Fight or Flight الكر و الفر – Making Numbers Humans جعل الأرقام بشر (Part 3: Fled and Forgotten)

In March of this year, 2015, I was asked to conduct an intake with an Iraqi in one of the peripheral parts of Amman. Spring had just started, the weather was getting warmer and the sun flooded our offices in Jabal Amman, when I called Martin to fix an appointment for the intake. On the phone, he was very polite and anxious to veil his desperation. He started giving me a brief flashback on his story, some scattered scenes of a tragedy that seemed too absurd to be true. And it was in that moment that it dawned on me. Suddenly I stood still, when before I was walking around in the room disquietingly. His voice turned into a mere whisper and his words transformed into a mass of syllables I was failing to decipher. I realised something that I had noticed in other professionals working in this domain, something I had so far been struggling to qualify as either good or bad, something that seemed to be just part of their professionalism. And it broke something inside me when I realised that I had developed this damned skill that ran so strongly against my most dearly held beliefs and convictions:

*I had stopped feeling. *

I was desensitised. Not completely, but to an extent that shocked and ashamed me. And I realised that this process of detachment had started a year before, when I was immersed in the research for my Master thesis about European adolescents who join militant factions in Syria and Iraq. The phenomenon had, back then already, an enormous presence on social media where individuals and groups regularly posted videos, photos and updates on their statutes. In the context of my research, I was exposed to the horrific reports available online that went from the ‘mere’ faces of dead fighters to the ‘mere’ remnants of those who had fallen victim to the atrocities. While looking at the first picture had cost me quite some effort, the hundredth and second one I was able to examine in detail with very little emotional attachment.

I then recalled, in another flashback, that when I assisted to the first intake, the one of Paul, it struck me to see the interviewer talk to the PA[1] in a very objective tone, focusing on the facts and responding almost drily to his narrative. She advised me in the follow-up to this quite perturbing experience, not to become too attached to the individual story but rather keep track of the bigger picture and focus on the pieces of information that were likely to corroborate his or her case. I confessed to her, back then, that this was something I struggled with but that I would do my best to detach myself in the interest of helping the PA.

View on Jabal Al Nuzha, the neighbourhood, in which Martin was living

And there I was, not even half a year later, listening to Martin and responding in a very dry and professional tone, focusing on the facts and the things I was able to do for him instead of leaving him with the illusion that I could do more. Indeed, in that professional sense, emotional detachment was probably the only way to effectively help someone in the realm of misery but, on a visceral level, it felt heavy and overly mechanic, like I lost a piece of my humanity. However, I was about to recover part of it a few days later.

It was on a Thursday, when I went to see Martins at his place – which turned out be literally no more than just a place. He had hobbled the few meters to the gate on his crutches to welcome me. He was still young, not even ten years separated us. We went inside, through a door that had abandoned his purpose long time ago. He invited me to take place on the small bedlike furniture and apologised for being unable to offer me anything, although still insisted on giving me a small bottle of water. We then sat down and he started his narrative.

Together with his brother, he was running a small jewellery shop in one of Baghdad’s neighbourhoods. In Summer 2007, at the height of the sectarian tensions, his brother received a letter stating “Go away”, yet did not give it much attention nor thought. One week later, when Martin came into the shop, where he usually arrived after his brother, he was surprised to find it empty. They started searching him, without success for the few days after. Like most individuals affected by the post-war upsurge of criminality, they were afraid to inform the police that they considered as corrupt and untrustworthy. One week later, Martin’s brother was found: shot in the head, with signs of torture and his feet tied to a car, behind which his body, dead or alive, had been dragged around. He was Martin’s older and only brother.

In the aftermath of these horrors, Martin tried to flee through Turkey, but his attempt failed. He returned to Baghdad and omitted going back to the shop or his house for almost four years. During that time, he was hiding in a small shelter, afraid of the fate that would await him if he went back. After four years, when the situation in his neighbourhood seemed calmer, he returned to his house and resumed working in the shop on a part-time basis. A few weeks went by without any trouble, and despite his ongoing trauma from the circumstances of his brother’s decease, he started regaining some confidence and hope. Hope, that should be shattered not even a month after his return.

On the first summer day in 2011, he went to his shop in the morning as usual. When he opened the door, it exploded in his face with a massive blow, which was the last thing he would be able to recall months later. He went into a coma that lasted over a month. When he woke up, he found himself in hospital, in a body that was not the one he remembered being his. He had suffered severe injuries on his legs, tummy, arms and ears and undergone three major surgeries while he was in coma. After he left the hospital, returning to his neighbourhood had ceased to be an option. He went back to hiding from his attackers who would soon find out that he had not been killed in the explosion. He stayed underground for another three years. Then, in the middle of Summer 2014, he received a letter saying “your brother’s fate is expecting you”. The same day he fled to Amman, Jordan.

Today, he lives in conditions a healthy human being could not bear. The small room he inhabits is barely isolated; his bed is a wreck; the small stove, that is supposed to cook food he does not have, is old and rusty. He needs follow-up surgeries on most parts of his body that were damaged. He is unable to sleep at night because of the pain – pain in his body that has not recovered yet; and pain in his head where the memories of his brother’s murder keep haunting him.

When he looks at me, I still see young man with a glimpse of optimism that he keeps clinging onto in order to survive the next day. Those dark eyes are witnesses of a life that was not lived; a life, of which the last seven years were spent in darkness and agony and whose future is uncertain, to say the last. He tells me that he was always a nice person, someone who was appreciated by his friends and family. He says he used to play the oud[2] and sing and enjoy life. He was looking to fall in love with someone.

The rent he received from UNHCR was cut after a few months for reasons that were not specified. He kept hobbling to the UNHCR office to enquire about the rent, but only to be advised to wait. The queue in front of the office is endless and the UNHCR workers are overwhelmed by the massive wave of refugees that keeps streaming into the Jordanian capital. According to the World Bank, Jordan is currently hosting almost 3 million refugees (that is more than a third of the number of people living in Switzerland) from conflict zones in its near or far neighbourhood. Most of them, like Martin, have no prospects of returning to their home country or staying in Jordan due to their precarious living situation and the absence of a proper legal status that leaves them vulnerable to institutional and individual abuses. They attempt to apply for resettlement to a third country, where they hope to live in safety and dignity, receive medical help and offer their children a future of their own – and not simply the rubbish that is left from the (de)generation that preceded them.

[1] Principal Applicant for resettlement (UNHCR)

[2] Guitar-like instrument