We Are Not Refugees: True Stories of the Displaced
288
We Are Not Refugees: True Stories of the Displaced
288Paperback(Translatio)
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Overview
For over a decade, human rights journalist Agus Morales has journeyed to the sites of the world's most brutal conflicts and spoken to the victims of violence and displacement. To Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Central African Republic. To Central America, the Congo, and the refugee camps of Jordan. To the Tibetan Parliament in exile in northern India.
We are living in a time of massive global change, when negative images of refugees undermine the truth of their humiliation and suffering. By bringing us stories that reveal the individual pain and the global scope of the crisis, Morales reminds us of the truth and appeals to our conscience.
"With the keen eye and sharp pen of a reporter, Agus takes us around the world to meet mothers, fathers, [and] children displaced from their homes. Now, more than ever, this is a book that needed to be written and needs to be read."
—Ali Noraani, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum and author of There Goes the Neighborhood: How Communities Overcome Prejudice and Meet the Challenge of American Immigration
"Morales notes [that] those who live on the margins are not even refugees, often seeking survival without the UNHCR, internally displaced people whose stories we need to hear, whose lives we need to remember. . . a must read." —Dr. Westy Egmont, Professor, Director of the Immigrant Integration Lab, Boston College School of Social Work
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781623545321 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Charlesbridge |
| Publication date: | 03/05/2019 |
| Edition description: | Translatio |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.40(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Bin Laden, Refugee
Afghanistan and Pakistan
September 11 came at the right moment to justify America's aggressive military expansionism: now that we are also victims, we can defend ourselves and strike back.
Slavoj Zizek
May 2, 2011. I receive a call first thing in the morning about a story I need to cover for Agencia EFE, the Spanish news agency I work for. It's a warm summer morning in Pakistan, and the sun's first rays are shining brightly into my east-facing office. Outside there are no cries, helicopters, or military vehicles. There's no sound in the streets, or anything to suggest that the history of this part of the world has just changed forever.
The news is of the killing of the world's most wanted terrorist, Osama bin Laden. The earliest leaks say the attack took place "in the outskirts" of Islamabad, where I work as a correspondent. Still sleepy and in pajamas, unable to believe my ears, I delve into my memory of the weekend, in case I happened to attend some party in the area surrounding the Pakistani capital and the scoop had been staring me in the face. The strangest ideas can pass through your mind at moments like this.
Soon, President Barack Obama makes an appearance to confirm the killing of Bin Laden in Abbottabad, a city populated by retired military personnel, about two hours from Islamabad by car. I turn up the volume on the television. Twenty-three Navy SEALs in two Black Hawk helicopters have just carried out a bold operation to kill the leader of Al Qaeda, who was hiding out in a three-story house just a stone's throw from Pakistan's principal military academy, according to the official story. They entered in the wee hours on a night with a new moon, pumped him full of bullets, and threw his body into the Arabian Sea.
Elite American troops. Black Hawks. Osama bin Laden's refuge. Roll the dice.
They had destroyed the West's symbol of evil — the fanatic whose crimes had justified a decade of invasions and exoduses, the man responsible for the deaths of thousands of people and for planning terrorist attacks all over the world.
I get dressed and get my camera ready. While my Pakistani colleague and interpreter, Waqas Khan, is on his way, I call the number of every contact I have — every single one — who might know something. The only one to answer is the spokesman of Pakistan's main Islamist party, Jamat-e-Islami.
"Osama bin Laden is the leader of a way of thinking. He isn't alone. He's the leader of the greatest regime in the world."
I call some intelligence sources to find out if the Pakistani army has set up roadblocks, which is more than plausible — the United States has violated the territorial sovereignty of a country in possession of nuclear weapons, governed from the shadows by the military. A country that rejected the West's accusations that it was harboring terrorists, and that had now seen a team of Navy SEALs kill the leader of Al Qaeda not in the hostile Afghan borderlands, but in a city full of its own soldiers.
As I'm about to leave the house and get in the car with Waqas, my roommate gets up and, still disheveled, starts making breakfast.
"Looks like they've killed Bin Laden," she yawns. "It's going to be a busy day for you, right?"
