Refugees in Transit

Their flight arrived at noon at JFK airport. After our first 2 hours of anxiously waiting with welcome signs in Arabic that drew suspicious glances from around the terminal, we went into the office and asked if it was possible that any passengers from the flight remained in immigration.

“I’m waiting for two Iraqi refugees,” I said. The woman behind the desk laughed

cynically.

“Go buy yourself a cup of coffee and relax. It’s gonna be a while.”

It took the U.S. a year to help them get them out of Iraq and into Jordan. And after nearly six months in Amman, separated from their remaining family in Iraq a year and a half after the murder of their brother Hussein by insurgents, Saida and Hassan finally made it to America.

I met their brother Hussein at a leadership symposium studying Middle East conflicts in Cyprus in the summer of 2005 at the end of my third year in college. His admiration for American institutions, his commitment to Iraqi democracy and his thoughts on Middle East peace were outspoken. He was introduced by the head of the symposium as a special guest. “This is Hussein. He spent 5 days in transit from Baghdad to Nicosia. He has one brother and four sisters at home in Iraq. If he could meet anybody in the world, it would be George W. Bush because Bush is responsible for his freedom to be here today.”

Most of us were amazed. I, for one, had not envisioned meeting an Iraqi who remained thankful to the United States. But Hussein constantly surprised us. He was one-part Mesopotamian poster-child of the neo-conservative campaign machine (the Republican Party had sent Hussein a ticket to Ohio to campaign in 2004), another part nationalistic, educated and well-spoken with a genuine thirst for Coca-Cola and a desire to preach unity rather than sectarian division.

Hussein’s smile and joie de vivre were infectious. “You don’t realize what it is like to have freedom because you have always had it. After your country invaded mine, I finally understood what freedom was.” His eyes brightened as he took my hand and unfolded and moved each one of my fingers in a motion to grasp the air, “But now I can feel my freedom,” he inhaled, deeply. “Now I can taste it.”

The consequences of the poorly managed political results from the invasion of Iraq have caused the articulation and intensification of radical sectarian identities on a regional level as well as a local level. These identities may not always have been so politicized. I remember Hussein commenting on an event in which Kurdish journalists came to discuss how their region alone was excelling by exhibiting the tell-tale signs of democracy such as fair elections and a free press. Hussein stood up and challenged their separatism underlying their claims. “You mustn’t talk like this. Acting alone as though the Sunni, Shia and Kurds are separate parts of Iraq is what makes our sectarian and ethnic conflict real. This is the biggest problem of them all.” Hussein believed that sectarianism had been augmented in the Middle East by the invasion of his country. He believed that a larger identity could be forged if no one group had exclusive political control over Iraq’s destiny or its oil.

After our program, Hussein returned to Iraq to work for an American NGO, setting up children’s educational programs in Baghdad. Toward the summer of 2006, he still e-mailed about a unified Iraqi identity, although he feared for his life and told many of us candidly about how sectarianism was slowly tearing his country apart. He had received numerous death threats from insurgents for working with the Americans and was, at last, trying to leave the country. He wrote a mass e-mail to all of us, stating “My rose of a city, my Baghdad, has become my prison.”

In late June of 2006, Hussein was killed by insurgents while at home to say goodbye to his family before fleeing the country for Europe. As devastated as our group of students was, we were equally driven to research the facts and the possibilities to assist his brothers and one of his sisters, who also had worked for the Americans and had received death threats.

Hussein’s eldest sister Saida and his only brother Hassan hid for a year in a basement in Iraq before they finally escaped to Jordan in June of 2007. In Amman, they applied for refugee status through The United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR) and eventually made it onto Kirk Johnson’s list, a document with the names and whereabouts of Iraqis who are endangered in Iraq by their association with the Coalition. They waited in Jordan almost 6 months to receive amnesty and refugee status in the United States. Their entire wait was nearly one and a half years.

Finally, last Monday we headed to the airport to greet his brother and sister. Many thoughts rushed through my head on the trip. I thought of what it would be like to see the skyline of New York for the first time as an immigrant to the United States in 2007. As a third generation American, it is hard for me to relate to the much-idealized symbol of this as a land of opportunity for all immigrants. Thoughts of my great-grandparents’ own voyages to this country as political refugees from pogroms in Russia filled my head. Soiled by the vomit of others and clutching one tattered bag per family, they arrived in Ellis Island with nothing. They waited two days in transit before they were released, penniless, to the lower East side of Manhattan.

Much has changed in 2007. They were set up with housing outside of D.C. and e-mail has allowed several of us to communicate with them and encourage them to continue with the sluggish refugee process, despite the sacrifice of leaving the rest of their family behind. The road ahead for Saida and Hassan will not be simple, but certain modern conveniences have facilitated the process. Though the context has is different, hopefully the opportunity that this country affords to those who are persecuted, should they make it here, has not.