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Being a Refugee - What does it mean?
"A refugee situation is a difficult one. We are people with many problems. Our rights are not respected in out land or origin and often neither in the land of asylum. We are without a voice and when we try to speak, our voice are not heard. But we have out lives and that is our greatest hope. We shall one day return to our homeland, where there will be peace for all and we shall live together and build our lives anew, and have a chance to plan for our lives and to build our future."
"So I became a refugee, without knowing yet what it meant to be one. Within a few days, I soon understood the meaning, that I was now considered worthless."
"Many are in shock. Many carry a deep sense of loss. Many are humiliated, anxious or disoriented. They have committed or suffered atrocities. Their tension is great. They are a people on the alert. Family structures are often destroyed. Fathers may still be at war or be killed. In refugee settlements, there is injustice, corruption and deceit. With loneliness and abandonment and under cramped living conditions, there is promiscuity. Moral and morality are lost or abandoned. Yet, there is also a great will to keep families together. There is a great longing for integrity. there is heroic courage and readiness to forgive."
"To be a refugee is to live at the margins of society, excluded from political or social importance. The man or woman who is a refugee many one time have been important, once enjoyed a role in life. In a camp of displaced people, teach one is a former something: a former housewife, doctor, farmer, minister of state. Each is a person in waiting, dependent on another's decisions."
"Never judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoe", says a Jewish proverb. It may be difficult for us to walk in the shoes of asylum seekers and refugees. For a start, many do not have any, and those who do, have literally worn them out walking to safety. What we can do is look critically at stereotypes and images we consume through the media, to start unpacking the story by asking fundamental questions like "who are these people?" Do we know anything about where they come from, what pushed them to leave their home, family, culture, and all that is sage and familiar to them? How do they feel about the tragedy they may have experienced back home, about the being locked up month after month in the country where they came to seek refuge, with no idea when they will be released, and how their future will turn out? To reach out to asylum seekers, we must got to know them, approaching them with respect and humility, aware that we can never fully understand what they have been through, much less judge them for decisions they have taken.
To better understand the challenges facing refugees and the baggage they carry, we can refer to "phases" of the refugee experience, drawn up by psychologists and other professionals in the field. Pre-flight refers to the period leading up to flight itself. This may be an extended periods and may feature economic hardship, social disruption, physical violence and political oppression. This phase may involve traumatizing experiences (e.g. torture or rape or the killing of loved ones) and considerable anguish regarding the decision to flee one's home, possessions, land etc. "In Sudan, people like rebels robbed or looted us by taking our clothes, bicycle, radio cassette, slaughtering our goats. If you have a daughter, they might use her as a subject indecently, in front of you, which is not good. This is also one of the major things for those having daughters from 12 to 15 years old, (they) are forced as wives."
The subsequent flight phase involves the experience of separation from home (and frequently family), and the dangers of passage itself to a country of first asylum. Many refugees pay dearly for this journey in terms of personal and financial costs, and they face extremely hazardous journeys during flights. Many pay the ultimate prices: their lives. "I paid 1000 US dollars to travel by boat together with another 260 immigrants. It was very crowded, we could not move. After 24 hours - I thought we were near Sicily - there was a sudden storm. I was certain we would die. No one could save us except God."
The phase which follows flight - that of temporary settlement or asylum seeking - may involve extended accommodation in a refugee camp or in detention. Although refugees are now safe from the threats that characterized their life before, their life is characterized by uncertainty as they attempt to procure assistance, legal recognition, and reunification with their families. Often they must overcome all these obstacles alone and in increasingly hostile environments in unwilling host countries. Overshadowing everything else is the uncertainty asylum seekers have about their future, which is in the hands of others. Asylum seekers can hardly be blamed for feeling powerless, as they have no say or control over what is going on in their own lives. Living conditions in detention, camps, or in the community are often poor and do not help. In Malta, as government policy stands now, asylum seekers must remain in detention until their application for refugee status is processed, a procedure which usually takes months. As asylum seekers wait, there is great fear of what will happen to them. They have no idea how ling they will be detained for, or when they will be interviewed. Faced with the possibility of rejection and deportation, asylum seekers experience agonizing uncertainty, leading to frustration and despair. Even if they are lucky enough to be detained or living in a camp, it is very hard for asylum seekers to have normal life routines at this time. "No one told us what was going to happen to us. We did not know anything about the future, if we could spend our life in detention, if we would be there for days, months or years, or be released. We would discuss among ourselves: "Will we spend our life here? Will we be send back to the tragedy we left behind?' We were afraid. Some nights I was unable to sleep, I worried about what might happen.
