Refugees Daily - Internal Global Press Review

BOGOTÁ, Colombia — A Colombian peace deal that the president and the country's largest rebel group had signed just days before was defeated in a referendum on Sunday, leaving the fate of a 52-year war suddenly uncertain.

A narrow margin divided the yes-or-no vote, with 50.2 percent of Colombians rejecting the peace deal and 49.8 percent voting in favor, the government said.

The result was a deep embarrassment for President Juan Manuel Santos. Just last week, Mr. Santos had joined arms with leaders of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or the FARC, who apologized on national television during a signing ceremony.

The surprise surge by the "no" vote — nearly all major polls had indicated resounding approval — left the country in a dazed uncertainty not seen since Britain voted in June to leave the European Union. And it left the future of rebels who had planned to rejoin Colombia as civilians — indeed, the future of the war itself, which both sides had declared over — unknown.

Both sides vowed they would not go back to fighting.

Mr. Santos, who appeared humbled by the vote on television on Sunday, said the cease-fire that his government had signed with the FARC would remain in effect. He added that he would soon "convene all political groups," especially those against the deal, "to open spaces for dialogue and determine how we will go ahead."

Rodrigo Londoño, the FARC leader, who was preparing to return to Colombia after four years of negotiations in Havana, said he, too, was not interested in more war.

"The FARC reiterates its disposition to use only words as a weapon to build toward the future," he said in a statement. "With today's result, we know that our challenge as a political party is even greater and requires more effort to build a stable and lasting peace."

The question voters were asked was simple: "Do you support the final agreement to end the conflict and construct a stable and enduring peace?" But it was one that had divided this country for generations, as successive governments fought what seemed to be a war without an end and the Marxist FARC rebels dug into the forest for a hopeless insurgency.

To many Colombians who had endured years of kidnappings and killings by the rebels, the agreement was too lenient. It would have allowed most rank-and-file fighters to start lives as normal citizens, and rebel leaders to receive reduced sentences for war crimes.

"There's no justice in this accord," said Roosevelt Pulgarin, 32, a music teacher who cast his ballot against the agreement on a rainy day at an elementary school in Bogotá, the capital. "If 'no' wins, we won't have peace, but at least we won't give the country away to the guerrillas. We need better negotiations."

María Fernanda González, 39, an administrator at a telecommunications company who voted against the deal, said she simply did not trust the FARC.

"Why didn't they turn in their arms and tell the world what happened to the people they kidnapped, as a gesture during the talks?" she asked.

Her household seemed to reflect the deep divides in Colombia, with her husband, Carlos Gallon, 42, an engineer, voting for the deal. Mr. Gallon said the country had no choice but to stop fighting.

But still, he admitted, "I understand why she is voting no."

The referendum result overturned a timetable intended to end the FARC insurgency within months. The rebels had agreed to immediately abandon their battle camps for 28 "concentration zones" throughout the country, where over the next six months they would hand over their weapons to United Nations teams.

Under the agreement, rank-and-file fighters were expected to be granted amnesty. Those suspected of being involved in war crimes would be judged in special tribunals with reduced sentences, many of which were expected to involve years of community service work, like removing land mines once planted by the FARC.

On Sunday, the government said it had sent negotiators to Havana to begin discussing the next steps with the rebels. After the president's statement that he was reaching out to opposition leaders in the Colombian Congress like former President Álvaro Uribe, experts predicted a potentially tortured process in which Mr. Uribe and others would seek harsher punishments for FARC members, especially those who had participated in the drug trade.

"Everyone has said, including those who sided 'no,' that they could renegotiate the deal, but obviously that would have political challenges," said César Rodríguez, the director of the Center for Law, Justice and Society, a nongovernmental organization in Colombia focusing on legal issues. "It was a small majority, but a valid majority, and that has consequences."

On Sunday night, politicians who had strongly opposed the deal were already signaling that it was time to negotiate more stringent terms with the rebels.

"We want to redo the process," said Francisco Santos, a vice president under Mr. Uribe, who was against the deal but supports an eventual peace with the FARC. "In democracy, sometimes you win, but sometimes you lose."

