Loading ...On World Refugee Day Arab America Speaks to Syrian Refugee About Middle East, More
By Daniel Gil/ Contributing Writer
Qutaiba Idlbi had been imprisoned twice by the Syrian government and managed to survive, so when police came to arrest him for the third time, he knew he had to escape into hiding.
It was 2011 and the Arab Spring had broken out in the Middle East. The future and stability of an entire region was uncertain and the governments within countries like Syria, Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt were teetering.
Idlbi had been working as a reporter, submitting videos of the uprisings to international media outlets like Al-Jazeera and the BBC, something which garnered attention not only from news agencies but also the Assad regime’s intelligence community.
It was after Idlbi went into hiding that the government tried to kidnap his little brother. “I realized that it had become more about just my safety, but the safety of my family,” Idlbi told Arab America. “So we were in hiding for some time… they wouldn’t stop looking for us so I took my little brother and we left for Lebanon in September 2011.”
Six years later and Idlbi finds himself safe from harm’s way living in Washington D.C. with a stable job as a Social Psychology and Cultural Norms Specialist for the Joint Operations Command where he works on strategies to combat ISIS in the Middle East. His passion for helping refugees and trying to portray them in a positive light made him no stranger to Arab America. In 2015 he stood outside in the November cold at Washington D.C.’s Union Station with a sign from a Syrian refugee asking for hugs from passersby.
Arab America spoke to Idlbi because June 20th is world refugee day, one meant as a day when we recognize and commemorate the resolve, the strength, and the loss so many millions of people have experienced as refugees.
Idlbi was lucky enough to escape Syria before civil war broke out and destroyed his home country. For so many though, the prospect of fleeing their homes and venturing to a new world proves a dauntingly challenging mission.
According to the United Nations Refugee Agency there are more people around the world who have been displaced than at any other time in history. They estimate there are 65 million people worldwide who have been forcibly displaced, a third of which are under the age of 18. Nations have lost entire generations of people as their countries have been flung into chaos. Of those 65 million, many are refugees fleeing wars in the Middle-East, specifically Syria, Afghanistan, Turkey, Iraq, and Yemen.
Over recent years the large influx of displaced peoples has contributed to a rise in xenophobic rhetoric and nationalist movements in Western countries in the face of the mass international refugee crisis. In countries like the United States, this discourse propelled Donald Trump into the office of the President who attempted to change the country’s immigration policy all together so as to quell and ultimately halt migration of refugees to the US.
Although Trump’s infamous immigration ban was ruled unconstitutional, it is because of this persecution that Idlbi finds it important to hearken back to the words of the American founding fathers and recognize what the American identity means to people who have had to leave their homes for their own survival.
“America was built basically on refugees and immigrants… so many people came here because they were oppressed either politically, economically, religiously in one way or another,” Idlbi told Arab America. “When we change that it’s as if we are betraying our own identity.”
The principles on which this identity rests is what some find so attractive within the borders of the United States, Idlbi has found in his experience with others who have had to flee their countries. “Refugees come here for a space where they can be who they want to be, where they can have dignity which are the main things people asked for during the Arab Spring: dignity, freedom, and social justice.”
He also finds it important that Americans recognize the history of US foreign policy in the Middle East over the past half century because its effects are what they have come to associate the United States with.
“People need to recognize that the United States has supported military dictators in the Middle East for the past 50 years who stripped freedoms and dignities of those people there which was followed by years of war… so there is almost an obligation to at least offer a hand for people affected by our policies.”
This makes Idlbi think back to after he and his brother fled to Lebanon. During that time his little brother was finishing high school. So, he found himself traveling around the Middle East, investigating the effects the Arab Spring was having on societies and economies in the region. This brought Idlbi into contact with a lot of people with many opinions on the western world.
“People in the Middle East believe, particularly because of the rhetoric of democracy western governments try to spread there, that every American agrees with every decision their government makes when it comes to foreign policy. This is because of the way democracy has become branded in the Middle East… and that was the hardest thing to explain to them. That is not how the American government operates.”
Once people can recognize this, Idlbi believes, is when discussions surrounding the intake of refugees from the Middle East will transform from political rhetoric to a practical debate about the histories of Western and Arab worlds which have historically been so intertwined.