It all began on the other side of the border, in Afghanistan. In October 2001, as the Twin Towers still smoldered, some forty thousand American soldiers and four hundred military planes invaded Afghanistan to topple the Taliban regime and dismantle Al Qaeda, the terrorist network it was hosting. The major television channels broadcast live coverage of the dreamlike pursuit of the perpetrator of the 9/11 attacks, the Saudi Osama bin Laden, who managed to escape across the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan, the Durand Line, perhaps by motorcycle or on horseback. Like thousands of other jihadists, Bin Laden established his new base of operations in Pakistan. It's impossible to separate the history of these two countries: AfPak is the revealing acronym coined by American diplomats to refer to the region. For Washington, D.C., this is a joint theater of operations: AfPak.
But despite its being the setting of the first major war of the twenty-first century, the media never shone a light on the suffering of the millions of refugees roaming throughout the region, even when they began to arrive in the West. When American boots set foot on the soil of this corner of the world, it was hardly a blank page. There were already millions of Afghan refugees in Pakistan and 1.4 million in Iran, the result of over two decades of war and instability. And at the dawn of the new century, a new exodus was about to spill over.
This part of the globe has always represented a nightmare for foreign armies. Similar in size to Texas, Afghanistan has a population of some 34.6 million. With no coastal access, and divided between north and south by the Hindu Kush and the Pamir Mountains, the country has survived despite being surrounded by three great civilizations and the empires that were founded there: Persia to the east, Central Asia to the north, and the Indian subcontinent to the southeast. Historians have resorted to epic language to describe the famed military defeats that have occurred there: "The Graveyard of Empires." "The Heart of Asia." "The Great Crossroads."
Civilians have paid dearly for this strategic position. The Afghan writer Saboor Siasang tells the story of a man who, despite hating politics (or so he said), would systematically display in his home the gold-framed portrait of whoever happened to be the Afghan leader at the time. His wife disliked the practice, to which he clung increasingly in the face of the volatile political situation, and the country's successive wars. One day, he accepted his son's suggestion that he replace the portrait with a map of Afghanistan. Not long after he did so, their house was riddled with bullets.
One day, I felt as if I'd met that man who always knew which portrait to hang in his house.
Since the beginning of the U.S. invasion, one of the Taliban's favorite places to plant explosive devices had been the road connecting the city of Kabul to the airport. Yellow taxis, children crossing the street without looking, NATO convoys with soldiers taking aim from the turrets, dilapidated cars, Afghans riding bikes in turbans, all-terrain vehicles from humanitarian organizations: a parade of the contradictions of war, waste, and poverty, divided by a thin median.
It was July 2010. Black goats sniffed at trash blooming by the side of the road, as if the highway were a river with life growing up around it. Military checkpoints, birds taking flight, noise, dust, street vendors, downcast faces.
"My son lost his life in an attack on this road," a street vendor told me, staring off into the traffic. "Anything I said about what's going on here would dishonor his memory."
From the road that so hypnotized the street vendor sprung alleyways where the noise died down: a neighborhood with a history of pain in every step, with deserted pathways and blue metal doors. Behind one of these lived Muhammad Khan, a retired employee of the Afghan Ministry of Transport.
On August 15, 2009, five days before a presidential election tainted by fraud, Muhammad was on his way to the Ministry to collect his pension. A suicide bomber at the wheel of an all-terrain vehicle loaded with explosives detonated his bombs near the NATO headquarters and the U.S. embassy, in the unprotected heart of Kabul. Seven people were killed and ninety-one injured.
Muhammad was among them.
"A vehicle arrived suddenly, and exploded. I was seriously injured. I spent four months in the hospital. I had three surgeries — on my stomach, on my liver, on ..."
The old man paused. He lifted his ochre tunic to reveal a swollen abdomen, a map of infected scars. The surgery cost him forty thousand afghanis (over six hundred U.S. dollars). In Afghanistan, the average income per capita is less than that.
"I can't support my family," he said, stroking his granddaughter's hair.
"Do you think things in Afghanistan are worse than ever?" I asked.
"Can't you see? Anyone can see," the old man answered, somewhat annoyed by my ridiculous question. "Not that I can judge anymore, since I spend all day in bed."
