South Sudan’s Refugee Flow Is Often a Children’s Crisis

ARUA, Uganda–The flood of South Sudanese refugees from the country’s 5-year civil war has been called a children’s crisis.

More than 60 percent of the well over one million refugees who have poured into neighboring Uganda are under the age of 18, government and United Nations officials say. More than two million people have fled South Sudan overall.

Amid the fighting, over 75,000 children have found themselves on their own in Uganda and other neighboring countries, according to the U.N. refugee agency, separated from their families in the chaos or sent by their parents to relative safety.

While many children have reunited with relatives after crossing the border, others are matched by aid workers with foster families in an effort to minimize the disruption in their lives. Without parents, some children are left vulnerable to exploitation and abuse, aid workers say.

Some teenagers find themselves the head of their households, taking care of siblings.

One 16-year-old boy now takes care of his younger brother. “My father was shot in the war,” he said. “And then my mother, I don’t know where she went.” He doesn’t know if she’s dead or alive.

The two brothers fled to Uganda on the back of a car after seeing their father’s body on a street in their village. After arriving in Uganda they were taken to a reception center run by the U.N. refugee agency.

Efforts to support the children have been hurt by a recent scandal in Uganda in which officials were accused of inflating refugee numbers to siphon off aid money. That has shaken international donors.

Aid workers say resources are stretched thin as they try to place the unaccompanied children with foster families with close ethnic ties.

It’s crucial to place children with families that speak the same language, said James Kamira, a child protection expert with the World Vision aid agency.

One young mother of two, Beatrice Tumalu, now takes care of eight other children who are not her own.

“I feel pity for them,” she said, as she grew up under similar circumstances during the years that South Sudan fought for independence from Sudan. That independence was won in 2011, and South Sudan’s civil war broke out two years later.

The unaccompanied children have little of that aid workers call psychosocial support to help deal with trauma. In one refugee settlement just six case workers are available for 78,000 children, according to the Danish Refugee Council.

Another 16-year-old said his parents died three years ago in South Sudan. He walked into Uganda last year and later was placed with a foster family from another ethnic group.

“Staying there, it is not very well,” he said of the cultural and communication issues.

Sitting against a tree, he opened the Bible he carried with him and began to cry as he read one passage: “I will not leave you as orphans; I will come to you.”

South Sudan’s many unaccompanied children need stability and education or “we can lose actually that generation,” warned Basil Droti, who is in charge of child protection at one settlement for the Danish Refugee Council.

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David Platt - A Biblical View of the Refugee Crisis - Acts 17

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Queen Rania: The Syrian refugees I met are experiencing something worse than death

By Rania Al Abdullah, Washington Post, May 5, 2016:

Rania Al Abdullah is queen of Jordan.

In his novel “Blindness,” José Saramago asks us to imagine a world where one by one, people lose their sight. The epidemic triggers apocalyptic scenes of panic, cruelty, disorder and, eventually, the breakdown of society. It’s fiction, of course. After all, how could the whole world go blind?

That’s what I used to think.

After visiting the Kara Tepe camp in Lesbos, Greece, last week to meet a group of refugees and to support the life-saving work of the International Rescue Committee, I think truth could be stranger than fiction. In fact, I’m thinking about writing a sister novel to Saramago’s.

I’d call it “Deafness.” Because no one’s listening.

No one’s listening to the nearly 155,000 refugees who have risked their lives to reach Greece since the start of this year.

No one’s listening to Maha, the bright and articulate 24-year-old gynecologist trainee from Raqqa, Syria. For nearly four years, she defied the odds–conflict, threats, danger and deprivation–to study and work in a hospital. What kept her there, she told me, was that “the needs were so great, and doctors were in such short supply.” But, in March, finally, so scared that Daesh, also known as ISIS, would target her, she succumbed. She made the heart-rending decision to abandon her vocation and fled through 46 checkpoints guarded by all parties to this conflict–each one a frightening ordeal–to get to the Turkish border. If the fighters–on either side–found out she was a doctor, they likely wouldn’t let her leave, so she sewed her papers into the lining of her jacket to conceal them.

