Showing posts with label refugees. Show all posts
Showing posts with label refugees. Show all posts
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Witness - Witness - Shukri: A New Life
hirty-one-year old Shukri left her four children in Somalia in 2008, walked across North Africa and risked a hazardous raft trip across the Mediterranean to seek a better life in Europe.
She is one of thousands of such migrants who attempt the journey each year and although she has been given refugee status in Italy her future still looks bleak.
Filmmaker Rossella Schillaci followed Shukri and in the following account describes the realities of her life - and those of thousands of others.
In the winter of 2008, over 400 Somali and Sudanese refugees squatted in an abandoned building that had once housed a medical clinic in downtown Turin, northern Italy.
The Italian government's indifference towards refugees left them with little alternative. Once refugees are issued a sojourn permit, they are left to fend for themselves, with just a few receiving temporary housing and education. Many rely on Catholic volunteer relief associations for help, but these cannot provide housing and the waiting lists for dormitories seem endless.
Many refugees live and sleep on the streets. In larger cities, they squat in old buildings or abandoned factories, enduring overcrowded and grim living conditions often without water or electricity.
A better life
Like Shukri, Hindiyo left her family behind in Somalia
Shukri lives on the second floor of the abandoned medical clinic in Turin. There is no heating, one water tap for every 80 people, and the squatters rely on local charities for food.
Like her housemates, she arrived in Italy after crossing the Sahara and the Mediterranean with the dream of building a better life in Europe.
She decided to make the dangerous journey to escape war-torn Somalia, where life seemed impossible.
So in February 2008, after divorcing her husband, Shukri left her four children with her mother and headed to Ethiopia.
She eventually travelled to Italy by boat - or as she describes it, by balloon; a rubber raft so worn out that it could be punctured by a fingernail. She knew the journey would be a matter of life and death and the vastness of the sea scared her when she was about to embark in Tripoli. But still she had to go.
When she was in Somalia she believed - like many others - that Italy was one of the most beautiful places in the world. She had heard stories of other Somali women finding work there that had enabled them to support their families back home and even to buy houses.
But soon after arriving she realised that life in Italy was not as she had imagined. She had wanted to work and be independent so that she could build a decent life that would enable her to support her family. Instead she was forced to live on subsidies.
She learned Italian and trained as a care-giver because she had been told that it would be easy to find work caring for the elderly or disabled.
Shortly after arriving in Turin, Shukri became friends with Hindiyo, another Somali woman who had also left her family behind. They became like sisters, living together and sharing everything.
Hindiyo often thought about her hungry children and sick parents back in Somalia and felt guilty that she had not been able to send money home as she promised. The guilt was so bad that she often could not sleep at night.
Against the odds
Shukri expected it to be much easier to start a new life in Italy
Now, after two years little has changed. 'Emergency' measures rather than longer-term solutions are still employed to deal with the refugees.
Many refugees have "escaped" Italy in search of a better life in other European countries, although they know that if the authorities elsewhere discover that their fingerprints were taken in Italy they will be sent back.
After having temporary jobs as caregivers in a small mountain village where they were the only Muslims, Shukri and Hindiyo are again without work.
When they were working they had been able to send money home but that has stopped now. Their families are disappointed and find it hard to believe that life in Italy could really be so hard.
But Shukri and Hindiyo are not giving up. They are still looking for work and hoping to build better lives. Shukri has realised that she cannot expect to get an office job, but now it is hard to get even a caregiver job as people are asking for driving licenses and a car.
With the ongoing war in Somalia, Shukri doubts that she will ever return and hopes to find a permanent job that will help her save her children and mother.
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Rape in Iraq
Rape’s vast toll in Iraq war remains largely ignored
Author: Wameeth (Iraq), Mideast Youth
This is a report by Anna Badkhen, a correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, who highlights the sort of news that has too often gone unreported. I felt it was important to also share here for the sake of awareness:
Many rape victims have escaped to Jordan but still don’t have access to treatment and counseling.
AMMAN, JORDAN - As though recoiling from her own memories, Khalida shrank deeper into her faded armchair with each sentence she told: of how gunmen apparently working for Iraq’s Interior Ministry kidnapped her, beat and raped her; of how they discarded her on a Baghdad sidewalk.
But her suffering did not end when she fled Iraq and became a refugee in Jordan’s capital, Amman. When Khalida’s husband learned that she had been raped, he abandoned her and their two young sons.