Muhammad bowed his head. His pride was wounded. Suddenly, he raised his cane and declared himself a "revolutionary," a seeker of change, a dreamer. What did he mean by "revolutionary"? The old man clarified that the word had nothing to do with communism, nothing to do with the regimes that the Soviet Union installed in Kabul during the Cold War. He didn't support the Russians. Nor did he support the Americans who had invaded his country at the beginning of the new century. Nor did he support the Taliban, who were now threatening to return to power. He was a revolutionary because, even though he was retired, he hadn't lost hope that the Afghan people would one day rise up.
Muhammad didn't belong to anyone. At sixty-five, he didn't need anyone to explain the story of the portrait of the leader and the map to him.
"I have no opinion about the peace process between the Afghan government and the Taliban," he said at the end of our conversation, sitting with his cane in his hand. "We have to support this government, because it's the government we have right now."
I head toward Islamabad by car, in the direction of Bin Laden's final residence in Abbottabad, a town flanked by hills that rise before the traveler as the legendary Karakorum Highway, one of the highest in the world, begins to steepen. There are two possible routes. To avoid the checkpoints, or perhaps because I'm entranced by the mountains, I choose the less direct, more scenic route, which meanders along by the Karakorum Highway, passing through peaceful Pashtun villages, among them Murree, a tourist enclave often visited by the upper classes on weekends. There is nobody here: the way is open. There's no sign to suggest that this operation of global dimensions has really taken place. At the wheel, my fellow traveler, Waqas, speeds ahead of those crazed Pakistani buses, an eastern homage to horror vacui: an orgy of color, mirrors, lines in Urdu, woodcarvings, religious motifs. We pass a man climbing the road on horseback, clothed in a cream-colored tunic and a pair of wide-legged trousers, the traditional shalwar kamiz.
Journalists were aware that Osama bin Laden had taken refuge in this impenetrable part of the world, but the end of his fluid biography seemed, once again, a fiction. There was something about the trajectory of his life and the script of his death — a mask, an exaggeration — that revealed the spirit of the new era. The castle of conspiracies and paranoia, of taboos and fears surrounding terrorism and Islamism in AfPak, seemed to be teetering on the verge of collapse.
I arrive in Abbottabad.
"Bin Laden's house?"
"That way," a Pakistani resident of Abbottabad tells me with a mischievous smile, not hesitating to offer me some tea. It doesn't seem like a good moment to stop.
The soldiers halt me as I'm about to reach the finish line. This haven of peace is Bin Laden's neighborhood, Bilal Town, now cordoned off by security forces. I can't see the house, which stands in a clearing of over 1,000 square feet, near the police cordon. I talk to a few neighbors to see if they can access the compound and take a picture of the house with a cell phone, but they ask for too many rupees in return, and Agencia EFE doesn't have the budget for that kind of extravagance. When I try to get through the checkpoint by force, a soldier stops me by putting his hand on my chest.
"Some things should remain secret," he says with absurd haughtiness.
While the journalists threaten to riot, the only person wandering around with a smile on his face, with the satisfaction of a mission accomplished, is the ABC news reporter Nick Schifrin, who has managed to obtain some exclusive images from inside the house — bloodied sheets, medications, chaos — most likely thanks to the first officials who inspected the dwelling.
The neighbors can't believe it.
"It's just a show put on by Obama to get his troops out of Afghanistan," says Faisal Ilyas, a government employee from Abbottabad who lives just a few miles from the house of the sheikh.
Disbelief, skepticism, cynicism.
"It isn't true, the U.S. is lying," says everyone I speak to.
Only the fresh eyes of the neighbors, somewhere between fearful and indifferent, excited and cautious, betray that Osama bin Laden is dead, and they don't know what to do: the hum of ubiquitous, attentively watched televisions in stores, small businesses, and ground-floor apartments provides the soundtrack to their bewilderment.
What story can be told from there? All you can do is speak to the neighbors and see, touch, sense the end of an era; watch as the region once again disappears down the drain of history, losing what little interest the world had in it. And most of all, doubt. The most-often-recalled image of that operation against Bin Laden is not of Pakistan, where it took place, but rather the team overseeing the operation in the White House Situation Room, with a grim-looking Obama, and Hilary Clinton covering her mouth with her hand.
