Why do countries like ours’ and those of Western Europe appear to have settled into peaceful political processes that manage a degree of continuity and stability, and others do not?
In countries where modern institutions are weak and poorly developed, and a democratic or participatory political culture based on consensus and power sharing has not had the time or the political, social and economic conditions to develop, older loyalties and obligations trump allegiance to the state and nation and respect for, or at least, acceptance of its institutions and processes. Countries like Syria and Iraq, and much of Africa, were in reality modern contrivances superimposed upon the wrecks of old empires. The cartographical design may have been determined by the presence of natural resources in such and such a place, or the location of a port or river, highway or mountain pass. And often, in wide tracts of desert or jungle, mountains or plains, lines were simply on drawn on maps from point to arbitrary point, sometimes with the agreement or collusion of a rival power or friendly local despot.
In lands such as these, loyalty and allegiance to family, clan, tribe, religious sect, and ethnic group held precedence over the fabricated state and its often transplanted institutions and processes. Patronage, nepotism, corruption, and a network of mutual favours and obligations smoothed the paths of people seeking or seizing benefits or appointments. Old ways were tried and true, compared to aspirations or pretensions to fair and open governance. Political parties which emerged on ostensibly western lines were no more than parochial political machines, whilst gerrymandering, branch-stacking, vote-rigging and even violence ensured electoral outcomes that favoured the powers that be.
The culture of dependence and obligation that characterized pre-modern societies in the West is still the norm in much the world. And it is replicated throughout society, from the humble street-vendor to city hall. Need a license? A school scholarship? A better job? A party post? Want to avoid a traffic fine? A law suit? A jail sentence? Money changes hands. Deals are done. Debts are incurred. And social and political relationships are established. And thus, the creaking wheels of bureaucracy and governance turn, driven by patronage and payola, often greased with cash and the threat or actual use of violence encourages the emergence of and tolerance for the zaim, the strong leader. That leader develops a sense of identification with the country – not in the sense of service, but that of ownership. Family, clan, kinship and sect obligations and entitlements cement the zaim – literally “boss” – in place, whist patronage and brutal security forces beholden to the elite ensure that he is not challenged. Hence the mukhabarat (literally, intelligence) keep watch on dissent and protest.
Once in power, it can be difficult for the autocrat to vacate his seat. Family interests, party, sect and ethnic ties, and economic imperatives, and fear of retribution should the patriarch depart, render it dangerous for what amounts to a family business to relinquish the keys to the kingdom, and the levers of power. As they say, he who rides a a tiger never can dismount. Hence in countries as diverse culturally and geographically as Syria, Zimbabwe, the Central African Republic, the central Asian ‘stans of the former Soviet Union, and North Korea, the “dear leader” is strongly encouraged to hang in there by his nearest and dearest.
This is indeed how societies and polities evolved and developed during Europe’s so-called Dark Ages in the wake of the collapse of the western Roman Empire. When authority fails, its place is taken by force. Today, we see it in many places around the world, especially in the Middle East and Africa, where social order is under constant attack from paramilitary thugs and religious fanatics, and violence is endemic. Any large, diverse society includes individuals who do not conform to the law. And it is said that some 10% of us have the potential to become psychopaths. When that society is in a state of breakdown, violence and the resort to force become widespread, these come into into their own as chieftains, warlords, robber barons, and pirate kings rule their parochial roost, commanding mercenaries, militias, and private armies. As the Bard wrote, “Take but order away and hark what discord follows”. Violence breeds violence, requiring a corresponding use of force by the state to maintain order. And if the initial, brutal crackdown fails to stifle dissent and rebellion, to borrow from Shakespeare again, the dogs of civil war are let lose, and all hell breaks loose. The Bard of Avon had his Henry declaim “Cry Havoc”, this being an old English war cry that signaled no quarter, and ensuing rape and pillage.
On the marches of civil wars, the bleeding edges of nations and empires collapse in on themselves like stars to create black holes where roam robber bands, death squads, militias, and drugged and indoctrinated child soldiers deal out death and destruction whilst trading variously in oil, diamonds, heroin, grass, guns, and people, extorting dollars and gold from locals and from foreign donors. Quantrill’s Raiders and Jim Lane’s Red Legs cut a swathe through “bloody Kansas” and Missouri. And other times and places have seen their sad share of jaywalkers and bushwhackers. Swedish and German mercenaries marched back and forth across a devastated Mitteleuropa during the Thirty Years War, just as Reds and Whites ranged and ravaged through Byelorussia and Ukraine during the civil war that followed the Russian Revolution. The dying decades of the Twentieth Century saw this in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. And it prevails today in Syria and Iraq, Libya and Yemen, Afghanistan and Africa.
And so, and as clear and present example, to suffering, sad Syria.
Following in Father’s Footsteps, Following Dear Old Dad
Bashar al Assad inherited this patrimony from his father Hafez. He was a reluctant ruler, not expecting to take charge. The heir apparent was his brother, a fast-living hedonist who died in a car crash. He did endeavour to bring about gradualist change in Syria. I saw changes whenever I visited Damascus.
This was not to suggest that Syria was an Arab utopia. There was a large divide between town and country, exacerbated by a a long and ongoing drought that forced many rural folk to migrate to the rundown fringes of the major towns, adding to pressures on resources, housing and employment. Whilst in practice a secular, multi-faith and multi-ethnic society, there was a cultural and spiritual divide between the conservative, Islamic rural communities and a more secular-minded urban middle class. The country was ruled for near on fifty years by a family and elite drawn from a particular, minority sect, which sat atop a pyramid of nepotism, patronage and corruption. And that rule was upheld by a cruel and efficient secret police and military special forces that kept a proactive watch on dissent. There was definitely an air of anxiety and caution amongst those who aspired to a more liberal Syria, with the midnight knock on the door, arbitrary arrest, and detention in one of the regime’s many political prisons being a fact of political life in this secular, socialist country.
But on the other hand, Syria was almost self-sufficient in food and oil products. It had well resourced and efficient health and secular education systems, and a flourishing arts scene. As a nation, Syrians were a tolerant and welcoming people, and within the bounds of religious propriety and political caution, freedom of worship, of expression, of lifestyle, and even of discreet gender preference were given. In the narrow streets of the Old City of Damascus, Thursday night, the eve of the Muslim holy day, was a fairy land of lights and laughter. Courting couples hand in hand, girls in hijab and uncovered alike; families promenading in their “Sunday best”; young goths with spiky hair and black makeup, short skirts and tight jeans. Busy stalls and sweetshops, crowded, street-side cafes – the famous Damascene maqha – or coffee shops.
Foreign observers, friendly and hostile, have noted how well-dressed and cashed-up the refugees flooding into Eastern Europe appear to be. The reality is that these are Syria’s middle class. By local metrics, they were comparatively well-off, and had a strong work ethic and a high wages to savings ratio. These were, and are Syria’s future.
Syrians were genuinely proud of their country, of its status as a centre of Arab culture and Arab nationalism, and of its history. And of its priceless archeological heritage. The Roman cities of Apamea, Palmyra, and Bosra; the Crusader castles of Krak de Chevaliers and Salah ud Din; the Byzantine monastery St.Simeon; the Umayyad mosques of Aleppo and Damascus; the Christian villages of Maaloula and Saidnaya where Aramaic is still spoken; the ancient suqs of Aleppo and Damascus. Syria was a historian’s idea of heaven.
When the revolution broke out, sympathetic commentators wondered whether Bashar would be “Hammersmith Man”, a reference to his former career as a ophthalmologist in London, where he lived for many years with his gorgeous, well connected, merchant banker wife and children, or “Hama Man”, recalling his father’s brutal crackdown on an Islamist revolt in that city in 1981 where in some thirty thousand souls perished at the hands of security forces. In the end, Junior was swept along by the elite’s blinkered but well-tried survival mechanism – force and fear.
Back in the heady days of the Arab Spring, Syrians from all ethic, religious and political groups hoped for a loosening of authoritarian controls. But the regime resorted to form and to repression. Sectarian militias murdered and mutilated initiating a cycle of bloody vengeance as a popular, peaceful and largely secular movement became militarized, polarized, in many areas, Islamized, and as internal and external interests with varying political, religious, and geopolitical motives became involved and embroiled against the regime, against the rebels, against each other. Regular forces, militias, warlords, village defense forces, Kurdish separatists, foreign fighters, mercenaries, foreign air forces, undercover operatives. A war of all against all, as Thomas Hobbes once said. To paraphrase Mark Twain, history might not repeat itself, but it certainly rhymes.
And now, whilst most of the antagonists have been herded by their foreign patrons towards a crowded and reluctant negotiating table, it all seems like a terminal case of “too little too late”. Syria is in ruins, some half a million Syrian are dead, and countless more maimed.and it its population is scattered, weighing heavily on the consciences and economies of neighbours and of the European Union. Syria as a nation state may in fact be no more. There is talk of partition, and a redrawing of the map that emerged from the peace treaties of The Great War. And the odds are that with Russian military support, Bashar al Assad, bete noir, pariah, lame-duck to those governments who wished him gone, and his Iranian and Hizbollah allies, are going to win the civil war.
He may or may not succeed. Right now, his forces are pushing back the rebels, writing himself a pivotal part in the peace. Right now, the parties talk and walk whilst the killing continues, and the diaspora grows. International forums are but talking shops, stages for self-righteous and self-aggrandizing posturing and stotting, acrimonious gatherings that appear to function in a time bubble that is remote from the brutal reality. If and when the guns fall silent, Bashar may or may not be able to put the country back together. He may or may not be able to recreate the multi-faith, modernizing, cosmopolitan society that existed before the war. He may or may not be able to disarm the hundreds of militias and private armies that have proliferated and even prospered during five years of chaos.
He will need billions of dollars and the help and goodwill of many nations to rebuild the towns and cities, and to restore the shattered archeological heritage. He will never bring back the dead, or the skilled and educated exiles who will chose to make new lives in foreign places of greater safety. Nor will he be able to repatriate the thousands of plundered artifacts and treasures that have disappeared into the international black market. He will not be able to heal the wounds, give solace to the bereaved, assuage the grief, counsel and treat the trauma, and divert the desire for vengeance into the promethean labour of reconstruction.
Putting his own words into the mouth of a conquered British chieftain, an old Roman once said, “solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant” – they make a desert and they call it peace.
Its been a diverse year In That Howling Infinite. We have traveled, to quote Bob Dylan, “all the way from New Orleans to Jerusalem” – and to many other places in between. Vikings and Roman legionaries; Bob Dylan, Jackson Browne and Bruce Cockburn; Britain in the ‘forties and Paris in the ‘fifties; America, the Levant, and even Wonderland. By Year’s end a million souls will have journeyed to Europe from the war-ravaged lands of the Middle East, and my final posts for the year contemplate what it might mean for refugees who find to safe haven in Australia.
Here is a retrospective.
The year began with a short piece on recent archeological discoveries in Jerusalem that strongly suggested that the Via Dolorosathat Jesus trode on his final journey to Golgotha was the wrong route, and that instead, it began just inside of the Jaffa Gate. I took a light-hearted look at the Jerusalem Syndrome, a mental condition involving the presence of religiously-themed obsessive ideas, delusions and other psychoses triggered by a visit to The Holy City.
I read but one piece of fiction this year – a sad admission from a lifelong bibliophile – but this one book was probably one of the best I have read: The Incorrigible Optimists Club, winner of the prestigious Prix de Goncourt, by Jean Michel Guenassia. It is set in Paris’ Rive Gauche, as the ‘fifties gives way to the ‘sixties; as the crooners makes way for rock n’roll; as the Cold War divides a continent, sending dissidents and refugees fleeing to a safe haven in Paris; as the Algerian war divides and destroys families: and as the seeds of ‘les evenments de Mai 1968’ are sown in the hearts and souls of France’s young people. It is a coming of age book, of young hopes and fears, love and loss, a book about writers and reading, and the magic and power of the written word in prose and poetry.
March saw the passing of my old friend Dermott Ryder, chronicler and luminary of the Folk Music revival in Sydney in the early ‘seventies. Dermott’s Last Rideis my tribute to him. And April was a month of anniversaries and remembrance. Forty years since the outbreak of the Lebanese Civil War, and the centenary of the landings of the ANZACs at Gallipoli. Pity the Nation takes its title from Robert Fisk’s tombstone of a book on the long war; and he had taken it from a poem written in 1934 by Khalil Gibran, Lebanon’s most celebrated poet, a poem that was both a prophetic testament and a testimony of times to come: “Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation”. The Watchers of the Water is a song about Gallipoli sing by a Turkish solder.