If a person is a criminal, the court will tell him hi must be in a cell for say, 10 years, and he can count his time. But we did not know. They can do what they like with is, we are in their hands."
The final phase involves resettlement or repatriation. This phase becomes more complex for millions of asylum seekers as the number of those accepted as formal refugees becomes significantly less. Repatriation to the county of origin is seen more and more as the "durable solution" of choice, although certainly not necessarily by the refugee themselves. Rather it is host government who try to push them back. Refugees frequently experience much tension, anxiety and fear in the period of entry into their country and readjustment, especially if circumstances there are not fully conductive to return. Resettlement brings its own problems, like unemployment, racism, culture conflict, language... the list goes on. This could pose a potential threat to the sense of well being and cultural identity of refugees, if they are not supported in this transition. Although they do not live a precarious existence anymore, refugees are still separated from their families and face considerable challenges to integrate.
The most fitting way to describe the "refugee experience" may be to say as an experience of devastating loss. They have experienced multiple losses (op parents, spouses, siblings, separation from children, loss of homeland, culture, identity, belongings). One Jesuit who worked with refugees in Asia Pacific in the eighties described the refugee as "kneeling people". In any life situation, reaction to loss is expressed through grief, which is a natural, expectable reaction to loss (any type of loss, not just death). A grieving person passes through well-documented psychological, emotional and physical reactions, both within him/herself and manifested in the community where he/she lives. These manifestations are normal and with time they should be resolved, if they are not avoided or repressed. Our well-being depends largely on how we handle loss; resolution of grief is the result of accepting the reality of the loss and reorganizing life to accommodate the absence of what has been lost. However, with refugees and other displaced people, this process is complicated and often hindered because frequently their circumstances so imply do not allow for a healthy resolution of grieving, and for support in this difficult time of life. They have been torn away from the community and culture they know, so there are prevented from displaying their grief in ways which are socially acceptable and familiar. Over and above this, asylum seekers are refugees are facing the additional tension of starting again in a foreign land, often alone, full of uncertainty. They are struggling to survive in a strange urban setting, in a detention center, in a refugee camp or wherever they may be. To better understand this, we can consider "stages" to the grieving process outline on the attached handout. Consider those stages: how can refugees realistically work through these phases? Although grieving is normal and healthy, the process can become complicated and even pathological. When life issues are unexpressed or un-acknowledged, they can become locked in "frozen locks of time". Frozen blocks of time stop normal grief and deny people the ability to grieve. IT can feel as if life stops and time stands still. The natural flow of feelings in inhibited. There is no movement forwards until these issues are resolved and feelings released. Multiple losses, suicide, killings, AIDS, abuse and violence are all situations that can easily lead to complicated grief, which can be present in both children and adults. For asylum seekers and refugees, who experience multiple losses in stressful and unsupportive environment, so, the possibility of blocked depressive grieving is a very real one. Refugees and asylum seekers are frequently victims of trauma. Survivors of war trauma who have suffered multiple losses often exhibit behavior and emotional status, which meets the criteria for chronic post-traumatic stress disorder.
Asylum seekers and refugees are frequently portrayed as people dependent on the charity or whims of others. While sadly it is a reality that asylum seekers often have nothing and hence must depend to some extent on the goodwill of individuals, organizations and state, and while it is also a reality that decisions regarding their life are often out of their hands, asylum seekers and refugees are far from helpless and weak. Quite the contrary, the experience of humanitarian workers has been to discover awesome strength and resilience as people who have suffered so much strive to live, for themselves and for their families. Their resources and indomitable will are what pulls them through and not the handouts of reluctant governments and benevolent charities. I have met this spirit time and again. Ivica stands out on my memory. A Croatian from Bosnia, Ivica fled Sarajevo with his wife and child after living underground in the first terrifying months of lighting there in the nineties. He went o Germany, where he spent four year, working night and day, together with his wife, so he could rebuild his destroyed home when he returned to Bosnia, He did return as soon a the Dayton peace agreement was reached in 1995, and today is proud owner of a yellow houses, "so I can see it when I am approaching". |
Part I: