Playing today – Argentina, Bosnia

Fittingly for the last of my series of World Cup linked refugee stories, both of today’s have a football theme.

Argentina

Bayan Mahmud fled ethnic violence in the north of Ghana, stowing away on a ship leaving Cape Coast, and ending up in Argentina.  He was lucky, finding kindness from a member of the ship’s crew, and then from strangers who helped him get to Buenos Aires, and to get refugee status.  Now, he’s on the Boca Juniors youth football team and hopes to one day be the first black player in the Argentine national team.  Maybe next time…

Bosnia & Hercegovina

Dejan Cokorilo’s story of leaving Sarajevo for safety in Sweden – ‘The Civil War kidnapped our childhood. Our city was under siege, but somehow my parents found a way out. We found peace and freedom in a new country, far away from home.’

Meanwhile the Bosnian national team includes a number of players who at least temporarily fled their homes during the war – amongst them Miralem Pjanic, Edin Dzeko, Asmir Begović, Senad Lulic, Haris Medunjanin.

There’s an actual Refugee World Cup, in Manchester later this month.  Details here:

http://www.manchestercommunitycentral.org/event/refugee-world-cup-2014-football-tournament/2014-06-29t084500

and another took place in Sweden just before Rio as well:

http://frenchfootballweekly.com/2014/06/11/forget-brazil-2014-the-alternative-world-cup/

Playing today: Italy, Costa Rica, Honduras, Ecuador, Switzerland, France

Italy

The Italian island of Lampedusa is best known for being the primary European entry point for migrants, mainly coming from Africa.  Last autumn, around 36o migrants died in the seas around the island, and over 30 000 have been rescued by Mare Nostrum.  And the boats keep on setting sail, crammed with desperate people.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/02/europe-refugee-crisis-un-africa-processing-centres

Costa Rica

One of the most peaceful and stable countries in the region, Costa Rica hosts many refugees, mainly from Colombia and Nicaragua.  Costa Rica took in many refugees from a range of other Latin American countries fleeing civil wars and dictatorships during the 1970s and 1980s.

Honduras

In recent years, growing numbers of people have sought asylum in Mexico, Canada and the United States, citing the threat of gang violence and forced recruitment in countries such as Guatemala, El Salvador and Honduras.

‘A 17-year-old boy who fled Honduras said, “My grandmother is the one who told me to leave. She said: ‘If you don’t join, the gang will shoot you. If you do, the rival gang will shoot you, or the cops. But if you leave, no one will shoot you.'”‘

Ecuador

Jason Tanner reports on a photographic assignment for UNHCR on the Ecuador-Colombia border:

‘Over the course of four weeks I would be ferried, often at short notice and sometimes covertly, to meet with and photograph refugees fleeing persecution and violence from neighbouring Colombia. This fearful frontier town in Ecuador is often the first stepping off point for refugees seeking safety and security. Unfortunately, for many refugees, the reach of those responsible for the violence often extends deep beyond the porous borders of Latin America.’

Switzerland

Switzerland’s cherished neutrality during the Second World War was in part protected by rigorous border controls.  Many refugees were turned back, including at least 20 000 Jews.  Those who helped people to cross the border were subject to criminal proceedings, and it is only very recently that some of the sentences handed out to people who challenged the restrictions to smuggle desperate people across the frontier have been given pardons.   See Aimée Stitelmann’s story here.

France

In September 1940, plans were being developed to enable Jewish children to get special visas to leave for the US.   The plan was intended for children under 13, but older children (up to 16) were eligible to accompany their younger brothers and sisters.   In March 1941, the OSE  (Oeuvre de Secours aux Enfants) at Montpellier sent a list of 500 children held in camps who were candidates for emigration.  These children were released from the camps, and brought by OSE to await emigration, along with children who had been helped by the Rothschild Foundation, Secours Suisse and the AFSC.   The first convoy of 101 children left Marseille in May 1941.   The train stopped briefly at Oloron station, just by the Gurs camp, so that children could say goodbye to their parents.  This was traumatic for all, and OSE did not continue with this practice.   From France, the children travelled through Spain to Portugal, stayed for around a week whilst they received medical care and were vaccinated.  At Lisbon, they boarded the SS Mouzinho, which took to the sea on 10 June 1941.  They disembarked in New York where they were met and looked after by the U.S. Committee for the Care of European Children.  The OSE went on to organise an underground network to smuggle children out of France.

Rio Mavuba, a member of the French World Cup squad, was born on board a boat in international waters during the Angolan Civil War, and later stated that his birth certificate did not have a nationality on it, reading only “born at sea”.   He received French nationality in September 2004.

Colombia, Ivory Coast, Uruguay, England, Japan, Greece

Colombia has one of the world’s largest populations of displaced people – somewhere between 2.6 and 4.3 million – due to ongoing armed conflict in the region.

See here for information on the photo project, Land of Light, undertaken by UNHCR Colombia and the Colombian photographer Santiago Escobar Jaramillo, which was realized through a series of  workshops with displaced communities.