May saw two diverse pieces of social history. The Spirit of 45 takes personal perspective of British filmmaker Ken Loach’s documentary of the excitement and optimism that followed the Labour Party’s election victory at the end of World War II. This laid the foundation stone for the British welfare state. Bob Dylan’s Americana discusses the meaning and significance of the lyrics and the imagery of Dylan’s early ‘eighties masterpiece Blind Willie McTell, a harrowing journey through America’s dark heart.
In June, we visited Yorkshire and in London, conjuring up memories and historical connections. Harald Went A Vikingis a saga about the first of two kings to die on English soil in the late summer of 1066, and the adventures that took him from Norway to Constantinople and Jerusalem and finally, to Yorkshire. Roman Wall Bluestakes its title from WH Auden’s poem about a homesick and grumpy legionnaire on Hadrian’s Wall, and contemplates the lives of the ethnically polyglot soldiery who defended the Empire’s borders. And June saw another famous anniversary, the Bicentennial of the momentous and bloody Battle of Waterloo. The Long Road to Waterloo prefaces a song for the men who, after twenty six long years of war, never came home.
Battle of Stamford Bridge, depicting King Harald Hardrada hit in the neck by an arrow
In July, controversy erupted in the Land of the Free over the flying of the Confederate Flag in states that were once part of Old Dixie. The dead hand of the Civil War reached out and touched the hearts of Americans and their friends throughout the world in the wake of yet another mass shooting. This time, a young man gunned down worshippers at prayer. That the victims were folk of colour, and the shooter, a young white extremist, reopened wounds that have never really healed. Rebel Yellsurmises that The South will always be with us, in our thoughts, in our historical memory, in our art and literature, our books and films, and our favourite music.
September marked the one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Lewis Carroll’s timeless, fabulist masterpiece Alice In Wonderland. Go Ask Alice, I Think She’ll Know reproduces Australian critic Peter Craven’s masterful celebration of Alice 150. The title belongs to the mesmerizing Grace Slick of Jefferson Airplane who cut through to the rabbit chase channeling the long-gone Lewis in a psychedelic musical masterpiece.
On an infinitely sadder note, Ruins and Bones is a tribute to the memory of Syrian archeologist Khaled Muhammed al Asaad, murdered by ISIS in August 2015, and of Palmyra, the ‘Pearl of the Desert’.
Allende’s Desk and Osama’s Pyjamas is a brief commentary on the extension of American military power and the pathology of demons and demonization. Tales of Yankee Powerlooks at American foreign policy during the 1980s from the perspective of the songs of Jackson Browne and Bruce Cockburn.
November’s Children of the Revolution looks at the events that led up to the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, and the early days before it became too dangerous to gather on the streets, when men, women and children would parade in public places, waving the flag of the old Syria, the one that flew before the Assad clan seized power in 1966. Canny camera men could take media-friendly shots of photogenic little girls in face makeup looking sad, vulnerable and defiant. Those days of hope are long gone.
A highlight of this past year has been my work as a volunteer with the Humanitarian Settlement Services programme. The HSS’ mission is to assist newly arrived refugees to settle in Australia. In No Going Home, I endeavour to imagine the refugee journey. Hejirais a sequel of sorts and, indeed, a happy ending.
Happy New Year to these prospective New Australians, and to all my readers. May 2016 be fortunate and fulfilling.
I finally broke into the prison, I found my place in the chain. Even damnation is poisoned with rainbows, all the brave young men they’re waiting now to see a signal which some killer will be lighting for pay. Into this furnace I ask you now to venture, you whom I cannot betray.
Leonard Cohen, The Old Revolution
The Syrian civil war broke lose in March 2011, two months after the events in Tahrir Square, and one month after the fall of Mubarak.
Amidst the tumult and media hype of the Arab Spring, it was as if the distant drums had suddenly hit the volume switch. In the dusty border town of Dara’a, just north of Jordan, local kids wrote on a wall: “The people want the regime to fall”. The words had been repeated from Tunisia to Egypt, from Yemen to Bahrain. It was the cry of the revolution. The local governor decided to come down hard. The young people, all under 17, were thrown in jail. The punishment stunned the town, and suddenly, Syria, progressive, diverse, proud, beautiful, but authoritarian Syria greeted the misnamed Arab Spring.
The young men’s families and friends weren’t having any of it. It is said that in broad daylight, dozens of young men pelted a poster of a smiling President Bashar Assad; a statue of the Bashar’s late father and predecessor Hafiz Assad was demolished; and official buildings, including the HQ of ruling Ba’ath Party’ and the governor’s office, were destroyed. “There is no fear, there is no fear, after today there is no fear!” hundreds of men chanted in shaky mobile-phone footage.
Over that weekend, security forces opened fire on marchers. This was the regime’s well tried negotiating technique. But Assad responded immediately, sending a high-ranking delegation to deliver his condolences to the families of the dead. The governor was sacked, and the boys released.
So far, so “I mentioned the war but I think I got away with it” But the die had been cast. The demonstrators made demands the regime was unwilling or unable to meet. And the rest is tragedy.
I am not about to retell the story of the Syrian revolution. It is still being written, and as yet, there is no ending. Only more blood. As I write, well over three hundred thousand souls have perished (soon, it will overtake the butchers bill of the Spanish and American Civil Wars), and tens of thousands have disappeared into prisons and oubliez. Millions have been displaced within the country; millions have sought shelter in neighbouring countries; and at least eight hundred thousand have taken to the roads of Central Europe.
But I will quixotically hark back to just before events reached the fork in the road, to when there was an outside chance that Syria could avoid the chaos and carnage that was besetting other children of an Arab Spring that was turning into a bitter winter.
Back to the days before The Fall when pundits were asking whether Bashar would be Hammersmith Man, reflecting his former career as a successful ophthalmologist in London, and his glamorous, cosmopolitan, former merchant banker wife, or Hama Man, recalling his father’s crackdown on an Islamist rising in Hama in 1982, in which uncounted tens of thousand are believed to have perished. We discovered very soon whom he was destined to become.
To the days before The Fall, before the revolution became weaponized and islamized, and demonstrators danced together in the streets, earning the intifada the short lived sobriquet ‘the Dabke Revolution’, named for the circle folk dance popular throughout the Middle East and the Balkans.
The days before the slaughters began. First by the forces of regime, led by Bashar’s brutal brother Maher and his notorious Fourth Armoured Division. Then by the thuggish Alawi militia – the Shabiha, or “ghosts” or “shadows”, a double-edged meaning alluding to their underworld origin and methods, and also to the fact that they literally turned people into ghosts. And then, in reciprocal ferocity, by opposition militias that grew and proliferated, fought and died, divided, and divided again, and embraced a jihadi creed, sowing the dragon’s teeth that evolved into Jabhat an Nusra and Da’esh.
The days before it became too dangerous to gather on the streets, when men, women and children would parade in public places, waving the flag of the old Syria, the one that flew before the Assad clan seized power in 1966. Canny camera men could take media-friendly shots of photogenic little girls in face makeup looking sad, vulnerable and defiant. When the picture that is the featured image of this blog was first published in Al Jazeera in early 2011, I was both enchanted and inspired. I immediately started using it, with acknowledgements, in my publications and postings. When more and more of these images appeared, I used them too. But I was becoming a tad suspicious. The lasses looked too clean, too cute, and indeed, many actually looked alike. The photographers’ daughters, perhaps, or those of friends. Were they for-real or where they posed? I guess I will never find out.
Needlessly to say, as the rebellion morphed into harrowing civil war, such images disappeared, and in their place, we saw destruction and carnage, and the broken bodies of little girls and boys slain by bomb and bullet, hardship and hunger. Now, as families were forced to abandon their homes and make their way to the borders, and thence, into Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, and finally, into Europe, we see children staggering on dusty roads, carried piggy back by exhausted fathers, pushed in strollers, scorched by the sun, soaked by the rain, and frozen by the snow. And we see little Aylan on his golden beach, a Kurdish toddler now a symbol of all the drowned babies of the Mediterranean and the Aegean Sea.
Photogenic children no more. Just victims, survivors, lost souls.
I fought in the old revolution on the side of the ghost and the King. Of course I was very young and I thought that we were winning; I can’t pretend I still feel very much like singing as they carry the bodies away. Into this furnace I ask you now to venture… you whom I cannot betray.
On a personal note, we were last in Syria in March 2009, and whilst visiting the famed Roman amphitheater at Bosra, just northeast of Dera’a, we had the pleasure of the company of a crowd of Syrian school children. They treated us like visiting celebrities and sang us a song of welcome. It is saddening to look at these pictures now, and wonder where these children are now.
You know it never has been easy Whether you do or you do not resign Whether you travel the breadth of extremities Or stick to some straighter line Joni Mitchell, Hejira
People’ll tell you where they’ve gone They’ll tell you where to go But till you get there yourself you’ll never really know Where some have found their paradise Other’s just come to harm Oh Amelia it was just a false alarm Joni Mitchell, Amelia
How sweet it is to learn new things – to walk new streets, to look through new windows. Working lately as a volunteer with the Humanitarian Settlement Services progrmme, I have had that opportunity. The HSS’ mission is to assist newly arrived refugees to settle in Australia, participate in our way of life, access services available to us all, and to develop the skills and knowledge needed to begin a new life in our country. The following pieces recall two days in my volunteer life. They are a sequel of sorts, and indeed, a happy ending to my recent post No Going Homein which I endeavored to imagine the refugee journey.
Hejira is an Arabic word that commemorates specifically the flight of Muhammad from Mecca to Medina in 622. But it also refers to any emigration or flight, and this is the context here.
Arrival
I wait at our tiny airport for an Afghani family coming to Australia from a refugee camp on the Pakistani border. They have come here straight from Iran with but a short transit in Sydney. The plane is a little QANTAS Dash 8, and the passengers walk down the gangplank. The day is hot. Young girls in short shorts and skivvies disembark, and young men in shorts, tees and thongs (the sandals, that is). There a few suited businessmen, and retirees in nondescript array.
Our new arrivals are last off. Mum and two teenage sons. She wears a hijab and Iranian dress,, and the boys, jeans and tee shirts. They step onto the hot tarmac and walk, tired and nervous, to the arrivals lounge. We are with the welcoming party – a family of Afghanis who settled here a short while ago, two young girls, their mother and their auntie. They too are dressed in salwar kameez – they came here from a camp in Pakistan. The ladies dwelt there for twelve years, and the girls were born there.
A young Hazara serves as our interpreter. She is dressed like a fashionable Iranian muhajibabe in simple and smart attire – for it is indeed Iran that she and he family sought shelter from the Afghan storm. She is eighteen, and arrived with her mother and siblings two years ago. Her English is excellent – she wants to be an interpreter, and is working towards that goal at TAFE. And this is the thing. These folk have all come here on 204 visas for women at risk, the sole carers of dependent families. Their husbands are either dead or decamped in Afghanistan or in the border camps.
And then there are we three Aussies. The tireless Humanitarian Settlement Service caseworker, a lady from community services who wanted to witness an arrival, and myself, working for the HSS as a volunteer, likewise bearing witness to what is quite a powerful scene.
The meeting and the greeting is done with salaams, embraces (the Afghanis) and handshakes (we locals). The first minutes in their new home in the sun. I help the lads load the suitcases on to the bus, and my work done, I bid them all “khoda hafez” and take my leave. They are driven off to their new digs, an Afghan meal, the first of much paperwork, and then sleep.
But not before they are taken to the headland, from where they will view the Pacific Ocean to the east, hills covered in banana plantations to the west, and beyond them, below the cloudless blue sky, the blue-green foothills of the Great Dividing Range. On the other side, far to the northwest, their landlocked, shattered home is 11,353 kilometers away.
Moving
Our mission today is to move a Hazara family from their first, interim dwelling, to a permanent home on the other side of town. A mother with four children. Three of these are at school today, and the eldest, a sparky eleven year old, has stayed home to help mom move house and help us with translation. Although she has been in Australia for just six months, her English is astonishing. She later tells me she can speak five Afghan languages, Urdu, and a bit of Hindi. Nothing is going to hold this one back.
Their bags and boxes are ready, and these fill the bus. So off we all go to their new home. Two Afghani neighbours greet us on arrival, with two young girls and a tiny boy. Three ethnic groups, three languages, and two religions, and they are getting along famously.
“Why do you think that is?” asks the caseworker. “Because there are no men around”. No men. No controllers. No patriarchy. No rules. No tribes. No prejudice.
In Sydney, in Melbourne, with the larger Afghan and Muslim communities, with the mosques and madrassas, imams and ideologies, the self-appointed and self-perpetuating mullahs and muftis, male control would be asserted, with their restrictive rules and regimentation. All the old baggage that was left behind would be brought in and unpacked – the tribal loyalties and enmities, the specious theological diktats on dress and demeanor, form and function. And the patriarchy.
But not here, in this northern, sea-side town. Just women doing their best to get along and make the new life work for themselves and their children.
What will the future hold for these women taken out of their homes, their culture, their society, and asked to craft a new life and identity for themselves and their children in a new and strange land? How will they go with the language and with life in general? Will they make new friends, find rewarding work, and “fit in”, or will they cling to their old lives, lonely and isolated, their children the sole interface between themselves and the world?
I wonder about the young girls – and particularly the bright and outward-going ones I have met. Will they build successful school and professional careers? Will they make long and lasting friendships with their Australian and other peers? Will they let go the costumes, conventions, and constrictions of their parents’ culture?
I wonder about the young boys, and the young men whom I greeted at the airport. How will they fare in their matriarchal domestic world? How will they adjust to their new life here with all its challenges and temptations?
If they remain in this regional city, who will be their role models? Will they become more Australian than Afghani as they grow up and mature among their north coast peers? Will they complete their education, and find work in an area with a very high level of youth unemployment? Or will they be isolated and lonely, dislocated and discontented? Will they assume their old culture’s patriarchal role and demand their mothers and sisters subject themselves to the son’s authority as head of the family, and impose restrictions their movements and morality, demeanor and dress?
Will they be drawn to the capital cities with their diverse Muslim communities. And into which circle will they be drawn? To the moderate ones who just want to get on with their lives in an Aussie world, to the pious and unassuming who see jihad as an internal spiritual quest, to the criminal and bikie gangs that we hear so much about, or to the radical proselytizers who view our culture and values as anathema to the word and will of God?
All this is in the future, and as these folk might say, in Gods hands. But in reality, it is in their’s and their’s alone. But I am glad to have been able to play a small part in setting these new arrivals on their path.
Never in modern times – since the Second World War – have there been so many refugees. There are over sixty nine million people around the world on the move today – people who have been forcibly displaced from their homes and are fleeing from persecution or conflict. Forty million people have been internally displaced within their own countries – including six million Syrians. Over 25 million are refugees in neighbouring countries and further afield -. 25% of them are in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, and Uganda. five million are Syrians. These figures are of those registered by the UNHCR. The real numbers are much higher. [See below, The World Refugee Crisis in Brief, and The Refugee’s Journey]
Just imagine …
Millions are on the move – , and you are one of them.
Lebanese American BBC Journalist Kim Ghattas says well:
I often get asked why my family never left – or more pointedly, why my parents kept us there, dodging sniper fire on the way to school and back. The answer is this: We stayed because leaving is hard. Becoming refugees meant leaving our lives, our identity, and our dignity behind…No one’s first instinct is to leave. Their first choice is usually to hold on to the comforting familiarity of home; when that becomes impossible, you leave for another safer area within the country. Then you leave for a neighboring country, so you can return as soon as possible or even keep an eye on your property while you’re away. Only when the walls are closing in and the horizon is total darkness do you give up and leave everything you have ever known behind, lock the door to your home, and walk away.
no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear saying- leave, run away from me now i don’t know what i’ve become but i know that anywhere is safer than here
Somali poet Warsan Shire, Home
A million spaces in the earth to fill, here’s a generation waiting still – we’ve got year after year to kill, but there’s no going home. Steve Knightley, Exile
Oh, the wind, the wind is blowing, through the graves the wind is blowing, freedom soon will come; then we’ll come from the shadows. Leonard Cohen, The Partisan
I pity the poor immigrant whose strength is spent in vain, whose heaven is like ironsides, whose tears are like rain. Bob Dylan, I Pity the Poor Immigrant
Just imagine …
What if you had to leave behind everything that you hold dear. Your identity, culture, language, faith. You job, your school. Your loved ones, your friends, and your play-mates.
What if you have to sleep with your shoes on so you are ready to run if your enemies are approaching your village? And then you have to flee your home and climb the mountain to escape, helping your youngsters and old folk up the rocky slopes in the summer heat, and there is nothing to eat or drink, and nothing you can do except wait for capture or rescue.
What would YOU do if you had but a short while to gather a few things together and run, leaving your whole life behind? What would you try and take with you?
Then you wash up, literally and figuratively, on foreign shores – in border refugee camps, dusty border towns or urban slums. And there you stay, with other tens, hundreds, thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands in like dire straits.
Until one day, you are selected for humanitarian settlement in a strange land at the other end of the earth.
That day may never come; so, impatient, frustrated, desperate, you use your family’s savings to pay smugglers and traffickers who prowl the desert and jungle camps like predators and the port cities of Turkey, Libya and South East Asia.
So you take to the seas in frail boats and brave the the deep and dangerous waters of the Mediterranean, the Adriatic and the Indian Ocean.
You might only have enough money for one passage, so you go on ahead and hope to send for your kin once you have reached safe haven.
You may be one of fortunate ones who make it – not one of those cast ashore, lifeless flotsam and jetsam like baby Aylan on his golden beach.
You are now one of tens of thousands in a river of desperate endeavour.
You walk the long miles of the unwelcoming highways of Eastern Europe to a German or Swedish sanctuary. You might end up in a detention camp in Italy or Spain, stranded in the Calais Jungle, or the harbours of Java and Sumatra.
Or else, you are parked in a hot and hostile makeshift camp somewhere near the Tropic of Capricorn.
Just imagine …
You have fled the terror of the warlords and the militias, the holy warriors and the ethnic cleansers.
You discover that the border camps of Jordan and Lebanon, Turkey and Afghanistan, Thailand and Malaysia, Kenya and Namibia have their own ecology of hardship and handouts, rape and robbery, beatings and bribes, illness and neglect, cursory and desultory treatment by overworked and under-resourced aid workers, and shake-downs by the criminals who thrive in these places and the cops who take a cut and turn a blind eye or else enforce punitive directives from politicians, parliaments and bureaucrats.
There, you and yours’ attempt to rebuild a semblance of a life-before amidst the tents and the shanties, the dust and the sewage, the summer’s heat and the winter’s cold. A mosque to pray in, a school for the children, games of football or backgammon for idle youth and menfolk.
You try to keep the children warm and fed and free of mortal illness; you try to keep the spirit alive in a time of anxiety, fear, threat, loss, and confusion, a time of hopeful emptiness and of empty hopelessness.
Zaatari refugee camp, Jordan July 2013
Just imagine …
You are one of the lucky few selected for settlement in the fabled, unknown ‘west’.
New lands, under foreign skies, different constellations, so far away it might as well be the moon.
You now dwell among strangers. You neither speak their language nor comprehend their ways or their foreign gods.
You have no friends or family to call on in time of need.
You must rebuild the basic buildings blocks of a normal life – where even the idea of a normal life has now changed utterly.
The houses, the streets, the shops, the money even – are all new.
The things you took for granted are no longer there, and in their place are new ways and means.
New systems and processes – social, welfare, health, education – with new rules and ways of getting things done. Going to the doctor, to the bank, to government offices.
Understanding that policemen and soldiers are not people you have to pay off or flee from.
Learning English.
Finding a home.
Getting the kids into a school.
Finding a job when your qualifications are not recognized, and work-ways are different to what you know.
The laws are new, the language is new, the way people dress and behave, talk, walk and eat is new.
Many new things are fascinating, tempting.
Others, confronting and insulting to your morality and values.
Some are alien, even, beyond your comprehension.
Codes of behaviour, dress, decorum, politeness, are new. Less formality, respect and deference; open displays of sexuality, affection, and rudeness that would not have been tolerated, permitted even, at home.
You don’t understand what makes the locals tick – their mannerisms, their speech, their body language, their concept of time and space, even.
And you are shocked and frightened by their hostility. Not all – just a noisy and troublesome few who talk quietly amongst themselves, or hurl abuse, or march through city streets with signs that scream, “go back to where you came from!”, “go home!”
Home?
There is no home.
Home is far, far away.
So far away, it might as well be on the moon.
Just imagine…
This is the new. And you still bear the cross of the old. The world you left behind is still with you.
You miss your family, your friends, and the comfort and support you all gave each other.
You miss your old life. The streets, the sounds, the smells. The weather and seasons. Your job, your status, your school, your neighbourhood.
You yearn for street and shop signs you could read, voices you understood on the radio and television, on the street, and on the buses.
You hate having to try and make yourself understood to officials and doctors, desk clerks and shop assistants, and even the supportive and ever helpful case workers whose mission is to help you get through all this.
You are homesick, and lonesome; you feel isolated, helpless, dependent.
There is a terrible ache in your heart and a rift in your soul.
And then there are the scars that won’t and perhaps can never heal. The psychological and physical effects of the events and experiences that forced you to flee your homeland.
Conflict and violence, intimidation and discrimination, torture and brutality, even. You have flashbacks, bad dreams, anxiety attacks, and actual physical and mental pain and anguish.
They say that PTSD is endless. There is no cure …
Just imagine…
You are a stranger in a strange land, and there’s no going home …
They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the LORD, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. Psalm 107
Home
Warsan Shire
no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark.
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city
running as well.
your neighbours running faster
than you, the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind
the old tin factory is
holding a gun bigger than his body,
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.
no one would leave home unless home
chased you, fire under feet,
hot blood in your belly.
it’s not something you ever thought about
doing, and so when you did –
you carried the anthem under your breath,
waiting until the airport toilet
to tear up the passport and swallow,
each mouthful of paper making it clear that
you would not be going back.
you have to understand,
no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land.
who would choose to spend days
and nights in the stomach of a truck
unless the miles travelled
meant something more than journey.
no one would choose to crawl under fences,
be beaten until your shadow leaves you,
raped, then drowned, forced to the bottom of
the boat because you are darker, be sold,
starved, shot at the border like a sick animal,
be pitied, lose your name, lose your family,
make a refugee camp a home for a year or two or ten,
stripped and searched, find prison everywhere
and if you survive
and you are greeted on the other side
with
go home blacks, refugees
dirty immigrants, asylum seekers
sucking our country dry of milk,
dark, with their hands out
smell strange, savage –
look what they’ve done to their own countries,
what will they do to ours?
the dirty looks in the street
softer than a limb torn off,
the indignity of everyday life
more tender than fourteen men who
look like your father, between
your legs, insults easier to swallow
than rubble, than your child’s body
in pieces – for now, forget about pride
your survival is more important.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home tells you to
leave what you could not behind,
even if it was human.
no one leaves home until home
is a damp voice in your ear saying
leave, run now, i don’t know what
i’ve become.
This Syrian mother and her child were rescued by the Greek Coast Guard.
The World Refugee Crisis in Brief
The Melancholy Mathematics
Like death and taxes, the poor and racism, refugees have always been with us. But never in modern times – since the Second World War – have they been so many!
There are over sixty nine million people around the world on the move today – that have been forcibly displaced from their homes – fleeing from persecution or conflict.
This doesn’t count economic migrants who have hit the roads of sub Saharan Africa and Central America fleeing drought and crop failure, economic recession and unemployment, poverty, gangs and cartels, seeking a better life for themselves and the families in Europe or the USA.
Three quarters of a million ‘economic migrants’ are on the move in Central America, whilst the UN estimates that at least four million people have left Venezuela because of its political and economic crisis in what has been described as the biggest refuge crisis ever seen in the Americas. There are refugee camps on the Colombian border. Most are in Columbia but others have entered Brazil and Peru. But these are not by legal definition refugees – see below, The Refugees’ Journey .
Of those sixty nine million people over 11 million or 16% are Syrians. The numbers keep growing Thirty one people at being displaced every minute of the day. In 2018 alone, 16.2 million people were newly displaced.
Forty million people have been internally displaced within their own countries – this includes six million Syrians and off our radars, some two million souls who once lived in the contested regions of eastern Ukraine.
