Joshua: Do you see this kind of idea being maybe even able to prevent future wars? Because, I think, one of the problems is that we don’t know each other. And if we are able to know each other, we realize that there is no reason to fight.
Firas: Yeah, you’re right. That’s what exactly happen. And people, the children, they are not children. They are going to lead the world after us. And we need to prepare all our children, your children and our children, prepare them to lead the world better than now.
October 26, 2010
Yarmouk Camp, located on the southern outskirts of Damascus, is home to approximately 250,000 Palestinian refugees. Mazen Rabia lives in Yarmouk and works as an Arabic teacher. Joshua Brollier interviewed Mazen to ask for his insight into daily life in the camp over fifty years after the first Palestinians were forcibly displaced to Yarmouk from Palestine by the newly forming Israeli state.
Written July 22, 2010. Re-posted from the Oct/Nov edition of the NY Catholic Worker Newspaper.
A rosary hangs from the mirror of Yusef Amir’s (1)taxi cab. In Islamabad, the capital city of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, openly displaying Christian iconography is not unheard of, but it is still a bold identification with a minority that has been the target of significant discrimination and persecution within the past several years. Attacks on Christians are not frequent in Islamabad itself, but according to a recent report put out by the Human Right Commission of Pakistan, at least 117 Christian houses were burned to the ground by Islamic fundamentalists in the residential areas of Gorja, Korianwala and other parts of Pakistan. Christians in Pakistan also suffered hardships last year, such as being threatened to convert to Islam, prosecution under blasphemy laws and social ostracization.
“The military is the muscle that protects the ruling elite from the wrath of the people,” says Pakistani political analyst Dr. Mubashir Hassan. “Right now, people are out on the street; blocking roads, attacking railway stations, etc. If you read the papers, it seems as though a general uprising has started all over Pakistan.”
Islamabad— “Our situation is like a football match. The superpower countries are the players, and we are just the ball to be kicked around.” This sentiment, expressed by a young man from North Waziristan, has been echoed throughout many of our conversations with ordinary people here in Pakistan and in Afghanistan. Most are baffled that the United States, with the largest and most modern military in the world, can’t put a stop to a few thousand militants hiding out in the border regions between Pakistan and Afghanistan.
For six days in late May, 2010, Emergency, an Italian NGO providing surgery and basic health care in Afghanistan since 1999, welcomed us to visit facilities they operate in the capital city of Kabul and in Panjshir, a neighboring province. We lived with their hospital staff at both places and accompanied them in their weekly trips to various FAPs (First Aid Posts) which the hospitals maintain in small outlying villages.
May 24, 2010 Refugee Family Living in Shah Mansoor
Islamabad—Abir Mohammed, a refugee from Bajaur, says that the battles which raged in his home province since 2008 have dramatically changed his life. We met him in a crowded Islamabad café where he politely approached customers, offering to shine their shoes. He isn’t accustomed to shoeshine work. But, he needs to earn as much money as possible before reuniting with family members who await him, near Peshawar, in a tent encampment for displaced people.
Islamabad—On May 12th, the day after a U.S. drone strike killed 24 people in Pakistan’s North Waziristan, two men from the area agreed to tell us their perspective as eyewitnesses of previous drone strikes.
Through the Soviet invasion and occupation, the Afghan civil war and now the United States war and occupation, a young man named Zainullah, around 25 years of age, has seen war his whole life. But you’d never know it by his engaging smile and his relaxed countenance. Zainullah currently lives at a paraplegic center in Hayatabad, Pakistan, a suburb of Peshawar, the capital city of the North-West Frontier Province. He is originally from the Helmand province of Afghanistan, which has been one of the most intense battlegrounds during the “war on terror” launched by the United States in 2001.
May 14th, 2010Schoolkids from Swat: Photo taken by G. Simon Harak
In May of 2009, under tremendous pressure from the United States, the Pakistani military began a large-scale military operation in the Swat District of Pakistan to confront militants in the region. The UNHCR said the operation led to one of the largest and fastest displacements it had ever seen. Within ten days, more than two million people fled their homes.
Now, a year later, our small delegation visited the Swat District. After a breathtaking ride through the Hindu Kush mountains, traveling in a pick-up truck from Shah Mansour in the Swabi district, we arrived in Swat’s capital, Saidu Sharif.
