Nicholas Seeley on Rumors, Love and War in a Syrian Refugee Camp

A Syrian Wedding
by Nicholas Seeley
Amazon, 35 pages, $1.95

 

What motivated you to write the book? Why focus on a Syrian wedding at a refugee camp?

The book emerged out of the work I was doing as a freelance reporter in Jordan. I’d been following the situation Syrian refugees coming here since mid-2011, when things in Syria really began to get rough—but when the Za’atari camp opened, in 2012, it was clear this was a different kind of crisis than the ones Jordan was used to. This was more than a transit center or a holding area. It was very quickly becoming like a city, filled with people trying to continue life in the face of an uncertain future. So I felt very early on, that this was an important story, and that what these Syrians were experiencing, on a personal and a social level, was something a reporter could explore in some depth, and which would merit the telling.

And there were also political, economic aspects to the story of refugees in Jordan that I found interesting. I wanted to do something in-depth about the crisis, but didn’t have a strong central idea I felt would draw readers in and give me space. Then, in late 2012, we started hearing these disturbing stories coming out of the camp, of rape, of women forced into prostitution by poverty, tales of refugee families forcing very young girls into marriage, or essentially selling them into prostitution. The camp was being portrayed as this Mad Max kind of place. And I was compelled to find out more, because these were stories that really deserved attention.

The more time I spent trying to chase down those stories, the more ephemeral they became. There were rumors everywhere, but no one actually knew a family that had married off a daughter for money—not even a friend of a friend. The hospitals, midwives and women’s health centers in the camp were not seeing rape victims, or sex workers, or even women who appeared to be in danger of becoming sex workers. Surely these things must happen on occasion, because everything happens eventually, but the idea that these abuses were widespread was all rumor.

So then who was starting the rumors, and why?

There are always multiple causes. One part of the answer may lie with aid agencies: they have an absolute responsibility to be vigilant about the social issues that result from a crisis, such as people turning to prostitution, or sexual exploitation of women and children. These are what the humanitarian world calls “negative coping strategies,” which people turn to in desperation. Humanitarian actors have to be on the lookout for this stuff, and to try and prevent it—even when there is no strong evidence yet that it’s happening. So if on Monday morning a major humanitarian agency talks about preventing sexual exploitation of women and girls, then by noon you will have people assuming that sexual exploitation is a big problem, which is not necessarily so.

That’s one way rumors start. Another is the tension between refugees and host communities. I should say that Jordan has been very accepting, keeping its borders open for three years for a staggering number of refugees. It’s a country that is not wealthy, and had huge economic and development issues long before this crisis. But that said, there are certainly people and groups in Jordan that are very willing to portray refugees as dangerous or degenerate in order to justify excluding them.

Any reader can see Mohammad and Amneh’s wedding through the lens of their own, or their parents’ or a friend’s, and can begin to understand the massive changes that becoming a refugee has made in these people’s lives.

There are also tensions within the communities in the camp. You put people in a difficult situation, and previously existing social divisions tend to be exaggerated. In Za’atari, everyone is trying to define their identity in a new context. If you lost your job tomorrow, and your house was bombed and you were forced to move your family to Mexico and live in a refugee camp, and every week the young men were clashing with the federales, and there were rumors flying around about people selling their children into prostitution, you would have to find a way to explain that to yourself. You would find it very difficult to believe that “people like you” would behave like that. So it’s common to hear people in one neighborhood of Za’atari say, “all those problems come out of this other neighborhood on the other side of the camp. The people who settled there, they’re not really good people.” Then you go there and it’s just the same, and people are saying the same things about the neighborhood you just left.

But the largest portion of blame has to be given to the media, because we are altogether too credulous when it comes to sensational stories. There are a lot of reasons for that. Some of them are structural, and based on how we rely heavily on “expert” interviews and interlocutors who are simply repeating stuff they have heard. We over-generalize from anecdotes. Interviewing one prostitute does not show a trend. Reporters often aren’t familiar with the local context—to give one example, if you want to report on underage marriage in a Syrian refugee camp, you should know something about underage marriage in prewar Syria, which was very common in some communities and not at all in others. Otherwise you misinterpret what you see and hear.

Then there’s the constant pressure to get clicks and page views. Sexual violence seems to be something Western audiences like reading about. Once one outlet reports something, all the others tend to assume it’s true, and put pressure on their reporters to hunt down a similar story. Few ask if what was reported was really representative, and work independently to make their own assessment. Audiences, for their part, tend to like stories that reinforce stereotypes rather than challenge them. Finally, there are differences in ethical standards—in some markets, media outlets still consider it OK to pay cash for stories, but of course, in a humanitarian emergency in particular, that raises huge questions about the reliability of the information being reported.