Over 25 million are refugees in neighbouring countries and further afield. 25% of them are in Turkey, Lebanon, Iran, Pakistan, and Uganda. Some 57% of them come from three countries: Syria, 6.3 million, Afghanistan 2.6 million and South Sudan 2.4 million. The top hosting counties are Turkey 3.5 million, Lebanon, 1 million, Pakistan 1.4 million, Uganda 1.4 million and Iran 1 million.
Jordan shelters over three quarters of a million Syrians; during the Iraq wars, this relatively poor country sheltered a similar number of Iraqis, and still hosts tens of thousands of Iraqi Christians who’ve fled persecution at home.
These figures are of those registered by the UNHCR. The real numbers are much higher. The Lebanese government estimates that there are more than 1.5 million Syrian refugees in the country.
Much of the focus these days is on the Middle East – Syria and its neighbours, on Libya and the frail boats crossing the Mediterranean, on the war in Yemen which has killed over thirteen thousand and displaced over two million.
But situation in Africa is as dire.
More than 2 million Somalis are currently displaced by a conflict that has lasted over two decades. An estimated 1.5 million people are internally displaced in Somalia and nearly 900,000 are refugees in the near region, including some 308,700 in Kenya, 255,600 in Yemen and 246,700 in Ethiopia.
By August 2018, the Democratic Republic of the Congo hosted more than 536,000 refugees from Burundi, the Central African Republic and South Sudan. And yet, there are over 4.5 million Congolese people displaced inside their own country and over 826,000 in neighbouring countries, including Namibia, Angola and Kenya.
Should the present situation in Sudan deteriorate into civil war, another tide of humanity will hit the road.
And closer to home, there are millions of refugees in Asia.
As of March 2019, there are over 100, 000 refugees in 9 refugee camps in Thailand (as of March 2019), mainly ethnic Karen and Shan. Refugees in Thailand have been fleeing ethnic conflict and crossing Myanmar’s eastern border jungles for the safety of Thailand for nearly 30 years.
There were an estimated 1 million Rohingya living in Myanmar before the 2016–17 crisis, and since August 2017, an estimated 625,000 refugees from Rakhine, had crossed the border into Bangladesh.
The top-level numbers are stupendous. The detail is scary.
Some 52% of the world’s refugees and displaced are children. And many are unaccompanied. Every hour, around 20 children run for their lives without their parents to protect them.
Children are the most vulnerable to disease and malnutrition and also to exploitation and lose years of schooling. Millions are elderly and are also face health problems.
And the problems facing young people and adults are all enormous. International aid is limited and host countries often unsympathetic. Work opportunities are few, some countries even forbidding refugees to take work, whilst unscrupulous employers exploit the desperate. Migrants are often encouraged, sometimes forcibly, to return to their countries of origin regardless of whether or not it is safe for them to return. There are reports that many have returned to Syria into the unwelcoming hands of the security services.
Refugees have lived in camps and towns in Pakistan and Thailand, Namibia and Kenyan for decades. Most refugee children were not born in their parents’ homelands.
And the camps are by no means safe havens. There may be no shelter or only basic shelter in tents; no privacy; a lack of clean water; meagre food; limited medical care; and the threat of injury, disease and epidemics. They may be poor physical security and armed attacks, and abuse by the authorities and officials. There may be organized crime, shakedowns and extortion, corruption and bribery.
Families may have become separated, exposing women and children without the protection of male family members to more fear and violence. Women are subsequently vulnerable to harsh conditions, including potential sexual and physical and abuse, poor healthcare, and unequal access to food and water. They may be coping with the loss of the head of the family and with the changing roles and responsibilities that come from being the sole parent. They may not know if their male family members will return to them safely and they must deal with the stress and anxiety, the grief and loss arising from their recent experiences. They might be fearful of the future, which in a camp is unknown and unpredictable
Australia and Refugees
Of all displaced peoples, 17% of them are being hosted in Europe. According to recent data published by the UNHCR, Germany is home to the most refugees by far in Europe – 1.4 million in total. By comparison, France and Sweden have 402,000 and 328,000 respectively, and the UK, 122,000.
Australia’s contribution to the world’s refugee problem is but a drop in the ocean. But we have a long established humanitarian refugee settlement programme for people officially recognized as refugees by the UNHCR and selected for third-country settlement in Australia.
Our humanitarian migration intake for 2016 -17 was the highest year on record. The intake of 24,162 was some 10% of our broader migration program which saw 225,941 permanent additions to the Australian population, and included the special intake of Syrian and Iraqi refugees (an estimate 12,000 places over several years).
The figures are 17,500 in 2017-18 and similar in 2018-19, whilst Scott Morrison has pledged to freeze the number of humanitarian arrivals for the next term. Under the policy there will be an overall target of 60 per cent of the offshore component for women, up from 50.8 per cent in 2017-18. The Government will also push to increase the number of refugees and humanitarian entrants being settled in regional Australia from a target of 30 per cent to 40 per cent in 2019-20, whilst insisting that new arrivals will only go to areas where there is strong community support.
Coffs Harbour
Coffs Harbour is one of several refugee intake towns in NSW, along with Armidale, Newcastle, Wollongong and Wagga Wagga. It’s medical and educational facilities have….
Coffs Harbour hosts several organizations dedicated to helping former refugees settle in Australia. They arrive in Australia on specific humanitarian visas and become permanent residents the moment they are admitted into the country. – and hence cease to be refugees.
SSI looks after them when they first arrive in Coffs Harbour. North Coast Settlement Services, a division of Saint Vincent de Paul Society, takes over once SSI’s work is done – after between six and eighteen months depending on a family’s needs, whilst the privately run Sanctuary organization assists settled migrants with such matters as family reunion and employment. An ancillary NSW government agency, the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS), assists new arrivals with psychological support, and particularly, the effects of PTSD. STARTTS services include counseling, group therapy, group activities and outings, camps for children and young people, English classes and physiotherapy
I spend two days a week as a volunteer with Settlement Services International, a Sydney-based community organisation that administers the Humanitarian Settlement Program (HSP) which supports refugees from the moment they arrive at the airport, provides essential support and information to assist refugees settle in Australia and empower them to gain independence and build strong connections in their new communities. SSI helps with the needs of new arrivals and the challenges of settling in a new country. Its aim is to enhance self-reliance with a focus on English language skills, education and job readiness.
SSI administers the Humanitarian Settlement Programme in several centres in regional NSW, including Coffs Harbour, Newcastle and Armidale. In all three areas, SSI has teams of staff on the ground who work with refugees, humanitarian entrants and their local communities to help new arrivals to through their initial settlement. The SSI team includes case managers and volunteers from the local community and from the refuge community itself
SSI’s work includes meeting and greeting, arranging temporary accommodation on arrival; orientation, including familiarization with Australian ways, our services and institutions, and getting around Coffs Harbour; basic official matters like Centrelink, banking, and health services; English classes at TAFE and enrolling children at schools; dealing with real estate agents, rental leases and looking after their rental properties.
Where do our clients come from?
When first volunteering, I worked for Anglicare. New arrivals were largely from Myanmar and Congo – mostly Christians – and from Afghanistan. Many of the latter came to Australia under the “woman at risk” programme – mothers and children with no father. Whilst all are Muslim, many were Shia Hazaras, a Turkic people persecuted by the Sunni Taliban. Since SSI took over from Anglicare in September 2017, whilst Burmese and African families continue to arrive, the emphasis has been on Yazidis from Iraq and Syria, and particularly from the Yazidi heartland of Sinjar in northern Iraq, where they endured enormous suffering and hardship at the hands of the Islamic State. Considered infidels by Da’ish, they were targets of a campaign of genocide from 2014. More than five thousand were killed, and some five to seven thousand were abducted and enslaved – mainly women and children. Such was the danger that the UNHCR and the Australian and other governments took whole families straight out of the war zone rather than from camps outside Iraq.
Yazidis are ethnically Kurdish, and their language, Kurmanji, is Kurdish. Their society is hierarchical and endogamous. Their religion, Yazidsm, is a monotheistic religion and has elements of ancient Mesopotamian faiths, including ancient Persian Mithraism, and some similarities to the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Because Yazidis believe in reincarnation and turn to the direction of the sun when praying, it has been thought – erroneously, that the religion has its origins in ancient Persian Zoroastrianism and Hinduism. They believe in the one god, the creator of all things, who delegated the ongoing management to a heptad of seven holy beings or angels, the chief of whom is Malek Taus – the Peacock Angel.
Malek Taus has in the past been associated, by Muslims and Christians, with Iblis, Satan, and the fall of proud Lucifer. This misinterpretation has led, historically, to Yazidis being perceived as devil worshipers, and thus being subject to persecution and pogrom. The atrocities of Da’ish were only different from past assaults and massacres in their scale and longevity.
Volunteering
Whilst case managers specifically look after the new arrivals, they depend upon a team of volunteers to assist them in a wide variety of tasks that we locals take for granted. for example: taking new arrivals them to medical or bank appointments, showing them how to use the bus network, setting up accommodation prior to arrival, minding children whilst parents attend appointments, and even helping folk to purchase use lawn mowers – there are few lawns in Iraq and Afghanistan.
As a volunteer, past and present tasks have included walkabouts to familiarize new arrivals with Coffs Harbour, accompanying clients to house inspections when seeking new rental accommodation, and assisting with rental application forms; sending important documents like birth, marriage and education certificates to Social Services’ translation service for official translations; helping clients to apply for bus concession cards, school bus cards, and children’s sport vouchers; and assisting with NBN plans and connections. I have fixed broken cupboards, replaced light bulbs, checked out washing machines and kitchen stoves. and taking families to school interviews.
As I can get by with spoken Arabic and can read and write the language, and as i am reasonably proficient with computers, I have helped with online applications and prepared resumes. I have shown clients how to budget their money, and have run a class on how to set up and use smart phone calendars to help them make and keep appointments. On occasions, I am asked to just drop in on clients to see how they are getting on, and sort any basic house problems.
My most rewarding experiences have been: assisting case managers at the airport when the clients first arrive. It’s a very emotional moment for all involved; Taking families who have never seen the sea before to the seaside; helping a clients get a job; and helping STARTTS run a youth group for children and young people by registering the young attendees
How I got into this
Since my twenties, I’ve had an interest and, indeed, a passion for the Middle East, its history and politics, its people and culture, its languages and religions. I’ve travelled often to the region, and have studied it formally and as a hobby. I learned standard Arabic in the seventies and worked in academic and government research. Though I took a very different road for two decades, I returned to Syria in the noughties and got back into Arabic both standard and colloquial (two relatively distinct languages).
On retirement, I wanted to do volunteer work, and by happenstance, Coffs Harbour was a refugees intake town with several organizations dedicated to assisting new arrivals. At first, I used my knowledge of Arabic script to assist Farsi-speaking Afghans, and then the Iraqi and Syrian Yazidis arrived. Though their native tongue is Kurdish Kurmanji, and few could speak English, many spoke Arabic. SSI had several Arabic speaking support-workers, and some new arrivals had good English and now work as Arabic and Kurmanji speaking support staff, I am able to step in when they are already booked. Who’d ever have thought I’d be able to use and grow my Arabic in Coffs Harbour.
The Refugees’ Journey
Who is a migrant? Who is a refugee? Who is an asylum seeker?
Migrants
A migrant is a person who makes a conscious choice to leave their country to seek a better life elsewhere. Before they decide to leave their country, migrants can seek information about their new home, study the language and explore employment opportunities. They can plan their travel, take their belongings with them, and say goodbye to the important people in their lives. They can continue to phone friends and family, or write, email or Skype them without fear of adverse consequences. They are free to return home at any time if things don’t work out as they had hoped, if they get homesick or if they wish to visit family members and friends left behind.
People who choose to migrate for economic reasons are sometimes called “economic refugees”, especially if they are trying to escape from poverty. But they are not recognized as refugees under international law. The correct term for people who leave their country or place of residence because they want to seek a better life is “economic migrant”.
However, the displacement of people caused by such economic circumstances, or by natural disasters like flood, drought or extreme weather, can contribute towards political, social and ethnic tensions that can precipitate refugee crises. Effective and timely external assistance from neighbours and donor nations will often help to avert this. Aid is therefore provided in an effort to keep people in their homes or in their home countries.
Refugees
The 1951 United Nations Convention relating to the Status of Refugees states:
“Any person who owing to a well founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his/her nationality and is unable, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself/herself of the protection of that country.”