Rumors spread fast in Amman; soon, everyone on her block knew that she was without a man in the house. Last month, her Jordanian neighbor barged into her apartment and attempted to rape her.
Khalida never reported the incident. Like tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, she does not have a permit to live or work here, and she is afraid that if she turns to authorities for help she will get deported. So instead of seeking punishment for her assailant, she latched the flimsy metal door of her apartment and stopped going outside.
Her story sheds light on a problem that is little researched, poorly understood, and largely ignored: Iraqi rape victims who now live in Jordan illegally and without protection. Sexual assault is heavily stigmatized in the Middle East, and victims are often afraid to talk about it to anyone, fearing that their families will abandon them. And their shaky status in Jordan leaves them afraid to seek help and vulnerable to new assaults and abuse. They fear persecution by Jordanian immigration authorities almost as much as they fear returning to Iraq.
“The lack of legal status does lead to these sorts of protection issues [and] puts them in very exploitative situations,” says Imran Riza, who heads the mission in Jordan of the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the main international agency that assists Iraqis in Jordan. Women like Khalida, he says, “are certainly vulnerable, and much more vulnerable than others.”
Rape is a common weapon of any war; no one knows how many Iraqi women have been raped since the war began in 2003. Most crimes against women “are not reported because of stigma, fear of retaliation, or lack of confidence in the police,” MADRE, an international women’s rights group, wrote in its 2007 report about violence against women in Iraq. Some women, like Khalida, are raped by Iraqi security forces. A 2005 report published by the Iraqi National Association for Human Rights found that women held in Interior Ministry detention centers endure “systematic rape by the investigators.”
A handful of organizations are working to help rape victims in Iraq. MADRE, together with the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, operates several shelters and safe houses in Baghdad for Iraqi rape victims, where the women have access to healthcare and counseling.
But militias often target women’s rights advocates in Iraq, so these facilities are “a clandestine network,” operated by “mostly somebody who at a great risk to themselves has opened a room for these victims,” says Yifat Susskind, MADRE’s communications director. The shelters have helped several thousand Iraqi women since 2003. Most rape victims learn about the shelters from other women.
Documenting sexual assault in Iraq by international researchers remains complicated because of widespread violence. “There’s been a security issue, so we haven’t been able to get people on the ground to look at the issue for a long time,” says Marianne Mollmann, who leads women’s rights advocacy at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which published its last report about rape in Iraq in 2003.
Similarly, no one has tried to estimate how many Iraqi refugees have been raped while in Iraq or in Jordan, says Mohamad Habashneh, a Jordanian psychiatrist who works with Iraqi rape victims.
Mr. Habashneh has treated approximately 40 Iraqi rape victims for clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. But he estimates that they are just a fraction of Iraqi refugees who had been raped.
Psychiatrists like Habashneh charge between $25 and $40 per visit, too expensive for most Iraqi refugees, who, like Khalida, live hand-to-mouth on monthly handouts of about $100 from international agencies.
Many victims are afraid to go outside or travel to a clinic out of fear of being detained by Jordanian authorities.
To help these women, women’s rights organizations in Jordan must coordinate with larger agencies, such as UNHCR, to provide care and programs that would help the victims earn money “because rape survivors are alienated from their family and therefore have no way to sustain themselves,” Ms. Susskind says.
But so far, these resources are not available for most Iraqi rape victims in Jordan. There are no support groups, no counselors, no hot lines, an no one to soothe Khalida when she has flashbacks that make her relive the day when assailants dressed in police uniforms arrived at the Oil Ministry where she worked and said they were taking her in for questioning.
She did not tell her husband that she had been raped but he figured it out. Now, Khalida does not blame him for going away, or for leaving her so vulnerable to men who wish to prey on her.
“I have his phone number,” she says, sobbing quietly. “I dial it sometimes for the kids to talk to their father. Sometimes, because I love him, I like to hear his voice. But when I say ‘hello’ he hangs up.”
Author: Wameeth (Iraq), Mideast Youth
This is a report by Anna Badkhen, a correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor, who highlights the sort of news that has too often gone unreported. I felt it was important to also share here for the sake of awareness:
Many rape victims have escaped to Jordan but still don’t have access to treatment and counseling.
AMMAN, JORDAN - As though recoiling from her own memories, Khalida shrank deeper into her faded armchair with each sentence she told: of how gunmen apparently working for Iraq’s Interior Ministry kidnapped her, beat and raped her; of how they discarded her on a Baghdad sidewalk.