These are the times we live in.
In 2007, I took one of the best vacations of my life, not far from where Bin Laden was killed, when I visited the idyllic Swat Valley with a friend. It was known as the "Switzerland of Pakistan." We stayed in a semiabandoned luxury hotel, traveled the roads of Swat with a Pashtun who acted as our guide and driver, and who played music at full blast on a cassette player while we stuck our heads out of the hole in the car's broken roof, as if we were riding in a convertible, shouting about who knows what. Swat: only the babble of a river and its splashing against the rocks, cable cars dangling from tattered cables, bare-bones gas stations, bends in the road where breezes blew but time stood still, stands where you could buy meat stew.
Only a month later, the Taliban took control of Swat Valley and established sharia law. There, the radical group was headed by the Mullah Fazlullah, more widely known as Mullah FM for the tirades he broadcast to the valley's inhabitants via radio exhorting them to take up arms, who rode throughout the region on a white horse.
This tourist enclave transformed into a battleground was the unknown scenario of one of the largest exoduses in the entire region. Two million people fled the conflict in the valley. These people are the internally displaced, the IDPs, those who do not count as refugees, those unable to leave their countries and receive international protection. Two million is a tremendous figure that passes unnoticed amid terrorism, jihad, the destabilization of the country, questions of national security, and all those words gilded with threats that represent only the shell of a much harsher, more painful reality: that of people dying and fleeing from bombs.
Swat leapt into the international headlines when the Taliban, after a series of battles, managed to position itself around sixty miles south of Islamabad, and speculation intensified about what the militant Islamist group would do if it got hold of a nuclear weapon. The furor drove the army to launch a military operation to oust the Taliban from the valley. This was the setting in which Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani student who wrote a blog for the BBC about life under the yoke of the Taliban, came close to being murdered. Convinced of her cause as a promotor of girls' education, Malala challenged the radicals, spoke in defense of the rights of women, and ended up becoming, at only seventeen, the youngest-ever winner of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Amid that infernal situation, in an area of the valley reconquered by the Pakistani authorities, the army launched a remarkable pilot program to convince journalists that it was reintegrating members of the Taliban into society. The idea was to set up two reeducation centers to reform militants and potential "terrorists." The Taliban recruited from among broken families of lower socioeconomic categories, but although the cliché goes that terrorism emerges from poverty, the exploitation of grievances is a much more effective strategy: the son of a Pakistani killed in a military attack made an ideal recruit for the Taliban.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "We Are Not Refugees"
by .
Copyright © 2016 Agus Morales.
Excerpted by permission of Charlesbridge Publishing, Inc.
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Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Before We Begin . . . . . . . . . . . ix"We Are Not Refugees" . . . . . . . 1
Part I
Origins: Why Are They Fleeing? . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7
Bin Laden, Refugee, Afghanistan and Pakistan . . . . . 15
A Doctor Is More Dangerous Than a Fighter, Syria . . 28
Plastic Bottles, South Sudan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48
Part II
Flights: Who Are They? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63
In the Shade of a Turkish Lemon Tree,
Salwa and Bushra, from Syria . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70
Because of an Iranian Accountant,
Nesime, from Afghanistan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79
The Forgotten lake Kivu, Birihoya, Julienne, and
David, from the Deomcratic Republic of Congo . . 88
Part III
The Camps: Where Do They Live? . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
The City of Refugees, Zaatari (Jordan) . . . . . . . . . 105
Open-Air Prisons, Malakal (South Sudan) . . . . . . . . 114
The Spirit o fhte Migrant Shelters, Ixtepec (Mexico). 125
Part IV
Routes: How Do They Travel? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Waiting for the Beast, Central America—
The United States
The Route of Shame, Turkey—Greece—The Balkans. 164
Libyan Waves, Mediterranean Sea . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Part V
Destinations: When Do They Arrive? . . . . . . . . . . 201
A Ticket to Limbo in Refugee Class,
Central African Republic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209
The Refugee Parliament, Tibetans in Exile . . . . . . . . 233
The Last Border, Syrians in Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . 251
Acknowlegements . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269