The war left brutal scars in Colombia. About 220,000 people were killed in the fighting, and six million were displaced. An untold number of women were raped by fighters, and children were given Kalashnikov rifles and forced into battle.

Unable to put down the insurgency, the government turned in the countryside to paramilitary groups run by men who became regional warlords. The state seemed swept aside in the fighting.

In the end, the war lasted so long that it might have been difficult for many Colombians to forgive the FARC.

"The adults that were born before the war now number very few," said Juan Gabriel Vásquez, a novelist who voted for the deal. "As a society, we are a massive case of post-traumatic stress, because we have grown up in the midst of fear, of anxiety, of the noise of war."

Many people lost because of the outcome. Among them was President Santos, who had staked his legacy on the peace deal and had been rumored as a possible contender for the Nobel Peace Prize. FARC members, who had been on the run in the jungle for decades, saw their hopes of rejoining Colombia as political leaders, including 10 seats in Congress, suddenly dashed for the time being.

Perhaps the biggest winner on Sunday was Mr. Uribe, the former president, and the Colombian far right, which had vowed to defeat the deal at the ballot box. Mr. Uribe had argued that the agreement was too lenient on the rebels, who he said should be prosecuted as murderers and drug traffickers.

"Peace is an illusion, the Havana agreement deceptive," Mr. Uribe wrote on Twitter on Sunday after casting his "no" vote.

In the end, a small majority of Colombians agreed with him.

Correction: October 2, 2016
An earlier version of this article misstated the surname of a Colombian novelist who voted for the deal. He is Juan Gabriel Vásquez, not Velásquez. The article also misstated the surname of a music teacher who voted against the deal. He is Roosevelt Pulgarin, not Pulgarib.
 

Editorial-Opinion



DONALD TRUMP has telegraphed his intentions, if not always consistently, to radically shift immigration policy and, in so doing, subvert America's vitality and international standing as a beacon of diversity and tolerance. While he cannot unilaterally undertake every change he proposes, there is plenty he can do, on his own, to overhaul America's approach to immigrants. His program would undercut the nation's economic prospects, its values and the vibrancy of its neighborhoods and communities.

A President Trump could slash the number of refugees allowed to enter the country, including from Syria, downgrading President Obama's goal of admitting 110,000 in the fiscal year that started Saturday. Federal law gives presidents the power to bar any "class of aliens" they deem "detrimental to the interests of the United States," so Mr. Trump could as promised ban immigrants from Muslim-majority countries. The effect would be to undercut Washington's standing with allies as well as America's relations with its own Muslim citizens – a blow to America's capacity to fight terrorism.

In the same category of feasible but self-defeating policies, Mr. Trump could revoke work permits and the protection from deportation granted by Mr. Obama to nearly 1.5 million young undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as children by their parents. Just as Mr. Obama has used executive orders to shield those "Dreamers," Mr. Trump could remove the shield and thereby expel from the country a generation of promising, American-educated young immigrants, most of whom have little or no memory of their birth countries.

As president, Mr. Trump could also unilaterally broaden the categories of undocumented immigrants targeted for accelerated deportation; they would include, as he has pledged, visa overstayers. Together, they amount to more than 5 million people.

True, it would be staggeringly expensive to find, detain, process and remove so many migrants in those categories. Yet considering the pride of place his campaign has given to accelerated deportations, it is likely Mr.Trump could exert his will to a significant extent.

A study by the American Action Forum, a conservative group, estimates that deporting all illegal immigrants, as Mr. Trump has threatened, would require more than 90,000 federal deportation agents; there are fewer than 5,000. The nation's 34,000 detention beds would have to increase tenfold, and more than 30,000 additional federal lawyers would be needed to process the throngs that would jam immigration courts.

The price of carrying out such a mass expulsion (along with the wall Mr. Trump would build) would not be limited to the estimated budgetary expense ($400 billion to $600 billion), nor even the blow to the economy of depleting the labor force by more than 10 million workers. The most lasting and damaging cost would be to America's prestige globally and to its founding principles. A nation that expels millions of long-standing residents with deep roots in their communities is not a leader; it is a fearful, mean and meek place, heartless and spiritually crabbed. This is not the America envisioned by the Founding Fathers; it is certainly not a home of the brave.
 