During parts of her trip, this talented young medic, just one year away from qualifying to be a gynecologist, crawled through mud to avoid being caught. “I never felt safe–not for a single minute,” she whispered. “I still don’t.”

“From death to death to death” is how she described the ordeal of those who finally reached the shores of Lesbos. “All we want is a new chance at life.”

No one’s listening to her mother, Sadaa, either. All she wants is to see her sons, who are in Germany. “I got as far as Macedonia,” she said, “but then I came back to get my daughter, and then the borders closed. Now, I’m here with her, my sons are in Germany and my husband is in Syria with his sick father. What do I do? Where do I go?”

And no one’s listening to Fatina, who, just one month ago lost her husband on a boat as they fled Turkey. Eighty refugees were forced at gunpoint onto a dinghy designed for 25. They were crammed in, literally, one on top of the other. Her husband, at the bottom of the pile at the front of the inflatable craft, drowned. The only thought that kept her going on the terrifying sea crossing was that they had escaped Syria and were on their way to start a new life with their four children: 18-month-old twins, a boy and a girl; and two daughters, 4 and 6.

In front of her children, she puts on a brave face. “God gives you power,” she said. But when her children aren’t looking, tears tumble down her cheeks. “I just don’t know what to do,” she sobbed, cradling her head in her hands.

Each and every story is harrowing. Exhaustion hangs, thickly, in the air. I wonder how much more these women can endure. Each and every story is different, but they are linked by the threads of helplessness, hopelessness and despair. These are women at their breaking point.

There’s only one thing worse than enduring brutal conflict, escaping your homeland, leaving behind everything you know, abandoning your dreams, risking your life, becoming destitute, being abused, fragmenting your family, watching your children suffer and losing loved ones, and it is this: arriving at a place you think is a haven only to be told you will likely be sent back. No one is sure when. No one is sure where. That is the definition of futility–and it’s cruel. Because no one chooses to be a refugee. Refugees are refugees because the alternative used to be death. Now, there’s a worse option: a living death. That is what I saw on Lesbos.

Once you hear their stories, you can’t un-hear them. So, maybe it’s not that the world can’t hear. Maybe it’s that it won’t hear. Maybe it’s not an epidemic of deafness, but of selective hearing–we hear only what we want to hear and shield ourselves from what we don’t want to confront.

Because if the world listened to the stories–in Greece, Lebanon, Jordan (the kingdom estimates that there are 1.3 million Syrians now living there) and beyond–more people would feel compelled to act. And small acts of kindness would give way to bigger and bolder ones–which would give way to humane policies to help refugees.

But, first, we all must listen. To the sighs and the screams and the stifled sobs. To the exhausted exhalations and the broken voices. To the prayers and the wretched memories. To the whispered pleas: “All we want is a new chance at life.”

They’re telling us a story–a nonfiction story. Let’s dignify them by listening, and by supporting them in practical and lasting ways.

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Like the Syrians, I fled my country. Here’s what you don’t understand about refugees.

By Mikra Krasniqi, Washington Post, September 18, 2015
Mikra Krasniqi is a writer who lives in Silver Spring, Maryland.

In much of America, Syrian refugees are seen as threats, not victims. In February, the House Homeland Security Committee chairman, Rep. Michael McCaul (R-Tex.), said that accepting Syrians would create a “federally funded jihadi pipeline” to the United States. In June, Rep. Peter King (R-N.Y.) called a hearing on the issue, arguing that terrorist groups might use refugee programs “to carry out attacks in Europe and America.” Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina has agreed, warning that we have to be “very careful about who we let enter this country.”

These arguments fundamentally misunderstand what it means to be a refugee. Abandoning your home during wartime is not a choice or a political opportunity. It’s a survival instinct, a frantic attempt to protect yourself and your children from violence, starvation or death.

This is a reality I know only too well. Sixteen years ago, I was forced to flee Kosovo after the Serbian military burned my house to the ground. That experience taught me just how desperate life can be for a refugee and how important it is to treat asylum seekers with kindness and grace.