Refugees are forced to leave their country because they are at risk of, or have experienced persecution. Their concerns are human rights and safety, and not economic advantage. They leave behind their homes, most or all of their belongings, family members and friends. Some are forced to flee with no warning, and may not be able to say goodbye to friends and family, and may never be able to contact or see them again.
Many refugees have experienced significant trauma or been tortured or otherwise ill-treated. Their journey to safety is fraught with hazards, many risking their lives in search of protection. They cannot return home unless the situation that forced them to leave improves.
Location is all important. During civil unrest and conflict, people may be forced to leave their homes, but do not leave their country. These internally displaced persons (IDPs) are often referred to as refugees. But, whilst refugees and IDPs may flee for similar reasons, their legal status is very different. Whilst remaining within the borders of their home countries, IDPs are legally under the protection of their own government, even in cases where the government’s actions are the cause of their flight. A person cannot be recognized as a refugee unless they are outside their home country.
Asylum Seekers
These seek protection as refugees, but their claim for refugee status has not yet been assessed. Many refugees have at some point been asylum seekers, that is, they have lodged an individual claim for protection and have had that claim assessed by a government or UNHCR.
Some refugees, however, do not formally seek protection as asylum seekers. During mass influx situations, people may be declared “prima facie” refugees without having undergone an individual assessment of their claims, as conducting individual interviews in these circumstances is generally impracticable (due the large numbers involved) and unnecessary (as the reasons for flight are usually self-evident). In other cases, refugees may be unable to access formal status determination processes or they may simply be unaware that they are entitled to claim protection as a refugee.
It is important to note that refugee status exists regardless of whether it has been formally recognized. People do not “become” refugees at the point when their claims for protection are upheld – they were already refugees, and the assessment process has simply recognized their pre-existing status. People become refugees (and are entitled to international protection and assistance) from the moment they flee their country due to a well-founded fear of persecution, as stipulated in the Refugee Convention.
What causes a person or a people to flee their home country?
The most common causes are war and civil unrest, persecution for political or religious beliefs, or ethnic and racial identity, and human rights violations by government authorities or rogue militias. There could be extreme political instability and fighting; assassinations of people associated with certain political or social groups; arbitrary arrest and torture, mutilation and degradation that can happen without warning; routine sexual violence towards women and girls; forced conscription of child soldiers, forcing families to flee to protect their children; and conscription for slave labour. Governments are unable to protect their citizens, and may actively participate in violations, leaving people with no place or person to turn to for protection.
Often people will hang on, hoping things will improve. Flight is the last option because it means leaving everything behind – home, possessions, jobs, education, family and friends, language, culture and identity. People are often forced to flee with very little warning, no time to collect identity documents or precious things, or say farewell to family, friends and neighbours. They may have to travel long distances, often on foot or in small boats, and through dangerous territory or waters. They may go for long periods without food and water. They may become in danger of being intercepted, robbed or recruited, raped or killed, imprisoned or repatriated.
Life in the Refugee Camps
The fortunate might reach a camp or other place of relative safety. In the camp there may be no shelter or only basic shelter in tents; no privacy; a lack of clean water; meagre food; limited medical care; and the threat of injury, disease and epidemics. They may be poor physical security and armed attacks, and abuse by the authorities and officials. There may be organized crime, shakedowns and extortion, corruption and bribery.
Families may have become separated, exposing women and children without the protection of male family members to more fear and violence. Women are subsequently vulnerable to harsh conditions, including potential sexual and physical and abuse, poor healthcare, and unequal access to food and water. They may be coping with the loss of the head of the family and with the changing roles and responsibilities that come from being the sole parent. They may not know if their male family members will return to them safely and they must deal with the stress and anxiety, the grief and loss arising from their recent experiences. They might be fearful of the future, which in a camp is unknown and unpredictable
The Role of the UNHCR
The office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) is mandated by the United Nations to protect refugees and help them find solutions to their plight. It has over 4,000 staff in 120 countries and an annual budget of about US$1 billion. In addition to legal protection, UNHCR now also provides material relief in major emergencies either directly or in partnership with other agencies.
Refugee protection is covered by International Human Rights Law, and this sits within a broader framework of international law. The agency responsible for the oversight of international human rights law is the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR).
Refugees are accorded certain rights under international law, including
The right not to be sent back to a country where their life or freedom would be in danger
The right to receive public relief and welfare support at the same level as nationals
The right to access education and health care
The right to work
Entitlement to be issued with identity papers and travel documents
The role of the UNHCR is to
Safeguard the rights and wellbeing of refugees
Ensure that every person can exercise the right to seek asylum and find safe refuge in another country
Promote long-term solutions to the refugees’’ plight utilizing the options of voluntary return, local integration in the country of first asylum, or resettlement in a third country
Ensure that refugees are treated appropriately by countries that have signed the UN Convention
Ensure that refuges are given the same rights as nationals of the countries they are accepted into
Protect refuges from being forced to return to their home countries if it is likely they will be persecuted
Promote the reunification of families
Take into account the special needs of particular refuges classes, e.g. women and children
UNHCR’s “durable solutions” for refugees:
Voluntary repatriation, the preferred long-term solution – going back to the country of origin when it is safe for them to return country. Voluntary repatriation is encouraged if it is safe and reintegration is viable. Indeed, most refuges prefer to go home as soon as circumstances permit and a degree of stability has been restored.
Local settlement and integration is the next preferred option – making a home in the country to which they first fled. Such local settlement may e spontaneous with new-comers establishing a new community. Integration is facilitated there are common ethnic groups or co-religionists. However, there may be a political affiliation between the government of their homeland and the country of first asylum which may lead to continued harassment and persecution.
Resettlement in a third country – often as a last resort, when refugees can neither return home nor remain in the country of first asylum, and are then selected by the UNHCR and sent to a third country to start a new life. Some eleven countries offer resettlement on a regular basis: Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Sweden, the UK, and the USA.
Whilst the UNHCR strives for “durable solutions”, the reality of the global refugee problem is that many countries hosting refugees embrace “non-durable” solutions such as:
“Warehousing” – refugees remain indefinitely in a camp where freedom of movement is restricted, basic supplies are scarce and there are few opportunities for any meaningful activity
Involuntary Repatriation – refugees are sent back to their country or origin while it is still unsafe. Sometimes refugees are forced back; sometimes they return because this is the “least bad option”
Secondary Movement – refugees themselves attempt to get to a western country in which they can lodge a claim for refugee status. This often involves clandestine travel using people smugglers and it can be very dangerous.
Settlement and Arrival
Refugees are selected for settlement in Australia by the Department Immigration and Border Protection, in conjunction with the UNHCR. Before arriving in Australia, humanitarian entrants are required to go through security and health checks.
The Australian Cultural Orientation program (AUSCO) is provided to humanitarian visa holders who are preparing to settle in Australia. The program provides practical advice and the opportunity to ask questions about travel to and life in Australia. It is delivered overseas, before they begin their journey. The International Organization for Migration (IOM) is currently contracted to deliver AUSCO on behalf of the DIBP.
The average length of time spent in a camp or in a place of first refuge is 17 years, and migrants may have little experience beyond this. Children may not even have known their home country. Many will have experiences extreme instability and uncertainty. Being selected for resettlement can be an overwhelming experience, and can include feelings of intense elation on one hand and fear and anxiety on the other.
Under such circumstances, a person may not always be aware of the potential difficulties of resettlement. On arrival, feelings can quickly move from elation and joy to culture shock, resentment, dislocation and confusion. It can take months, years even, for new arrivals to understand aspects of their new country and adapt to it.
To rephrase Euripides, those whom the state wishes to destroy, it first demonizes.
When the president of Chile was killed in the military coup d’état that brought Augusto Pinochet to power on 9th September 1973 (yes, that first, forgotten 9/11), ex post facto justification for the bloody coup and its equally bloody aftermath was provided by the content of the drawers in the dead presidents desk. Though never corroborated, there were alleged to contain proof of an imminent communist takeover, and evidence of drug taking and black magic.
Cut to Panama in December 1989, and the US invasion of Panama, ostensibly to take out strongman and erstwhile ally Emmanuel Noriega. There, in the ruins of the city, was Allende’s desk. The same communist literature, the drugs, the voodoo.
Cut to Mogadishu, Somalia, December 1992. US marines led a doomed UN intervention to take out the warlord. Mohamed Farah Aideed. Enjoy the folly in widescreen in Ridley Scott’s masterful Black Hawk Down. And although the villain decamped unscathed, guess what he left behind? Yes, Allende’s desk, contents intact. Actually, the desk had transformed into a bedside table, but the contents now included, shock horror, red silk pyjamas!
Communism. Drug taking. Black magic. And the sheer, un-American decadence of red silk pyjamas. The State Department pressed the hot buttons of white, Christian US morality to garner domestic support for its military adventures. The desk never came to light after the fall of Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. No doubt the Serbian authorities kept is existence hidden.
And it was never found at Waco because it was no doubt destroyed in the fire of state retribution. But David Koresh, self-proclaimed millenarian prophet, with his apparently indoctrinated and deluded followers, his harem, and his guns, was singled out for treatment very different to that meted out to scores of likeminded and heavily armed fringe dwellers scattered across the USA. To paraphrase Colin Powell, they were demonized, they were isolated, and they were destroyed. And on prime time television too. In that land of paradoxes, few eyebrows were raised when gun-toting members of the KKK offered to assist the DFDA and FBI in their assault on the besieged compound.
When Navy SEALS swooped on Abbottabad in Pakistan to take out long-sought-after Big Bad Osama bin Laden, they took careful notes of the contents of his bookshelves. An eclectic collection of reading matter – and pornography. No kindles, no iPads, so no eBooks or ePorn, which just went to show what a tired, old, out-of-date codger he was at the end of his days. The Pentagon has yet to reveal what they found on Osama’s bedside table. Maybe that voodoo and witchcraft stuff? And Osama’s pyjamas?
Though they both bequeathed sumptuous palaces to their conquerors, Saddam Hussein and Muammar Gaddafi were both spared the indignity of their cupboards being laid bare. But they were both caught hiding in drainpipes, which may show that the restless ghost of Allende’s Desk may have be laid at last.
Rumours of the inevitable demise of current bogeymen Bashar al Assad, Vlad Putin and Abu Bakr al Baghdadi are exaggerated. And the Fat Controller of Korea is still entertaining the world with his eccentricities and imaginative executions. So what will it be? Desks or drainage. And the long arm of the law has yet to reach inside another famous public enemy’s Knightsbridge hideaway. Yet, being the on-line, wired chap that Julian is, we may be disappointed.
And so it goes, as Vonnegut’s Kilgore Trout often declaimed when mad things happened. The American way of preparing the nation and its friends for a military adventure. First select your enemy. Give him horns and a tail. The latter day manifestation of the Judeo-Christian personification of the evil Other, the Dark Side of us all, and the public swallows and follows…Because it supports their own value system, their own perception of self, their own identity, and thereby, they’re own interpretation of what is and what is not appropriate behaviour. Then, hang on for a bumpy ride!
These are lands of testament and prophecy, of sacrifice and sacrament, of seers and sages, of vision and vicissitude, of warriors and holy men. The spiritual and the temporal have melded here for millennia. We see still the remnants of ancient empires and the echoes of their faiths. We chart their decline and fall in the fortunes of their monuments and their mausoleums, in the “tumbled towers and fallen stones, broken statues, empty tombs” where “ghosts of commoners and kings walk the walls and catacombs of the castles and the shrines”.
The cloud-capp’d tow’rs, the gorgeous palaces, The solemn temples, the great globe itself, Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4 Scene 1
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, The lone and level sands stretch far away. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias
Read also,The Rubble Of Palmyraby Leon Wieseltier, published in The Atlantic, 5th September, 2014
The Lebanese Civil War broke loose forty years ago this month. A cold war fuelled, by aggregating hostility between the Palestinian refugee community, a militarized state within a state, and their reluctant Lebanese hosts, became hot with deadly clashes between Palestinian and Maronite militias. Sects, clans, families, and the political parties and militias that gathered about them, went for their guns, the hounds of hell were loosed, and the massacres began.