She wore her finest green velvet dress and chatted about her grandkids over doughnuts and coffee at a house of worship in New Jersey.

In many ways, she's a typical, doting, 60-year-old grandmother. But she's also a Syrian refugee.

The woman was forced to flee her war-ravaged country and rebuild her shattered life after her son got caught in a barrage of sniper fire amid a brutal five-year civil war.

"The young men from the village, they put him on a stretcher, just two sticks and a blanket, and carried him 7 kilometers to Jordan," the new resident of Elizabeth, N.J., told the Daily News last week.

She recalled leaving nearly everything behind and racing across the border to be by her wounded son's side. After the escape, the Jordanian border sealed shut, with three of her adult daughters still trapped in their hometown of Daraa.

While most fellow New Jersey grandparents get to take their loved ones' safety for granted, she worries about bombs dropping over her grandchildren's heads and gunfire crackling through their streets.

She worries they could end up like little Omran Daqneesh — the 5-year-old Syrian boy photographed alone and covered in blood in the back of an ambulance following an air strike in Aleppo last month.

"When we left, the bombing was all around us. There was always shooting, always bombing, every day," she said while attending a support group held at the Darul Islam Mosque in Elizabeth.

10,000 Syrian refugees find new home in U.S.
"Every day I worry about my daughters. They're still there. Their children are young," she said.

Concerned about possible reprisals on her relatives still living in Syria, the mother of nine asked to be identified as only Om Awad, a variation on one of her cultural names.

She arrived in New Jersey six months ago with her 80-year-old husband, one of their other daughters and the son who still has a bullet lodged in his back.

They're some of the more than 10,000 Syrian refugees resettled in the U.S. in the last 12 months, meeting a goal set by the Obama administration.

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Om Awad — one of 306 Syrian refugees settled in New Jersey in the last year — spoke to The News in Arabic translated by Huda Shanawani, 63, a Syrian-American woman who's lived in the U.S. for 47 years.

Shanawani works with the International Rescue Committee, local organizations and other New Jersey mosques and synagogues to set newly arrived refugees up in independent apartments with all the food, clothes, phones, furniture and services they need to get back on their feet.

"Nobody wanted to leave Syria," Shanawani explained. "But to have their kids watch this killing in front of them, that's what made them leave."

She gathered 25 refugee women and 10 of their children Thursday for the monthly get-together at Masjid Darul. Toddlers crawled on the ornate red and gold carpeting as the moms shared their harrowing stories.

One young mother recalled fleeing Aleppo with her husband and four daughters amid devastating warfare at the end of 2012.

"A part of the building where we lived was hit by a bomb," the woman who asked to be identified only as Rana, 32, said. "We didn't take any clothing, any belongings, nothing. We left everything behind."

She said her daughters — now 13, 11, 10 and 1 — were terrified.

"When we left, that was the beginning of the bombing. The area where we lived, that was the epicenter. My children were very young, they were very tense," she recalled. "We couldn't sleep from fear."

She said her family first fled to the southwestern city of Daraa — the cradle of the 2011 uprising against Syrian President Bashar Assad that sparked the civil war — but more bombings erupted about eight months later.

No Licensing in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

Desperate and determined to survive, they walked across the border to Jordan and ended up in a refugee camp, she said.

"It was very, very hard living in the camps. We slept on the floor, on stones. The water was very far for us. The bathrooms were very far. If you wanted to cook it was very far. My husband was not allowed to work or drive a car," she recalled.

"Everything was forbidden to us. We had to live by whatever they handed out to us and even that was very limited. My daughters and I would cry, (asking) where are we going to live?"

They eventually paid a smuggler to get them out of the camp and later got in touch with the United Nations. They arrived in Elizabeth about six months ago, she said.

"They picked our file. We had a lot of meetings and they accepted us, thank God," she said. "Here things will be better. Here we will be able to do what we need to do to survive, to live. The most important thing is for my girls to get their education and to study."

In New York State, 637 Syrian refugees have been settled in the last year, according to the U.S. State Department. Of that group, 21 are in New York City, including 12 in Brooklyn.