The war in Kosovo began in the spring of 1998, but sporadic fighting between the Kosovo Liberation Army and the Serbian military started much earlier. In 1990, Serbia stripped Kosovo Albanians of their political rights and occupied their institutions. In response, the KLA attacked Serbian-run police stations and army bases; eventually they seized control of entire towns.

The Serbians retaliated with a full-scale assault on Kosovo’s ethnic Albanians. Over a couple of months, they forced some 850,000 to flee the country; thousands more were displaced internally. Endless lines of refugees poured over the borders into neighboring Albania and Macedonia. It was one of the largest refugee crises in Europe since World War II.

At the time, I was 22, living in a small Albanian town just southwest of Kosovo’s capital. Though my family and I worried that we’d be targeted by the Serbs, we stayed. We hoped the war would end before it reached us. And besides, we had nowhere else to go.

We wished in vain. One afternoon in early April, I heard gunshots outside my parents’ house. I dashed through the door to find a dozen uniformed, masked men clutching Kalashnikovs. Grenades and knives were strapped to their hips. They summoned me over and marched me, guns to my back, toward the town square. As my friends and neighbors looked on, the soldiers began pummeling my body with the butt ends of their rifles. One pressed the barrel of his gun against my chest.

I prepared to die. But a commotion in the crowd distracted the soldier before he pulled the trigger. He turned away, and in the chaos that ensued, I sneaked behind a brick wall. Eventually, I was found by some neighbors, who carried me to my family.

We loaded ourselves into a trailer with about 25 other people and started out of town with just the clothes on our backs. We had no choice: By late afternoon, hundreds of Serbian soldiers had infiltrated our town of 1,000. They lit homes on fire and shoved people into trucks at gunpoint. Their message to us was clear: Leave.

Over the next 10 hours, our caravan of cars and trucks wove its way through a landscape of torched towns and villages. Serbian paramilitaries set up checkpoints along the road, robbing people of cash, jewelry and whatever other possessions they deemed worthy of pillage. They assaulted drivers, throwing rocks and shooting at them. Once, I watched soldiers drag a screaming woman out of her car. I don’t know what became of her.

When we reached the checkpoint just before the Albanian border, a large group of Serbian paramilitaries was waiting for us. Though it was pitch black, we listened as they approached each vehicle and ordered riders to give up their ID cards, passports, birth certificates–everything that gave us a legal claim to Kosovo.

In Albania, we were welcomed into a 1,400-person refugee camp run by Caritas Spain. For 10 weeks, we slept in overcrowded tents, ate canned food and sweated through scorching temperatures. I became an insomniac and spent hours wandering alone at night through an alien landscape of endless canvas cones. I heard people sobbing in the dark.

Though we were finally out of danger, I felt depressed, heartbroken, hopeless. Without the constant distraction of war, I could obsess over the violence I’d faced, the traumas I’d endured. They haunted me. And I struggled to imagine what tomorrow could possibly hold. As a refugee, I had nothing. Where would I be resettled? What would I do? How would I make a living? My future was entirely in somebody else’s hands. That uncertainty only fueled my despair.

But there were also moments of grace. One day, I took my little cousin to the makeshift hospital inside the camp. Spain’s prime minister, José María Aznar, was visiting. We shook hands, and I expressed my gratitude to him. With moist eyes, he looked up at my bruised face and then embraced me and my cousin. That day, I learned that refugees need more than food, safety and shelter. They need people who will listen to the stories of loss, people who can offer not only kindness but also empathy and understanding.

In July 1999, my family and I returned to Kosovo. I worked for the United Nations for a few years, then moved to the United States on a student visa. I stayed to finish college, earn two graduate degrees and start a family.

The Syrian conflict is much larger and more complex than the crisis in Kosovo. An estimated 9 million Syrians have fled their homes since 2011, when the war began. Of the 4 million refugees registered with the United Nations, 1.6 million are children under the age of 11; 708,000 are 4 years old or younger.