In a Levantine echo of the Thirty Years War that raged through Western Europe from 1618, cities were destroyed and the countryside ravaged as armies, militias and gangsters fought over the fallen body of a divided and devastated land. Muslims fought Christians, Sunni fought Shi’a, Maronites fought Orthodox, Druze fought Muslims and Christians, Syrians fought Lebanese and Palestinians, communists fought nationalists, and Palestinians, at one time or other, fought everyone, including other Palestinians. And all changed partners and enemies in a bloody danse macabre that was at once mediaeval and mid-20th Century in its savagery.
This Hobbesian “war of all against all” drew in outsiders. Syrians, who during the course of their intervention, changed allies and adversaries as their political and strategic aims and interests mutated, and ruled the country until, implicated in the assassination of popular former prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005, beat an undignified retreat (whilst never quite relinquishing the levers of power). Israelis, threatened by guerrilla attacks in the Fatah land of southern Lebanon, ostensibly invaded Lebanon to destroy the Palestinian military machine, and as the midwife in the birth of the Shi’a Hezbollah, waded with eyes wide shut into a quagmire that many have viewed as their Vietnam. Americans and French, who intervened with the aim of separating the warring sides and pushing them towards a ceasefire, departed in the aftershock of Hezbollah bombs that killed hundreds of their servicemen. And United Nations Blue Berets who serve and die still in the hostile borderlands.
The war raged for the next fifteen years, staggering to an end in 1990 after claiming over 150,000 lives and destroying the lives of tens of thousands of others, including over 100,000 permanently handicapped. Nearly a million souls fled their homes, and some 76, 000 remain displaced to this day, now forgotten in the midst of the new and greater Syrian diaspora, whilst tens of thousands emigrated permanently. There are still some 17,000 “disappeared” who may be either still in Syrian or Lebanese jails, or more likely, in one of hundreds of unmarked graves scattered across this tiny country.
There are no memorials, no cenotaphs, no national commission to trace the missing, and no Madiba to gather and reconcile the sundered tribes. Just memories of what those who endured call “the events”, and for some, a selective amnesia. A harrowing half-life endures, sleeping embers constantly being fanned to life by the ill winds that blow across the porous frontier with Syria and the iron curtain that separates Hezbollah from Israel. It said that old wars beget future wars. And in no land can this be more of a self-fulfilling prophecy if the Gods Of War have their way.
As well they might as the legacy lives on in the rise and rise of Hezbollah, a non-state that is stronger than the state. In the use of car bombs, suicide bombers, foreign hostages, and human shields as canny weapons in what we now call asymmetrical urban warfare. In the destruction of the Palestinians’ once formidable military muscle, now quarantined in the Gaza ghetto and the impotent Palestinian Authority. In remembrance of the massacres of Sabra and Shatilla that still haunt Israeli and Palestinian dreams, when Yasser Arafat decamped for Libya with his army and left his people at the mercy of the Phalange militia. The Palestinians are still in Lebanon, still yearning for their terra irredenta in the south.
And in Lebanon redux, some say the old hatreds linger still and could rekindle the fires of war. Others hope that a younger generation do not take the road to perdition travelled by their elders. Armed young men in Sunni Tripoli and in Beirut’s Shi’a suburbs, and fighting in Syria may disagree. Calmer countries chart their fortunes with the rise and fall of their financial indices, whilst Lebanese can check the political weather by watching the market price of hand-guns and Kalashnikovs. They may have buried the hatchets, but many know where they are buried.
The roots and fruits of the Lebanese civil war are myriad and complex. The redoubtable journalist Robert Fisk unravels them best in his tombstone of book, Pity The Nation. Read it and weep. For it is a bloody saga of trial and treachery, of enmity and endurance, of courage and cravenness, but most of all, of infinite sadness. And none more so than when he writes of a Lebanese doctor, Amal Shamaa: “I had to take the babies and put them in buckets of water to put out the flames. When I took them out half an hour after, they were still burning. Even in the mortuary, they smouldered for hours”. “Next morning”, Fisk continues, “Amal Shamaa took the tiny corpses out of the mortuary for burial. To her horror, they again burst into flames”. Such is the effect of phosphorous shells on mortal flesh.
The title of Fisk’s book is that of a poem written in 1931 by Khalil Gibran, Lebanon’s most celebrated poet, a poem that was both a prophetic testament and a testimony of times to come: “Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation”.
Pity the nation that is full of beliefs and empty of religion. Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave and eats a bread it does not harvest.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems the glittering conqueror bountiful.
Pity a nation that despises a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trumpeting, and farewells him with hooting, only to welcome another with trumpeting again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strongmen are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments, each fragment deeming itself a nation.
Kahlil Gibran, The Garden of The Prophet (1933)
ارحم على الامة
ارحم على الأمة المليئة بالمعتقدات والخالية من الدين.
ارحم على الأمة التي تلبس ثوبا لا يحاك.
وتأكل خبزا لا تحصد.
أشفق على الأمة التي تعتبر المتنمر بطلاً ،
ويعتبر منتصرها رائعا.
ارحم أمة تحتقر الشغف في أحلامها
لكنه يخضع لها عندما تستيقظ.
ارحم على الأمة التي لا ترفع صوتها
إلا عندما تمشي في جنازة ،
وتفتخر فقط بين أطلالها ،
ولن تنقذ نفسها عندما توضع رقبتها
بين السيف والكتلة.
ارحم على الأمة التي فيها رجل الدولة وهو ثعلب ،
والفيلسوف مشعوذ
فنه من الترقيع والتقليد
ارحم على الأمة التي تستقبل حاكمها الجديد بصوت عالٍ ،
ويقول وداعا له بسخرية ،
فقط للترحيب بآخر من خلال الاحتفال الصاخب مرة أخرى
ارحم على أمة حكماؤها أغبياء السنين ،
وأولئك الذين لا يزال رجالهم الأقوياء في المهد.
ارحموا الأمة منقسمة ،
وكل قطعة تعتبر نفسها أمة.
خليل جبران
Muslim gunmen clash with right-wing Phalange militiamen outside the Phoenicia Intercontinental hotel in Beirut, December, 1975.
Monday 25th April is Australia and New Zealand’s national day of remembrance for all Anzac solders killed and wounded in their nation’s wars, and to honour servicemen and women past and present. At first, the Anzacs fought in the British Empire’s Wars, beginning with the Boer War, and then through two World Wars. From the mid -twentieth century, they have fought and died in what could ostensibly be called America’s wars even though these were waged under UN, EU or western alliance auspices: Korea, Gulf Wars II and III, Afghanistan, and the current interventions in Syria and Iraq. Incidentally, Australian veterans commanded mercenary forces hired by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates that laid waste to towns and villages in Yemen during its recent civil way – with the help of American and British weaponry.
At the heart of the Anzac Day remembrance is the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps’ role the Dardanelles campaign of 1915-16, Winston Churchill’s grandiose and ill-conceived plan to take the Ottoman Empire out of the war by seizing the strategic strait between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean, thereby threatening Istanbul, the Ottoman capital. It was a military failure. From the initial seaborne assault to the evacuation, it lasted eight months and cost 114,000 lives with 230,000 wounded.
In 1915, Australians greeted the landings at Gallipoli with unbridled enthusiasm as a nation-making event. But it wasn’t long before they were counting the dreadful cost. More than 8000 Australians died during the Gallipoli campaign. As a loyal member of the British Empire, Australia eventually sent 330,000 men overseas to fight for the King. Volunteers all, not all of them white men – despite the authorities policy of recruiting only Australians of Anglo-Celtic stock, their ranks included many indigenous, Chinese and others. By the time the war ended in 1918, 60,000 of them were dead. As the late historian Ken Inglis once pointed out: “If we count as family a person’s parents, children, siblings, aunts and uncles and cousins, then every second Australian family was bereaved by the war.
[As for the Anzac Day march], I’d say only returned people could march. And then the day would come, I’d hope, when there’d be the last person marching, the last survivor as it were. And I’d think what a great day that would be … because it would mean we’d been at peace for a long time. And that’s what those men in the First World War were fighting for.”
Bill Gammage, historian and author of The Broken Years.
Gallipoli is cited as the crucible of Australian nationhood, but the Anzacs’ part in the doomed campaign was but a sideshow of the wider campaign. Although it is celebrated in Australian song and story, it was the Ottomans’ most significant victory in the war that was to destroy the seven hundred year old Ottoman Empire secure the reputation of its most successful general Mustafa Kemal, who as Ataturk, became the founder of modern Turkey.
Some thirty four thousand British soldiers died on the peninsula, including 3,400 Irishmen, and ten thousand Frenchmen – many of these latter being “colonial” troops from West and North Africa. Australia lost near on ten thousand and NZ three. Some 1,400 Indian soldiers perished for the King Emperor. Fifty seven thousand allied soldiers died, and seventy five thousand were wounded. The Ottoman army lost fifty seven thousand men, and one hundred and seven thousand were wounded (although these figures are probably much higher). An overlooked fact is that some two thirds of the “Turkish” solders in Kemal’s division were actually Arabs from present day Syria, Israel and Palestine – and a small number of European Jews who had settled there and who as Ottoman citizens were subject to conscription.
Gallipoli was indeed a multicultural microcosm of a world at war.
Whilst the flower of antipodean youth is said to have perished on Gallipoli’s fatal shore, this was just the overture. Anzac troops were despatched to the Western Front, and between 1919 and 1918, 45,000 Aussies died there and 124,000 were wounded.
Once upon a war, the Dardanelles Campaign of 1915-16 was a sideshow to the bigger theatres of the Eastern and Western Fronts. To some, it was a reminder that they could not stomach Winston Churchill for this was said to be his greatest stuff up in a career replete with such (although they would admit that he more than exonerated himself his and Britain’s Finest Hour). For many Australians and New Zealanders, it was a national baptism of fire, of youthful sacrifice on the altar of Empire. And notwithstanding the military defeat and retreat, the folly and foolhardiness, in the harrowing adversity and heroism, lay the bones of a young country’s enduring creation myth.
Former soldier James Brown, Anzac’s Long Shadow
There are abundant primary and secondary sources relating to the Dardanelles campaign and the Anzacs, but here is a wiki primer: Gallipoli Campaign
The genesis of a song …
Back in the last century, before ANZAC Day became the secular Christmas that it has become, before marketing people and populist politicians saw its commercial and political potential, before the fatal shore became a crowded place of annual pilgrimage, my Turkish friend, the late Naim Mehmet Turfan, gave me a grainy picture of a Turkish soldier at Gelibolu carrying a large howitzer shell on his back. Then there was this great film by Australian director Peter Weir, starring young Mel Gibson and Mark Lee. There were these images of small boats approaching a dark and alien shore, of Lighthorsemen sadly farewelling their Walers as they embarked as infantry, and of the doomed Colonel Barton humming along to a gramophone recording of Bizet’s beautiful duet from The Pearl Fishers, ‘Au fond du temple saint’ before joining his men in the forlorn hope of The Nek.
There were other melodies I could never quite get out of my head. One I first heard in a musical in Beirut before that magical city entered its Dark Ages – Al Mahatta, written by the famous Rabbani Brothers and starring the Lebanese diva Fayrouz. And The Foggy Dew, one of the most lyrical and poignant of the Irish rebel songs:
Right proudly high over Dublin town, they hung out the flag of war. ‘Twas better to die ‘neath that Irish sky than at Suvla or at Sud el Bar…Twas England bade our Wild Geese go that small nations might be free, But their lonely graves are by Suvla’s waves or the fringe of the grey North Sea.
Over three thousand Irishmen died at Gallipoli.
The song grew out of these many inspirations.
It was first performed in public by HuldreFolk in the closing concert of Coffs Harbour Folk Festival at the RSL on Australia Day 1984. When we had finished, there was absolutely silence in the hall. Then a voice cried out “the sky didn’t fall down!”, and the hall erupted with applause.
And here is HukdreFolk’s rendering of Russian poet Yevtushenko’s account of the parade of German prisoners of war through the streets of Moscow in 1941, juxtaposed with The Watchers of the Water.
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.
What candles may be held to speed them all?
Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.
The pallor of girls’ brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.
When it comes to stories about The Middle East, I am reminded of the Bobster’s closing lines in the wonderful ‘Black Diamond Bay’: “Seems like every time you turn around, there’s another hard-luck story that you’re gonna hear”. Anyhow, getting away from all the doom and gloom, here is something completely different.
Our recent visit to Jerusalem inspired several posts on this blog, and several songs. One of the latter, published below, examines the Jerusalem Syndrome.
