In the winter of 1993 my brother and I arrived in the Netherlands from Syria. Our escape story had begun in Kuwait two years earlier, when Saddam Hussein invaded the country with his army. Via Jordan and Syria we eventually reached the Netherlands where we hoped our flight would end. On the KLM plane from Damascus, my brother and I made a drastic and necessary decision that night.
The attacked Kuwait didn’t want us anymore. And we knew very well that we could not return to Liberia, our country of origin, where a bloody war was raging. Our future was uncertain, our whole existence was in jeopardy. To guarantee our stay in the country of arrival, the Netherlands, an extraordinary act was needed.
About the author
Vamba Sherif is a writer.
We decided to destroy the documents with which we could confirm our identities, in this case our Liberian passports.
To flee is to surrender yourself to the unknown; expose you to the danger without thinking. The destination offers no certainty. Nothing is sure. But the refugee takes the plunge anyway. Fleeing is a form of faith.
Shaking hands
I still remember to this day how I held the two passports in my hands, how I got up from my chair and went to the bathroom. There was fear of the consequences of my actions, but greater was the firm conviction that I must do this act. In that cramped narrow space, with trembling hands I tore up the documents on the basis of which we could be expelled from the country if our asylum application was not granted in the Netherlands. We had to avoid being sent back to Liberia at all costs. We had been through enough. We knew how as a refugee you can slowly lose your humanity.
Two years earlier, we were able to leave Kuwait in the middle of the night by paying exorbitant amounts to smugglers. They took us to the border with Iraq and Jordan on a bus used for freight transport. We then fled to Amman with another bus. But we didn’t get there. We were dumped in one of the largest refugee camps in the world, situated in a no man’s land. There I witnessed the worst that can happen to man: hunger, despair, death, misery. With that in mind, we decided to destroy our passports.
We didn’t want to run anymore. We were tired of running. The Netherlands had to be our final destination.
mouth of a shark
‘No one leaves home unless home is a shark’s mouth,’ sang the Somali poet Warisan Shire, once a refugee himself. “No one leaves home unless home is chasing you.” The home my brother and I had left, Liberia and Kuwait, had become the mouth of a shark. What was once home now meant death.
I had to think about all that when I saw the debacle last week that the refugee problem in Ter Apel has become. I saw my brother and myself as I watched the refugees knocking on the Dutch door, hoping for the security that had been taken from them in their country of origin. Every refugee in Ter Apel and elsewhere in the country has a story, carries a past that is worse than that of my brother and I.
Last straw
It is a feeling that goes beyond pain when a person has pinned his whole existence on one hope, on a dream, on a belief and sees it go up in smoke. It is indescribable when someone has seen family and loved ones die, hopes to find safety in us and comes to realize that we cannot provide that safety. We should be ashamed if we deprive him or her of the belief in a better life, that last straw.
The Netherlands must conduct a humane refugee policy. Instead of seeing refugees as a problem, we need to listen to their stories and gain their trust. Instead of unfolding a list of rules and duties for them, the first task is to put them at ease, to give them a sense of security. You can’t expect circumstances in which you wouldn’t want to spend days or weeks yourself to bring out the best in a person. Only if you approach them with respect and from person to person, refugees are able to surprise and reward us with their talents.
A person is a miracle. Let’s not forget that a refugee is a human being.