We had other advantages, too. The Kosovars were welcomed to Albania–thousands of families offered to host refugees in their homes. We shared a language and a culture. The Syrians, on the other hand, face angry officials, threats of arrest and a rash of hostility from border countries.

Still, as I watch news reports chronicling asylum seekers’ desperate boat trips to Europe, I’m struck not by our differences but by our similarities. I hear men and women speak of the amorphous trauma of leaving home behind. I see children, smiling and playful despite the chaos of war. And I catch glimmers of hope amid the despair.

The loss of a home is a near-impossible burden. Europeans and Americans must do everything they can to make the Syrian refugees feel safe and welcome.

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Syria’s Kurds Have Little Choice But to Flee

Patrick Cockburn, The Independent, September 3, 2015

The Kurdish enclave of Kobani in north-east Syria, once the home of Aylan al-Kurdi and his family, is largely in ruins after a four-and-a-half month siege by Isis fighters that ended in January. It was one of the greatest victories in Kurdish history, but a Pyrrhic one that saw 300,000 Syrian Kurds flee into Turkey from Kobani, a city just south of the Turkish border, and from the 250 villages surrounding it.

Isis may have been driven back, but the Kobani enclave remains a desolate, ruined and very dangerous place. Some 70 per cent of the city was destroyed in the fighting, by Isis suicide bombs and mortars, Kurdish counter-fire, and US air strikes using 500lb and 2,000lb bombs to smash Isis positions. At one point, Isis set fire to buildings in order to create a smokescreen to protect them from US aircraft.

In most of Kobani city there is no water or electricity supply and retreating Isis forces booby-trapped many of the shattered buildings, so these cannot be easily cleared. The fighting was more intense and went on longer than any recent battle in Iraq or Syria, with Isis–which calls itself Islamic State–losing an estimated 2,000 fighters and the Kurdish YPG militia some 560.

After January there was a trickle of Kurdish refugees returning from Turkey to Kobani because life among the ruins was better than in the squalid refugee camps. But the Syrian Kurdish authorities turned out to be tragically over-confident that Isis was incapable of a counter-attack. On 25 June some 100 Isis fighters disguised in YPG uniforms entered Kobani and a village 20km to the south of the city and began a massacre that left between 223 and 233 men, women and children butchered, along with 35 YPG militiamen. Syrian Kurdish refugees in Turkey will have got the message that it is not safe to go home even when their forces are advancing with the help of US air strikes and Isis is retreating.

Kobani is one of three Kurdish enclaves just south of the Turkish border that have created their own quasi-state since the Syrian army withdrew in the summer of 2012. The 2.2 million Syrian Kurds, long discriminated against by the Damascus government, became a surprisingly important player in the Syrian civil war. Their enclaves, which they call cantons, are in strategically valuable places, controlling crossing points on the 550-mile border with Turkey. Half this frontier is now held by the YPG, denying Isis important crossing points between Turkey and Syria.

The Syrian Kurds have a political significance out of proportion to their numbers in the region’s civil wars. They have achieved a real measure of practical independence in the de facto Kurdish state called Rojava under the control of the Democratic Union Party (PYD) and its well-disciplined YPG militia. Since last October, the YPG has been the only effective ground force in Syria co-operating with US airpower against Isis. But the enhanced influence of the Syrian Kurds has made them a target for their many enemies. Turkey has been dismayed at finding what amounts to a Kurdish statelet controlling 250 miles of its southern frontier. Worse, the PYD and the YPG are the Syrian branch of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK), a powerful guerrilla organisation that has been fighting the Turkish army since 1984.

This summer, Rojava, a fertile wedge of territory full of wheat fields and dotted with oil industry “nodding donkeys”, looked idyllic and peaceful compared with the rest of Syria. But for Syrian Kurds the future is full of menaces in the shape of a hostile Turkey to the north and Isis to the south. Moreover, any potential winner of the civil war in Syria may swiftly move to extinguish the Kurdish independent entity. In the face of these dangers, it is no wonder that Syrian Kurds will take any risk to escape to Europe or anywhere else where they might find safety.