This is a group of mental phenomena involving the presence of either religiously themed obsessive ideas, delusions or other psychosis-like experiences that are triggered by a visit to the city of Jerusalem. It is not exclusive to one particular religion or denomination, having affected Jews, Christians and Muslims from many different countries and backgrounds.
Jerusalem is all about faith and passion, and there is no city on Earth that people get more passionate about. The light is luminous. In high summer it almost shimmers. The very air is full of prayer and politics, passion and pain, and the rocks and stones virtually sing a hallelujah chorus of history. I am not a religious person, but I cannot help getting excited by the place – although I do not transcend to transports of delight and delirium.
In The Simpsons episode The Greatest Story Ever D’ohed, the Simpsons travel to Israel where Homer is afflicted with the syndrome, the illness and its effect on Homer being one of the plot’s central themes. In The X-Files episode Revelations, agents Scully and Mulder try to subdue a man afflicted with a form of the syndrome.
The featured photograph at the head of this blog is a real-life version of the above Simpsons picture. The man at centre stage is Carl James Joseph of Detroit, Michigan, ‘The Jesus Guy’ we encountered in the Church Of The Holy Sepulchre. He has been a common sight around the Old City for many years now.j
Of all the cities in the world, why Jerusalem?
“ The Arabs call the city ‘Al Quds’, “The Holy’. It was deemed sacred from pre-history. Those aforementioned iconoclast scholars suggest that Jerusalem was actually the holiest place in Islam, and that like Islam itself and the Prophet, Mecca and Medina were retrofitted to suit the conqueror’s narrative. A city of the mind as much as of this earth, it haunts the prayers and dreams of three faiths, and to this this day, it is coveted and contested. “The air above Jerusalem”, wrote Israeli poet Yehuda Amichai, “is filled with prayers and dreams, like the air above cities with heavy industry. Hard to breathe”. Arthur Koestler wrote: “The angry face of Yahweh is brooding over the hot rocks which have seen more holy murder, rape and plunder than any other place on earth”. Perhaps it is because Jerusalem is mankind’s number one hot spot! “There’s this thing that happens here, over the hell mouth”, says Buffy, “where the way a thing feels – it kind of starts being that way for real. I’ve seen all these things before – just not all at once”. More Jews have probably died violently in Jerusalem than in the Holocaust. And countless folk of other faiths have likewise perished”. From A Brief History Of The Rise And Fall Of The West by Paul Hemphill
A lot of folk put a lot of energy into mattters millenarian, when they could divert it to more practical matters like health, water, human rights, blah, blah blah… Some diligent souls have constructed a 3D virtual second temple as a template for its reconstruction. And they don’t care if they start a world war to get it built. Others strive to create a Caliphate that will precipitate the long foretold great battle at The End of Days. And yet others are endeavoring to recreate Noah’s Ark in Kentucky, USA. Different tribe, same psychosis. Never underestimate the irrational mind. For such is the power of myth and magic even in this techno day and age. More blood has been shed in and for Jerusalem than any other city on earth, and we ain’t done yet!
O Jerusalem!
Sound the trumpets of Zion to summon forth the saints.
From The Song of Solomon
O Jerusalem!
I never thought that faith could be so strong!
Ah, Jerusalem!
I never knew that faith could be such fun!
It’s something you don’t do at home.
It happens in Paris and Rome.
The fevered faithful’s illusion
That causes such holy confusion.
Scully and Mulder have fought it,
Homer Simpson has caught it
In Jerusalem.
Bear me up on angels wings
And other transcendental things.
Cradle me in Jesus’ arms,
Far from home but safe from harm.
Where the Golden Walls still glow,
Let my people go
To Jerusalem.
Never knew that faith could be so strong!
O Jerusalem,
Never knew that faith could be such fun!
Filipinas in a row harmonizing with “Swing Low
Sweet Chariot”.
Charismatic holy clown roams the alleys of the town,
Says he’s hunting down Iscariot.
Pentecostal Germans heard
Their pastor preach the Holy Word.
Drab babushkas clutch their crosses,
Eastern priest in black now blesses
Those who lie with arms out swept
On the rock where Jesus wept,
In Jerusalem.
Never knew that faith could be so strong!
O Jerusalem,
I want whatever they are on!
See that women dressed so plain, thinks she’s
Mary Magdelene
Waiting just beyond the Tomb for her Lord
To come again.
Is he not already here? Don’t you see him
Over there?
In his robe of woven wool, sandals, beard,
And flowing hair.
There’s lady known to me
Who would make a cup of tea
And take it to Mount Scopus every morning
To give to Christ when he returned in glory –
I tell you, I’m not making up this story!
Its Jerusalem!
I never knew that faith could be such fun!
O Jerusalem!
I want whatever they are on!
Sometimes in morning dreams, I see
The Holy City in front of me:
Forever and ever, and world without end,
We all need an invisible friend
In Jerusalem.
Jerusalem Syndrome? Tourist Goes Treasure Hunting in Old City Cave
Nir Hasson Ha’Aretz Mar 15, 2016
Zedekiah’s Cave is a remnant of what was the largest quarry in Jerusalem that dates back to at least Second Temple times. Daniel Bar-On
An American tourist was arrested last week after spending the night in Zedekiah’s Cave, also known as Solomon’s Quarries, which lies under the Muslim Quarter of Jerusalem’s Old City.
Last Thursday afternoon, when the site was open to the public, the 19-year-old entered the cave carrying a backpack. When closing time came, he hid in one of the crevices of the cave and the security people did not notice him as they checked the site before closing. He was there overnight and started digging in various sections of the cave, apparently seeking to find some of the treasures that various legends say have been buried there over the centuries.
While the cave is usually closed on Fridays, last Friday it was opened to do some development work. The workers found the tourist in the cave covered with mud, his backpack full of stones and shards that he’d dug up from the floor of the cave. He was handed over to police and his findings were confiscated.
During questioning the young man could not explain his motives for what he did. Police said he apparently has emotional problems and may have contracted the so-called Jerusalem Syndrome, a phenomenon involving religious obsessions or other psychosis-like experiences seemingly triggered in some people by visiting Jerusalem. He was released and has since left the country.
Zedekiah’s Cave is a remnant of what was the largest quarry in Jerusalem that dates back to at least Second Temple times. It covers some nine dunams (two and a quarter acres), with an entrance between the Old City’s Damascus Gate and Herod’s Gate. Over the years a number of legends and traditions have sprung up involving the cave. The Jewish tradition is that King Zedekiah tried to flee through the cave during the destruction of the First Temple.
A later Muslim tradition identifies the cave as “the cave of Korah,” the place where the biblical Korah and his allies were swallowed up by the earth when they tried to revolt against Moses.
In 1968 a resident of the Old City claimed that his grandfather had hidden three crates of gold coins in the cave before the War of Independence. He asked permission to search for the crates using signs his grandfather had left him and promised in return to give three-quarters of the treasure to the authorities. He was given permission to search but found nothing.
The cave also serves as a ceremonial site for the Freemasons from the 1920s to this day. The Freemasons revere the place, believing it to have been the site from which the stones for the First Temple were quarried. Since the 1980s the cave is operated by the East Jerusalem Development Corporation as a tourist site, and events are held there from time to time.
The Jerusalem Syndrome: Why Some Religious Tourists Believe They Are the Messiah
Chris Nashawaty, Wired, 17th February 2012
Shortly after his 40th birthday, the life of a man we’ll call Ronald Hodge took a strange turn. He still looked pretty good for his age. He had a well-paying job and a devoted wife. Or so he thought. Then, one morning, Hodge’s wife told him she no longer loved him. She moved out the next day. A few weeks later, he was informed that his company was downsizing and that he would be let go. Not knowing where to turn, Hodge started going to church again.
Even though he’d been raised in an evangelical household, it had been years since Hodge had thought much about God. But now that everything seemed to be falling apart around him, he began attending services every week. Then every day. One night, while lying in bed, he opened the Bible and began reading. He’d been doing this every night since his wife left. And every time he did, he would see the same word staring back at him—the same four syllables that seemed to jump off the page as if they were printed in buzzing neon: Jerusalem. Hodge wasn’t a superstitious man, he didn’t believe in signs, but the frequency of it certainly felt like … something. A week later, he was 30,000 feet over the Atlantic on an El Al jet to Israel.
When Hodge arrived in Jerusalem, he told the taxi driver to drop him off at the entrance to the Old City. He walked through the ancient, labyrinthine streets until he found a cheap hostel near the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. He had a feeling that this was important. Supposedly built on top of the spot where Jesus Christ was crucified and three days later rose from the dead, the domed cathedral is the holiest site in Christendom. And Hodge knew that whatever called him to the Holy Land was emanating from there.
During his first few days in Jerusalem, Hodge rose early and headed straight to the church to pray. He got so lost in meditation that morning would slip into afternoon, afternoon into evening, until one of the bearded priests tapped him on the shoulder and told him it was time to go home. When he returned to his hostel, he would lie in bed unable to sleep. Thoughts raced through his head. Holy thoughts. That’s when Hodge first heard the Voice.
Actually, heard is the wrong word. He felt it, resonating in his chest. It was like his body had become a giant tuning fork or a dowsing rod. Taking a cue from the sign of the cross that Catholics make when they pray, Hodge decided that if the vibrations came from the right side of his chest, it was the Holy Ghost communicating with him. If he felt them farther down, near the base of his sternum, it was the voice of Jesus. And if he felt the voice humming inside his head, it was the Holy Father, God himself, calling.
Soon, the vibrations turned into words, commanding him to fast for 40 days and 40 nights. None of this scared him. If anything, he felt a warm, soothing peace wash over him because he was finally being guided.
Not eating or drinking came easily at first. But after a week or so, the other backpackers at his hostel began to grow concerned. With good reason: Hodge’s clothes were dirty and falling off of him. He had begun to emit a pungent, off-putting funk. He was acting erratically, hallucinating and singing the word Jesus over and over in a high-pitched chirp.
“Jesus … Jesus … Jesus …”
Hodge camped out in the hostel’s lobby and began introducing himself to one and all as the Messiah. Eventually, the manager of the hostel couldn’t take it anymore. He didn’t think the American calling himself Jesus was dangerous, but the guy was scaring away customers. Plus, he’d seen this kind of thing before. And he knew there was a man who could help.
Herzog Hospital sits on a steep, sun-baked hill on the outskirts of Jerusalem. Its sprawling grounds are dotted with tall cedars and aromatic olive trees. Five floors below the main level is the office of Pesach Lichtenberg, head of the men’s division of psychiatry at Herzog.
Lichtenberg is 52 years old and thin, with glasses and a neatly trimmed beard. Born into an Orthodox Jewish family in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, he moved to Israel in 1986 after graduating from Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx and has worked at Herzog more or less ever since. It’s here that he has become one of the world’s leading experts on the peculiar form of madness that struck Ronald Hodge—a psychiatric phenomenon known as Jerusalem syndrome.
On a bright, late summer morning, Lichtenberg greets me in the chaotic lobby of the hospital, smiling and extending his hand. “You missed it!” he says. “We had a new Chosen One brought into the ward this morning.” We go down to Lichtenberg’s office; on top of a bookcase is a giant shofar, a curved ram’s horn that religious Jews sound on the high holidays. A middle-aged British man under the doctor’s care had used it to trumpet the Messiah’s—that is to say, his own—coming. Lichtenberg explains that allowing me to meet his latest patient would violate hospital policy, and he can’t discuss ongoing cases. He’ll talk about past patients as long as I agree to de-identify them, as I did with Hodge. “But,” he adds, “that doesn’t mean we can’t try to find a messiah of our own. In a few days, we’ll take a walk around the Old City and maybe we’ll find one for you there.”
There’s a joke in psychiatry: If you talk to God, it’s called praying; if God talks to you, you’re nuts. In Jerusalem, God seems to be particularly chatty around Easter, Passover, and Christmas—the peak seasons for the syndrome. It affects an estimated 50 to 100 tourists each year, the overwhelming majority of whom are evangelical Christians. Some of these cases simply involve tourists becoming momentarily overwhelmed by the religious history of the Holy City, finding themselves discombobulated after an afternoon at the Wailing Wall or experiencing a tsunami of obsessive thoughts after walking the Stations of the Cross. But more severe cases can lead otherwise normal housewives from Dallas or healthy tool-and-die manufacturers from Toledo to hear the voices of angels or fashion the bedsheets of their hotel rooms into makeshift togas and disappear into the Old City babbling prophecy.