Avigail Ziv, the International Rescue Committee's executive director for New York and New Jersey, said the city is mainly a destination for Syrian refugees who already have family or friends in the Big Apple due to the high cost of living.

"There is nothing quite like seeing people who have fled the worst circumstances imaginable restart their lives in this great city. It's incredible to watch them become New Yorkers," Ziv said.

Chris George, the executive director of Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services in New Haven, Conn., said his group has helped resettle dozens of Syrian refugee families in Connecticut over the last year — double the number from the previous year.

"They come because of their children," he told The News. "I'd say 99% of the Syrian refugees we've resettled are families — sometimes single moms whose husbands have been killed."

He and his group made headlines last year when they helped resettle a Syrian husband and wife with a 5-year-old son who were blocked from entering Indiana by Gov. Mike Pence, the Republican later picked as Donald Trump's running mate.

George's group works directly with the U.S. State Department and either places families directly in housing with supportive services, or matches them up with community groups who raise donations to sponsor a family.

He said the refugees are expected to "hit the ground running." The vast majority — about 90% of employable adults — find work in the first six months, he said, mostly in minimum-wage positions that don't require much English such as hotel housekeeping, landscaping and dishwashing.

He said the Syrian refugees sometimes struggle with posttraumatic stress disorder and high anxiety over the language barrier, but they often express relief "they no longer have to worry about snipers, bombings, kidnappings and torture."

George was critical of the Republican governors who've publicly opposed the resettlement of Syrian refugees in their states due to national security concerns.

He said applicants are thoroughly vetted, in his opinion, and quickly give back to the communities that help them.

"Welcoming persecuted people from all over the world is in our DNA. It's as American as apple pie," George told The News.

Back at Darul Islam Mosque last Thursday, a 34-year old married mother of four described fleeing Daraa in 2012 and arriving in Elizabeth last week.

Holding her 10-month-old daughter Asmaa in her arms, she recalled hearing the bombs at night, seeing the smoke and knowing she had no choice.

"When it reached our village, I took my children and I went to Jordan. We went illegally, we were smuggled into Jordan. I didn't have a passport. I didn't have anything. Nobody helped us, no one gave us anything," she said.

After a year and a half, they had their last interview in their rigorous screening process and finally boarded their flight to New Jersey.

"Everyone here is helping us. Everyone wants to help. It feels great. The children are so happy they don't want to go back. They said even if the war stops they don't want to go back," she told The News.

"We can't even think about what has happened there since we left. We can't even think of the horror. We are praying for our people," she said.
 

Texas has officially withdrawn from the nation's refugee resettlement program, according to Gov. Greg Abbott's office. But that won't stop the federal government from continuing to help refugees relocate here.

Abbott's office confirmed on Friday that Texas will no longer participate in the federal program, which helps thousands of refugees from around the world resettle in the state. Citing security concerns, state officials threatened last week to withdraw from the resettlement program if the feds did not "unconditionally approve" its amended state plan to only accept refugees who "are fully vetted and do not present a security threat" – part of Texas' efforts to keep Syrian refugees out of the state.

"Texas has repeatedly requested that the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the director of national intelligence provide assurances that refugees resettled in Texas will not pose a security threat, and that the number of refugees resettled in Texas would not exceed the state's original allocation in fiscal year 2016 – both of which have been denied by the federal government," Abbott said in a statement.

Federal officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment. They've previously stressed that refugees are only settled in the United States after lengthy, stringent security screenings that can take up to two years. Security officials with the state department conduct background and biometric screenings, and process applications received through the United Nations, which operates refugee camps around the world.

Once refugees are cleared, one of nine national resettlement organizations places them in communities across the country, where local nonprofits contracted by the state use federal dollars to help them find jobs, learn English and enroll children in school.

Though the state of Texas will no longer be the middle man, refugees will continue to be relocated here. The feds can appoint another entity – likely a nonprofit – to coordinate resettlement efforts and disburse funding. It's a set-up that was in place in six states in 2015, resettlement officials have said.

This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2016/09/30/texas-officially-withdraws-refugee-resettlement-pr/.