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UN Agency Forced to Cut Food Aid to 229,000 Syrian Refugees

Associated Press, Sept. 4, 2015

AMMAN, Jordan–The cash-strapped World Food Program has had to drop one-third of Syrian refugees from its food voucher program in Middle Eastern host countries this year, including 229,000 in Jordan who stopped receiving food aid in September, a spokeswoman said Friday.

The sharp cutbacks come at a time when growing numbers of desperate Syrians who initially found refuge in neighboring countries are trying to reach Europe. Since 2011, more than 4 million Syrians fled their country’s civil war, most settling in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Iraq and Egypt.

Abeer Etefa, a WFP regional spokeswoman, said the world must do more to support refugees in the regional host countries or face increasing migration.

“This is a crisis that has been brewing in the region for five years,” she said. “Now it is getting the attention of the world because it moved one step further from the region to Europe. We have to help people where they are or they will move.”

The U.N. agency has been distributing food vouchers to refugees since the beginning of the Syria crisis, but is facing increasing funding gaps. “Since the beginning of this operation, it has been hand to mouth,” said Etefa. “It is nerve-wracking for the refugees and the staff.”

She said the agency needs $236 million to keep the program–even in its scaled-back version–funded through November. No major donors have come forward, she said.

Since the beginning of the year, the agency reduced the number of voucher recipients in the regional host countries from 2.1 million to around 1.4 million and sharply reduced the value of the vouchers. The maximum is now $14 per person per month for urban refugees in Lebanon and Jordan.

Etefa said the agency tries to give priority to the most vulnerable refugees, including single mothers.

This month, refugees in Jordan faced the biggest cuts.

Jordan hosts about 630,000 Syrian refugees, including more than half a million in communities and the rest in camps. As of September, 229,000 of 440,000 urban refugees who had been receiving some food aid lost their benefits, Etefa said. Those living in the camps continue to receive food vouchers.

With conditions in the host countries worsening, thousands of Syrian refugees have been trying to reach Europe, many attempting treacherous sea voyages.

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Image of Drowned Syrian, Aylan Kurdi, 3, Brings Migrant Crisis Into Focus

By Anne Barnard and Karam Shoumali, NY Times, Sept. 3, 2015

ISTANBUL–The smugglers had promised Abdullah Kurdi a motorboat for the trip from Turkey to Greece, a step on the way to a new life in Canada. Instead, they showed up with a 15-foot rubber raft that flipped in high waves, dumping Mr. Kurdi, his wife and their two small sons into the sea.

Mr. Kurdi tried to keep the boys, Aylan and Ghalib, afloat, but one died as he pushed the other to his wife, Rehan, pleading, “Just keep his head above the water!”

Only Mr. Kurdi, 40, survived.

“Now I don’t want anything,” he said a day later, on Thursday, from Mugla, Turkey, after filling out forms at a morgue to claim the bodies of his family. “Even if you give me all the countries in the world, I don’t want them. What was precious is gone.”

It is an image of his youngest son, a lifeless child in a red shirt and dark shorts face down on a Turkish beach, that appears to have galvanized public attention to a crisis that has been building for years. Once again, it is not the sheer size of the catastrophe–millions upon millions forced by war and desperation to leave their homes–but a single tragedy that has clarified the moment. It was 3-year-old Aylan, his round cheek pressed to the sand as if he were sleeping, except for the waves lapping his face.

Rocketing across the world on social media, the photograph has forced Western nations to confront the consequence of a collective failure to help migrants fleeing the Middle East and Africa to Europe in search of hope, opportunity and safety. Aylan, perhaps more even than the anonymous, decomposing corpses found in the back of a truck in Austria that shocked Europe last week, has personalized the tragedy facing the 11 million Syrians displaced by more than four years of war.

The case of this young boy’s doomed journey has landed as a political bombshell across the Middle East and Europe, and even countries as far away as Canada, which has up to now not been a prominent player in the Syria crisis. Canadian officials were under intense pressure to explain why the Kurdi family was unable to get permission to immigrate legally, despite having relatives there who were willing to support and employ them. So far, the government has only cited incomplete documents, an explanation that has done little to quiet the outrage at home and abroad.

