profound shift in our relationship with the Holocaust. This raises challenging questions about the limits of testimony and its connection to the lived experience of the Holocaust.

The songs of the camps and ghettos count as part of the expanded testimony. They can help us to access the emotional world of the victims. Songs also open us up to the emotional world of the Holocaust, in ways that are perhaps more reliable than first-person narratives. They constitute part of a collective experience, sung and re-sung by countless individuals.

Song is different both from the intimate particular tone of first-person testimony and from the dehumanising abstraction of quantitative data (victim counts, the homogenised statistics of the dead and so on). And this is why it’s important to listen to the Holocaust: it enables us to access the emotional life of communities in terrible jeopardy, and to connect to their extraordinary creativity in the face of such brutality.

Echoes in the present

Today, recognising this is more important than ever. The parallels between some of the British media’s indifference to the plight of Jews before and during World War II and its current hostility to Syrian refugees is striking: a Daily Mail headline in 1938 read “German-Jews pouring into this country”, for example. The self-same discursive energy has been addressed by great swathes of the British press to the “inundation” of refugees from Syria fleeing targeted bombing, incarceration, torture and almost certain death. Elements of the press are using precisely the same strategic dehumanisation strategy, reducing refugees to an undifferentiated mass. The abstraction works precisely because it effaces human suffering and removes us from any responsibility to act.

As a musicologist of the Holocaust, my work has taught me that songs do not deal in the reduction of communities to a uniform mass, but in the complex, messy and irreducibly local experiential world of those who write, adapt, distribute and sing them. Songs are portable, easy to remember, they connect readily to personal experience and can be passed around in multiple versions. They do not carry their authorship heavily and they belong, in a very real sense, to the community of victims.

If we listen to the songs of displaced Syrians, just as we listen to the songs of victims of the Holocaust, we are forced to connect to displaced communities’ creativity, ingenuity and imagination. In short, we connect to their humanity, and to our own. As the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches, we would do well to resist the urge to close our borders and cover our ears.

Some of the ways Syrian refugees use song is suggestive of that same desire we see in victims of the Holocaust to refuse the discontinuities of displacement, and to maintain an ongoing intimate relation with the emotional world of “home” – der heym in Yiddish, albayt in Arabic.

Arriving at Budapest’s Keleti Railway Station in September 2015, refugees from Syria brought song with them. They were humming the mesmerising slow rap of Damascus-based hip hop duo Latlateh; swaying gently to Syrian rock group Khebez Dawle’s Ayesh (“Alive”); gently intoning the traditional tunes of protest songwriter Samih Choukir’s Ya hayf (“O shame”). The mix of Damascus-centred contemporary and popular musics, traditional tunes and the muwashshah (Arabic poetic song form) of Aleppo is crossing boundaries as never before.

If we listen to the songs of displaced Syrians, just as we listen to the songs of victims of the Holocaust, we are forced to connect to displaced communities’ creativity, ingenuity and imagination. In short, we connect to their humanity, and to our own. As the 71st anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz approaches, we would do well to resist the urge to close our borders and cover our ears.

(This article was first published in The Conversation)
 

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