But her suffering did not end when she fled Iraq and became a refugee in Jordan’s capital, Amman. When Khalida’s husband learned that she had been raped, he abandoned her and their two young sons.
Rumors spread fast in Amman; soon, everyone on her block knew that she was without a man in the house. Last month, her Jordanian neighbor barged into her apartment and attempted to rape her.
Khalida never reported the incident. Like tens of thousands of Iraqi refugees in Jordan, she does not have a permit to live or work here, and she is afraid that if she turns to authorities for help she will get deported. So instead of seeking punishment for her assailant, she latched the flimsy metal door of her apartment and stopped going outside.
Her story sheds light on a problem that is little researched, poorly understood, and largely ignored: Iraqi rape victims who now live in Jordan illegally and without protection. Sexual assault is heavily stigmatized in the Middle East, and victims are often afraid to talk about it to anyone, fearing that their families will abandon them. And their shaky status in Jordan leaves them afraid to seek help and vulnerable to new assaults and abuse. They fear persecution by Jordanian immigration authorities almost as much as they fear returning to Iraq.
“The lack of legal status does lead to these sorts of protection issues [and] puts them in very exploitative situations,” says Imran Riza, who heads the mission in Jordan of the United Nations’ High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the main international agency that assists Iraqis in Jordan. Women like Khalida, he says, “are certainly vulnerable, and much more vulnerable than others.”
Rape is a common weapon of any war; no one knows how many Iraqi women have been raped since the war began in 2003. Most crimes against women “are not reported because of stigma, fear of retaliation, or lack of confidence in the police,” MADRE, an international women’s rights group, wrote in its 2007 report about violence against women in Iraq. Some women, like Khalida, are raped by Iraqi security forces. A 2005 report published by the Iraqi National Association for Human Rights found that women held in Interior Ministry detention centers endure “systematic rape by the investigators.”
A handful of organizations are working to help rape victims in Iraq. MADRE, together with the Organization of Women’s Freedom in Iraq, operates several shelters and safe houses in Baghdad for Iraqi rape victims, where the women have access to healthcare and counseling.
But militias often target women’s rights advocates in Iraq, so these facilities are “a clandestine network,” operated by “mostly somebody who at a great risk to themselves has opened a room for these victims,” says Yifat Susskind, MADRE’s communications director. The shelters have helped several thousand Iraqi women since 2003. Most rape victims learn about the shelters from other women.
Documenting sexual assault in Iraq by international researchers remains complicated because of widespread violence. “There’s been a security issue, so we haven’t been able to get people on the ground to look at the issue for a long time,” says Marianne Mollmann, who leads women’s rights advocacy at the New York-based Human Rights Watch, which published its last report about rape in Iraq in 2003.
Similarly, no one has tried to estimate how many Iraqi refugees have been raped while in Iraq or in Jordan, says Mohamad Habashneh, a Jordanian psychiatrist who works with Iraqi rape victims.
Mr. Habashneh has treated approximately 40 Iraqi rape victims for clinical depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. But he estimates that they are just a fraction of Iraqi refugees who had been raped.
Psychiatrists like Habashneh charge between $25 and $40 per visit, too expensive for most Iraqi refugees, who, like Khalida, live hand-to-mouth on monthly handouts of about $100 from international agencies.
Many victims are afraid to go outside or travel to a clinic out of fear of being detained by Jordanian authorities.
To help these women, women’s rights organizations in Jordan must coordinate with larger agencies, such as UNHCR, to provide care and programs that would help the victims earn money “because rape survivors are alienated from their family and therefore have no way to sustain themselves,” Ms. Susskind says.
But so far, these resources are not available for most Iraqi rape victims in Jordan. There are no support groups, no counselors, no hot lines, an no one to soothe Khalida when she has flashbacks that make her relive the day when assailants dressed in police uniforms arrived at the Oil Ministry where she worked and said they were taking her in for questioning.
She did not tell her husband that she had been raped but he figured it out. Now, Khalida does not blame him for going away, or for leaving her so vulnerable to men who wish to prey on her.
“I have his phone number,” she says, sobbing quietly. “I dial it sometimes for the kids to talk to their father. Sometimes, because I love him, I like to hear his voice. But when I say ‘hello’ he hangs up.”
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
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