So it’s very easy for rumors to make their way into print and once that happens, they’re everywhere.I spent weeks going back to the camp, trying to find solid information on the sex abuse stories I was hearing—but what I found were fragments of the story behind those stories. And I met numerous refugees, got to spend time with them and hear about the problems they had, and their worries about their lives. Through that, I became interested in the ordinary, the everyday life of a refugee camp. That is what readers can relate to most, not the most extreme cases. I wanted to show what a normal wedding in the refugee camp was like in part because it offered a window onto the background of the issues of gender and marriage and exploitation that had brought me to the story, but primarily because it’s a ritual that just about everyone, from every culture, has experienced in some way. Any reader can see Mohammad and Amneh’s wedding through the lens of their own, or their parents’ or a friend’s, and can begin to understand the massive changes that becoming a refugee has made in these people’s lives.

How might a Syrian wedding look outside of Za’atari?

Life outside the camp has its own set of challenges, and it is important to remember that many of the people outside of camps are actually worse off than those in them. The Za’atari refugees feel stuck and stultified, but most of their most basic needs are met. Refugees outside still have very limited rights: most can’t work, they have limited protection and legal status, they receive less assistance. Their futures in Jordan or Lebanon or Turkey are nearly as limited as the futures of those in Za’atari.

At the same time, refugees are not monolithic: They are all kinds of people, all creeds and classes. So there will be as many different ways of dealing with becoming a refugee as there are people. Every wedding will be different. There are still refugees who have the means to have big parties, who can maintain the appearance of normalcy. Others who have no space for that, because surviving day-to-day is too much of a struggle.

And, certainly, there are some who will resort to the kind of “negative coping strategies” I described before. Especially from Lebanon, where there are no camps, and the overall level of assistance is less, we are hearing an increasing number of credible stories of women turning to prostitution, and of young girls getting married in ways that are not traditional, but that are based on their families’ or their own hope that marriage will offer them security and protection that refugee life cannot. More families sending their children to work, or to beg. That is still not the norm—but it is the future, if better solutions can’t be found for these people.

Younger refugees have grown up surrounded by violence. How does that shape these Syrians’ world perception, whether of the West, the larger region, and so forth?

There is anger at the West—though more disappointment. Even after everything that has happened, even after the Iraq war, many Syrians still believe in the promise of the West, especially America. They may not like some of our leaders or our policies, but the values we profess—independence, innovation, self governance, equality and human dignity—these are things they admire and aspire to. They may not have wanted to realize those values the same way Americans do, but in some way Syrians too were believers in American exceptionalism. They thought America would be able to stop this disaster, and their perception is that we couldn’t be bothered. That was what I heard most often in the camp. That America was a lie, that our leaders were just as corrupt and venal and hypocritical as theirs.

I do hear some people saying the Syria disaster has created a generation that will hate America, and lust for revenge. In some extreme cases, that may be true, but I think most will simply try to get on with their lives however they can. But they do so now in a world where the America they imagined is gone—and that is also a smaller, poorer world than the one they thought they knew.

How would you fix the humanitarian refugee crisis? Is the solution to simply build more camps? Integrate them more into the formal economy? How do you see this ending?

There is no solution to a crisis like this, there is only mitigation, and every action taken to forestall the worst consequences of the mass displacement will have consequences of its own. Building more camps would have consequences for the refugees forced to live there—and would likely do little good, now that the countries around Syria have all virtually closed their borders. A camp has limited value if it does not provide people a place to flee.

There are people now trumpeting the possibilities of economic integration, but that would have politically unacceptable consequences for Jordan and the other countries hosting refugees. This comparison has been made often, but it bears repeating: would America ever permit the economic integration of 80 million Mexicans? Even if it could happen, and if the results were overall positive, injecting vitality into the economy and encouraging growth, there would still be new tensions, new winners and losers. But the politics make that solution unimaginable.

The closest thing to a “solution” would be an end to the fighting in Syria, which seems farther off than ever. Even if the war were to end, there would still be probably hundreds of thousands or millions of Syrians (and, now Iraqis) who, for one reason or another, would never be able to go home. A peace agreement would only solve the problem if it came with a massive, global resettlement program, like the ones undertaken for Afghans and Southeast Asians in the last century.But even now, there is little sign of the political will for a major resettlement push, and it is unthinkable that places could be made for the 3 million now refugees.

So there isn’t going to be an ending. Through some cleverly worked-out combination of continued assistance to refugees and host countries, resettlement, economic integration and development aid, and peace-building in Syria that would allow some returns, with each of these initiatives carried out at a manageable scale, the world might be able to hold off some of the worst consequences of the collapse of Syria. Or it might not. Either way, everything will continue to get worse.

 

Nicholas Seeley is a freelance writer based in Amman, Jordan. His story “A Syrian Wedding” is available as an Amazon Kindle Single.