A few days ago, when tensions between Pakistan and India were at its peak, I wrote in search of my column Pahalgam’s wounds, war politics and peace, that the recent attack not only mourned many families but also contaminated the atmosphere of the subcontinent with the smell of ammunition. How long will we be counting the bodies? Now, the voices of war are slowly dimming and diplomacy is starting to pave the way.
This scenario is giving the heart a strange dash. But when I look at the silence on the borders, the heart thinks of millions of the faces that these wars have fallen victim to. The children, the women, the elderly who lost their identity from their homes. Those for whom the world has become a ruthless carpenter and the land is merely an ignorant land.
Today, the number of refugees is touching the horrific boundaries worldwide. According to the UN agency, by the end of 2024, more than 100 million people have either been displaced or wandered across the borders. This is not just statistics. It is a count of scattered lives. This is the debris of the dreams that even flourished at the doorstep of houses. The story of migration is nothing new. Whether it is forcibly evacuated from Spain or after the Armenian massacre in the early 20th century, the human history of millions of refugees has been written with the blood and tears of refugees.
The bloody migration of the subcontinent in 1947 was one of the largest and most tragic migrations in history. About one million four million people crossed the borders to save their lives, and millions of them died. The wounds of this migration are still on the existence of the two countries today. Similarly, the Palestinian jokes were the tensions of olive gardens and peace settlements after the establishment of Israel in 1948. Millions of Palestinians were expelled from their land. Today, for the third and fourth generation, they are living in refugee camps without a passport, without any land. Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Afghanistan, South, Sudan, Ethiopia, there is a caravan somewhere in every corner of the world that is wandering in the paths for its survival.
Being a refugee is not just a geographical change, it is the scatter of existence. Being a refugee is to lose the dream of a child who had to go to school, but now we have to learn to lose the bread in the tent. Being a refugee is the patience of a woman who seeks refuge for children in helplessness and hides her tears. Being a refugee is the curb of the old man who is separated from his land, his tongue and his soil and is lost in alien cities. Then when these refugees knock on the borders, the world that claims to be a human rights activist pushes them back. The waves become a cemetery for them, the walls rise. Documents and visas lock their fate.
When the United States and Europe close their doors to refugees, when the Gulf countries do not take any place in their cities for millions of homeless people, when African governments oppress their own people, the question arises, was human equality in the UN Charter was just a dream? We see that after the Ukrainian war, European countries welcomed the Ukrainian refugees, but when the talk was made by Syrian or African refugees, the same doors were closed.
It is a distinction based on color, race and religion, which has once again embarrassed the global conscience. But in the middle of every darkness, there is a burning somewhere. An anonymous volunteer in the hands of an anonymous volunteer, knowledge in the words of an anonymous teacher, hope in the pen of a fearless poet, these are the rays that still make the world a human world. Schools established for refugee children, welfare organizations operating in war -torn areas, opening their homes to refugees, are all lamps that burn across the borders and even between the hearts.
Remember! The refugees do not demand our sympathy, they demand their basic human rights, the right to live, the right to identify, the right of honor. We are somehow traveling to the inhabitants of these homeless land. Their story is connected to our dreams, their wounds are part of our human history. If we ignore these anonymous travelers, remember that tomorrow history will make us stand in the same apathy. We have a duty to learn the skills to look across the borders. Think of human beings beyond the religion of religion. And keep a gentleman in your heart for every sarcastic man who is separated from his soil from his dreams and flows on a path.
What torture will they go through, who are displaced with no identity? Every moment will pass in fear. No human has to go through this pain and helplessness. Yet hope should not be left. Perhaps a lamp is burning in a dilapidated tent on an unknown path that dares to beat the darkness.