Lichtenberg estimates that, in two decades at Herzog, the number of false prophets and self-appointed redeemers he has treated is in the low three figures. In other words, if and when the true Messiah does return (or show up for the first time, depending on what you believe), Lichtenberg is in an ideal spot to be the guy who greets Him.
“Jerusalem is an insane place,” one anthropologist says. “It overwhelms people.”
While it’s tempting to blame the syndrome on Israel’s holiest city, that wouldn’t be fair. At least, not completely. “It’s just the trigger,” says Yoram Bilu, an Israeli psychological anthropologist at the University of Chicago Divinity School. “The majority of people who suffer from Jerusalem syndrome have some psychiatric history before they get here.” The syndrome doesn’t show up in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but it and its kissing cousins are well-known to clinicians. For example, there’s Stendhal syndrome, in which visitors to Florence are overwhelmed by powerful works of art. First described in the early 19th century in Stendhal’s Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio, the disorder can lead to spontaneous fainting, confusion, and hallucinations. Paris syndrome, first described in 1986, is characterized by acute delusions in visitors to the City of Light and for some reason seems to preferentially affect Japanese tourists. Place, it seems, can have a profound effect on the mind.
What’s actually happening in the brain, though, isn’t completely clear. Faith isn’t easy to categorize or study. Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, has conducted several brain-imaging studies of people in moments of extreme devotion. The limbic system, the center for our emotions, begins to show much higher activity, while the frontal lobes, which might ordinarily calm people, start to shut down. “In extreme cases, that can lead to hallucinations, where someone might believe they’re seeing the face of God or hearing voices,” Newberg says. “Your frontal lobe isn’t there to say, ‘Hey, this doesn’t sound like a good idea.’ And the person winds up engaging in behaviors that are not their norm.”
SHE WOULD RUB HER TEMPLES, DESPERATE TO DIAL IN THE VOICE OF GOD LIKE SOMEONE TRYING TO TUNE IN A FAR-OFF RADIO STATION.
The psychosis typical of Jerusalem syndrome develops gradually. At first the victim may begin to feel symptoms of anxiety, nervousness, and insomnia. The next day, there may be a compulsive urge to break away from the rest of the tour group and visit holy places like the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem. Sufferers might follow this with a series of purification rituals such as shaving all of their body hair, clipping their nails, or washing themselves free of earthly impurities. The afflicted may then venture into the Old City to shout confused sermons claiming that redemption is at hand. In some cases, victims believe they are merely a cog in an ineffable process, helping to set the stage for the Messiah’s return with some small task they’ve been given. In more extreme cases, they can be swept up by psychotic delusions so intense, so ornate, that they become convinced they are Jesus Christ. “Jerusalem is an insane place in some ways. It overwhelms people, and it has for centuries,” Bilu says. “The city is seductive, and people who are highly suggestible can succumb to this seduction. I’m always envious of people who live in San Diego, where history barely exists.”
In other words, what you can blame Jerusalem for is looking like, well, Jerusalem. The Old City is a mosaic of sacred spaces, from the al-Aqsa Mosque to the Western Wall of the Temple Mount to the well-trodden stones on which Jesus supposedly walked. Like every city, it’s the combination of architecture and storytelling that makes Jerusalem more than just a crossroads. Great cities, the places that feel significant and important when you walk their streets, always rely on stagecraft—a deftly curving road, finely wrought facades, or a high concentration of light-up signage can all impart a sense of place, of significance. This architectural trickery can even instill a feeling of the sacred. The colonnades around St. Peter’s Square at the Vatican, the rock garden at Ryoanji temple in Kyoto, and the pillars at the Jamarat Bridge near Mecca all shoot laser beams of transcendence into the brain of a properly primed visitor. “Part of the experience of going to these places is the interweaving of past and present,” says Karla Britton, an architectural historian at the Yale School of Architecture. “There’s a collapse of time. And for some people who visit these sacred sights and spaces, this collapse can be psychologically disorienting. The whole act of pilgrimage is deliberately intended as a kind of disorientation.”
That in and of itself doesn’t make someone crazy. “There are a lot of people who come to Israel and feel God’s presence, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” Lichtenberg says. “That’s called, at the very least, a good vacation. God forbid a psychiatrist sticks his nose into something like that.” He smiles and rubs his beard. “But the question is, at what point is belief OK and at what point is it not OK? If someone says, ‘I believe in God,’ OK. And if they say, ‘I believe the Messiah will come,’ fine. And if they say, ‘I believe His coming is imminent,’ you think, well, that’s a man of real faith. But if they then say, ‘And I know who it is! I can name names!’ you go, wait a second—hold on!”
When people with Jerusalem syndrome show up at the hospital, doctors often just let them unspool their stories, however strange the narratives may seem. If the people aren’t dangerous, they are usually discharged. Violent patients might be medicated and kept under observation pending contact with their family or consulate. After all, the most effective treatment when it comes to Jerusalem syndrome is often pretty simple: Get the person the hell out of Jerusalem. “The syndrome is a brief but intense break with reality that is place-related,” Bilu says. “When the person leaves Jerusalem, the symptoms subside.”
Lichtenberg didn’t know any of this when he started at Herzog. Then, shortly after he began his residency in the late 1980s, he met a 35-year-old Christian woman from Germany. She was single and traveling alone in Israel. He remembers her as being gaunt, prematurely gray, and highly educated. The police had picked her up in the Old City for badgering tourists about the Lord’s return. “She arrived in a state of bliss because she believed the Messiah was coming,” Lichtenberg says. “I probably thought, she’s just meshuggeneh.”
Over the next few days, Lichtenberg underwent a transformation of his own. He became obsessed with the German woman’s case. He thought about how she would ricochet from periods of giddy rapture to moments of outright hostility and confusion. During her more manic moments, she wanted to share the Good News with the doctor. In her more depressive ones, she wandered the psychiatric ward desperately trying to hear the voices in her head that had gone momentarily silent. She would rub her temples as if she could dial in the voice of God, like someone trying to tune in a far-off radio station.
The woman stayed at the hospital for a month, until the doctor could arrange for her to be sent home. Lichtenberg has no idea what happened to her after she returned to Germany, but more than 20 years later he can still recall the smallest details of her case. “It was so interesting talking to her, but I was also a little embarrassed because there was no one at the hospital to encourage that sort of thing back then. At the time, the thinking here was more like, OK, what dosage is she getting? Should we increase it?”
This way of thinking is more sympathetic than many psychiatrists would call for. Actually, it wasn’t that long ago that one respected Israeli physician put two patients who both claimed to be the Messiah in a room together just to see what would happen. Each rabidly accused the other of being an impostor, barking fire-and-brimstone threats.
“People come to Israel and feel God’s presence,” Pesach Lichtenberg says. “There’s nothing wrong with that.”
Self-styled prophets have been journeying to Jerusalem on messianic vision quests for centuries. A certain Nazarene carpenter was merely the most charismatic and most written about. But it wasn’t until the 1930s that an Israeli psychiatrist named Heinz Herman clinically described Jerusalem syndrome for the first time. One of his early cases involved an Englishwoman who was so convinced the Second Coming was at hand that she climbed to the top of Jerusalem’s Mt. Scopus every morning with a cup of tea to welcome the Lord.
Most cases are harmless, but there have been disturbing exceptions. In 1969 an Australian tourist named Denis Michael Rohan was so overwhelmed by what he believed to be his God-given mission that he set fire to the al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s most sacred sites, which sits atop the Temple Mount directly above the Wailing Wall. The blaze led to rioting throughout the city. Rohan later said that he had to clear the site of “abominations” so it would be cleansed for the Second Coming. (The mosque was rebuilt by a Saudi construction company owned by Osama bin Laden’s father.)
More recently, an American man became so convinced he was Samson that he tried—and failed—to move a block of the Wailing Wall. An American woman came to believe she was the Virgin Mary and went to nearby Bethlehem to search for her baby, Jesus. And a few years ago, the Israeli press reported on a 38-year-old American tourist who, after spending 10 days in Israel, began roaming the surrounding hills muttering about Jesus. Shortly after being hospitalized, he jumped off a 13-foot-high walkway near the emergency room, breaking several ribs and puncturing his lung.
Lichtenberg says that during times of uncertainty and conflict (not infrequent in Israel), admissions to his ward spike. For example, in late 1999, when the rest of the world quaintly panicked about the Y2K bug and whether they’d be able to use their ATMs on January 1, Israel was on high alert, afraid that deranged religious crazies would flock to Jerusalem in anticipation of a millennial apocalypse. At the peak, five patients a week were brought into Lichtenberg’s ward. The country’s defense forces were concerned that someone would try to blow up the al-Aqsa Mosque, finishing the job Rohan started 30 years earlier.
One of the patients brought into Herzog at the time was an old man who sold novelty wooden back-scratchers near Lichtenberg’s home. The doctor knew him. He also knew that the man firmly believed he was King David. “Was he psychotic? Yeah, OK,” the doctor says with a shrug. “But I didn’t see any need to keep him. Unfortunately, he passed away recently. Otherwise, I would have loved for you to meet him. He would have been happy to talk to you.”
At 9 the next morning, the doctor and I are walking the narrow streets of the Old City. It seems like a good way to conduct an interview, outside the sterile confines of the hospital. Plus, we are still hoping to meet a messiah.
The scents of cumin and turmeric and cardamom are so overwhelming that my eyes begin to water. And even though the doctor has lived in Jerusalem for 25 years, his sense of direction in the winding alleys of the Muslim Quarter seems sketchy at best. After several embarrassing wrong turns and switchbacks, we find ourselves standing face-to-face with an Arab butcher skinning a goat that hangs on a giant rusty hook. We detour left down a dark passageway and nearly crash into a dozen elderly Italian women dressed in the black clothes of mourning, carrying a 6-foot wooden cross on their hunched backs. They’re huddled together like a rugby scrum, chanting in Latin as they take plodding steps along the Stations of the Cross, reenacting Jesus’ bloody march to his crucifixion.
We move aside to let them slowly pass. Neither one of us says a word. And as soon as they turn the corner and disappear from view, he turns to me. “I’ve got chills. Do you?”
I have to admit I do.
The doctor asks me to try to describe what I’m feeling as if I am one of his patients, and I stammer a response about going to Sunday School as a kid and the thick smell of incense I remember at Easter Mass at my father’s Syrian Orthodox church. But, really, as soon as I try to put the sentiment into words, the chills subside and trickle away.
This is essentially what happened to the patient I’ve called Ronald Hodge. After a month of taking antipsychotic drugs under Lichtenberg’s care at Herzog, he gradually came to accept the hazy reality of what he’d been through. He was still confused, but he was calmer, more cooperative, and he no longer felt voices thrumming through his body. The American consulate arranged for his discharge and put him on a flight back to the States. He went back to his old life.
Lichtenberg and I come to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Inside the entrance is the Stone of Unction, symbolizing the spot where Jesus’ body was anointed and wrapped in a shroud after he was taken down from the cross. Men are kneeling with lit candles. Women are kissing the stone and running their rosaries along the top of it. Many are crying. It’s profoundly moving.
We head east toward the Wailing Wall. There, rows of men dressed in black and wearing sidecurls are rocking back and forth as they pray. Lichtenberg grows quiet and slowly approaches the wall, rubbing his hand on one of the giant stones. He leans forward and softly kisses it. After a few minutes, he looks around and says, “No messiahs here today. Sorry.” He seems honestly apologetic.
Later, over a cold drink, Lichtenberg confesses that he sometimes views his patients with less-than-scientific eyes. “I guess when someone comes into the hospital claiming to be the Messiah, my interest is not just clinical,” he says. “Sometimes you can see right away that the patient isn’t the charismatic type. They’re just a sick patient. But, OK, yes, I’ll admit it. There have been a number of people over the years who managed to arouse a certain hope that, hey, wouldn’t it be great if this person really is the One? So far I’ve been disappointed. But you never know who will walk through that door tomorrow.” His cell phone buzzes on the table. He’s needed back at Herzog.
As Lichtenberg walks off toward the hospital, the drone of the muezzin’s call to prayer crackles and hisses over a loudspeaker. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up. Is this the strange power of Jerusalem? Or just the result of an overactive limbic system? It feels deeper than that—more holy. But then again, what is deeper than neurochemistry?