Mr. Kurdi, a Syrian Kurdish barber, and his brother Mohammad wanted to immigrate under the sponsorship of their sister, Tima Kurdi, 43, who lives in a suburb of Vancouver, British Columbia. She had invited Mr. Kurdi to live in her basement with his family and work in her hair salon.

“They can work with me, doing hair, I can find them a job, and then when they are financially O.K., they can move out and be their own,” she said by phone on Thursday.

Mr. Kurdi, too, said his sister had told Canadian authorities that she would be “responsible for our expenses,” but that “they didn’t agree.”

In fact, Ms. Kurdi said, she had applied at first only for Mohammad’s family, teaming up with friends and relatives to make bank deposits to prove she could support the family.

But in June, she said, Mohammad’s application was rejected for lack of a required document proving he had refugee status. But under Turkish refugee policies, such documents are nearly impossible for Syrians to come by. In any case, the experience persuaded the family that neither brother would ever get a Canadian visa.

That, Ms. Kurdi said, was when she offered to help her brothers finance the boat trip–something, she said through tears, “I really regret.”

Now, she said, “All what I really need is to stop the war. That’s all. I think the whole world has to step in and help those Syrian people. They are human beings.”

Aylan was named after a cousin, Ms. Kurdi’s son Alan, she said. She had never met Aylan or his brother Ghalib, 5, but saw and talked to them often on video chat. Aylan’s father grew up in Damascus, the Syrian capital, in the neighborhood of Rukineddine, but was originally from the Kurdish city of Kobani near the Turkish border. A year or so ago, he said in a telephone interview, he moved his family to Kobani because of increasing strains in Damascus. But he said it was not safe there either, with the Islamic State increasingly attacking the area.

The family eventually moved to Istanbul, but it was difficult for Mr. Kurdi to support himself, and he had to borrow money from his sister for rent.

Ms. Kurdi turned to her local member of Parliament, Fin Donnelly, who hand-delivered a letter appealing for help to Chris Alexander, the citizenship and immigration minister.

“We waited and waited, and we didn’t have any action,” he said.

In Canada, a country that has long prided itself on openness to refugees but has shifted that policy under a conservative government, this amounts to a campaign issue; Mr. Alexander had promised to admit 10,000 refugees from Syria, just over 1,000 had arrived by late August, and opposition parties like Mr. Donnelly’s say more should be welcomed. On Thursday, Mr. Alexander rushed back from the campaign trail to Ottawa, the capital, to deal with the family’s case, declaring that it “broke hearts around the world.”

Mr. Kurdi said he tried several times to cross to Europe on his own. He almost drowned trying to cross the river at Edirne, in Turkey, he said, “and once from the borders with Bulgaria and I got caught and sent back.”

Then he paid 4,000 euros, about $4,450, for the sea crossing–paying extra supposedly to avoid using a rubber raft.

“Of course we were afraid of drowning,” he said, “but the Turkish smuggler said it was going to be a yacht.”

Mr. Kurdi said the family had life jackets that were lost in the accident.

The voyage started in the middle of the night, around 3 a.m. in five-foot seas, he said. It is the season of the relentless Meltemi winds, when the waves can be 15 feet high.

Choking back emotion as he spoke, Mr. Kurdi described how he had flailed about while trying to find his children as his wife held on to the capsized boat.

“I started pushing them up to the surface so they could breathe,” he said. “I had to shift from one to another. I think we were in the water for three hours trying to survive.”

He watched helplessly as one exhausted child drowned, spitting up a white liquid, he said, then pushed the other toward the mother, “so he could at least keep his head up.”

Mr. Kurdi then apologized, saying he could no longer speak, and ended the conversation with one parting message.

“What I really want now is for the smuggling to stop, and to find a solution for those people who are paying the blood of their hearts just to leave,” he said.

“Yesterday I went to one of the smuggling points and told people trying to get smuggled at least not to take their kids on these boats. I told them my story, and some of them changed their minds.”

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