- A Black Pope for Rome - 22.10.2003
- Stay or Die :Analysis and memory of refugees - 26.06.2003
- Noen tanker fra en freelans forfatter som jobber i Utrop - 26.05.2003
The memory is a vast lake of remembrances; where sometimes disrupts big waves of thought. In the last of June 20th, International Days of the Refugee. The entire world will remember the humanitarian holocaust of this century in Afghanistan, in Iraq, Palestine, or in the Great-Lakes Region in East-Africa
To abandon goods and relatives, to desert towns and cities, to be far from your country that have seen you once born; in search of the unknown, married to grief, pity and chronicle anxiety. That a Common experience for all refugees, wherever they come from.
To struggle against famine or thirst, to cover his nudity with a small piece of clothe, to look for small basic assistance.
Yes! To walk, from hills to valleys, to cross-rivers and lakes, borders and countries; sometimes continents in search of safety and quietness. To leave behind damages, desolation and perdition.
The clock rings. Announces of death, disappearances and injuries reach us. The thunder of canons, we hear. In less than a quarter maybe that could be my end too. One group passes, a second group
Decided, we take with us little dishes, clothes, and some foods. The most courageous have decided to stays. But they have paid for their life. Messengers of death break in and advance toward civilians, sure to capture their preys.
You have no more times to take your diploma, your beautiful suit, and your photos souvenir. All buried in the garbage of the past. Call rather the children. The oldest is missing. The youngest one is sick. I will care him on my shoulders. Behind the woman silently tears.
Hours and days walking. The youngest on my shoulders claim food and has to drink. Tree more and endless days to cross the borders and win safety. No foods, no drink but we cannot stop and no mistake must be done. Always forward, breathless, we are only human beings.
That is an every day life of a refugee in flight. It is not difficult to define him. He is a man or a woman in search of peace. Warriors or adepts of brutality have violated his basic rights. Therefore he must find asylum somewhere else.
A refugee is a human being too. To become refugee, he was constrained to choose between to stay or die and to leave or suffer. Well every human would choose to leave question of survival. But nevertheless the most audacious man chooses to stay. And effectively he dies or suffers from humiliation or misery. Of course there are those who could not run, unfortunately most victims are again women and children. They are subjected to the evil consequences of men inhumanity. Nevertheless even in their new welcomed land. Refugees do not yet recover relieve or quietness. Victims of stereotypes such as criminalization, segregations, considered as less human.
A refugee is a person who has mental and physical capacities when he is treated with dignity. We must call him by his real name. Morally being refugee is not in itself an identity. Even without conflicts or political instabilities, all men or women can be brought to leave, and abandon his dearest one behind him. And in a spiritual way, notice that all, we are refugees on this earth since; we all pass by leaving this world behind.
Being a human being, a refuge must be considered equally as his fellow human brothers and sisters. As the first article of the Universal Declaration of the Human Rights specifies it: « All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and in rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience, and must act towards one to another in a spirit of brotherhood.»
None has decided to become a refugee. A refugee needs integration in his new country rather than rejection. He cannot be able to fulfil himself if his new society is not totally implicated in this process of integration. That will allow him at the end to become a more interested citizen participating in the well being of his new community.