Georgina’s story

Ivory Coast

Bere Tassoumane’s journey from stateless person to state official.

Some who left Liberia for safety in Ivory Coast during its civil war later returned the hospitality when Ivory Coast went through the same terrible trauma.  “During the Liberian war, refugees who left from Liberia to Ivory Coast stopped with people who also fled this Ivorian war,” Kolubah added.  “So those who were hosted as Liberian refugees in Ivory Coast do not want their host to go to the camp. They want them to stay with them no matter what it is.”

Uruguay

Uruguay’s president has agreed to take 100 Syrian child refugees.  The complexities of refugee politics are clear from this article – both in terms of the contribution relative to that of other nations, and to the problem as a whole, but also in terms of the way domestic politicians respond to even this ‘drop in the ocean’.

England

Refugee Action tells the stories of some of the refugees they work with, and the struggles they face in the UK.

I am, probably, more critical of my own country’s response on refugee and asylum issues, than of most others.  I expect more, I hope for more.  And there is so much to be disappointed, or angry, about.  I had to make a mental readjustment, however, talking to a taxi driver yesterday – father from Djibouti, mother from Britain, born in Dubai, and in no doubt at all that this was the place to be, a generous and welcoming society.  I found myself giving ground, acknowledging, I hope not too grudgingly, that it was good, even if I believed it could be better.   He’d have passed Tebbitt’s cricket test too, with a higher score than me…

Japan

Even a wealthy, peaceful nation, which tends not to persecute its citizens, can encounter a refugee crisis as the result of natural disaster.  The tsunami in 2011 left many homeless and facing desperate conditions.   ‘Freezing winds, hail storms and thick snow are the latest threats to 430,000 beleaguered survivors of northern Japan‘s week-long cascade of disasters. After a massive earthquake, devastating tsunami and nuclear crisis, many people made homeless are now facing icy weather, with temperatures forecast to plunge to –5C (23F).’ (Guardian, March 2011).

Greece

Syrian refugee Hussein finds safety in Greece.

In 1923, Greeks from Asia Minor were evacuated or relocated in Greece following the Convention Concerning the Exchange of Greek and Turkish Populations signed in Lausanne.  This followed a period of brutal massacres and ‘ethnic cleansing’ instigated by the government of the Ottoman Empire.  The first census after the evacuations showed the number of Greeks of Asia Minor origin to be 1,164,267. Descendants of the refugees took part in the great Greek migrations of the interwar period, as well as the large immigrations to the United States, Australia and Germany in the 1960s-1970s. Today, about 40% of the population of Greece claims full or partial descent from the Asia Minor refugees; as does an almost equal percentage of diasporan Greeks.

Playing today – Brazil, Belgium, Mexico, Algeria, Russia and South Korea

Belgium‘s invasion in two successive World Wars led to an influx of refugees into the UK. A local newspaper reported in 1916 on the celebration in Manchester of the Belgian Day of Independence,when ‘over 700 refugees were entertained by the Co-operative Wholesale Society. They had come from various parts of Manchester and the surrounding industrial towns’.  The Bishop of Salford ‘alluded to the trials through which the refugees had passed, and remarked that that day they had shown to the British race how strongly united they were. He assured them that the feelings of the English people for what the Belgians had done in the great European struggle would be always as they were to-day’.

Algeria is ‘home’ to a significant number of Sahwari refugees from Western Sahara.  Fadala was born in the refugee camps there and now works as a community outreach officer, particularly with young people in the camps:

I am working with Solidaridad Internacional as a community outreach worker. I am in charge of awareness raising efforts about the use of water. When I arrived here, it was almost a cultural shock. The situation in the camps is extremely difficult. Especially for the youth. There are no opportunities here. If there were no NGOs here, many youths would be out of jobs and would not be able to support their families.

If I did not find this job, I would have been at home. We cannot keep on waiting to receive humanitarian assistance without doing anything. Until when? The humanitarian assistance will not last forever.

I am very concerned about the dependency of Sahrawis to foreign aid and I would like to be a motor for a change in my community. My dream is to work one day as a journalist, to be able to convey the difficult life conditions my people are going through.

Brazil was the first country in Latin America to offer humanitarian visas to Syrian refugees.

Mexico – Martin Gottwald, UNHCR Deputy Representative in Colombia, shares his story for World Refugee Day here.

Russia – after the Revolution, from 1917-22, more than a million people left Russia.  Refugees moved eastward to Manchuria and China, via Vladivostok to Canada and the US, and westward, via the Balkans and the Baltic states, to Western Europe, particularly France.   Irene Nemirovsky and her family were amongst those who took refuge in France.  Irene, who became a highly successful writer, was still there when France was occupied by the Nazis.  As  a Jew, she was deported to Auschwitz where she was murdered, along with her husband, in 1942.  Her final, unfinished book, Suite Francaise, was published in 2006, after her surviving children read the manuscript and realised its importance. 

South Korea – Hungarian journalist Csaba Lukács tells his story of Soon-Sil Lee, a North Korean refugee