A Man Leaves His Island

Recently a news story about a man seeking asylum in New Zealand as a climate change refugee made headlines all over the world.

His original appeal to the Immigration and Protection Tribunal of New Zealand was dismissed in June 2013 because, according to the tribunal, he is not a considered a refugee under the terms laid out in the international Convention and Protocol Relating to the Status of Refugees. He is now asking the New Zealand High Court to let him appeal this case.

Mangroves planted on Kiribati to prevent erosion.

“There’s no future for us when we go back to Kiribati,” Ioane Teitiota told the appeal tribunal, adding that a return to his tiny Pacific atoll would pose a risk to his children’s health, according to Reuters.

The relationship between climate change and migration is complicated. And pointing to climate change as the main factor affecting the living conditions on small island states is difficult.

People such as inhabitants on small island states, in many cases find themselves caught between wrongs of the past and the future consequences of these wrongs, explains Ilan Kelman, Reader in Risk, Resilience and Global Health at University College London.

Kelman points out that many island states are still struggling with the effects of colonialism, post-colonialism, modernism, forced relocation efforts and misguided aid, as well as the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions, mainly from the rich countries of the world.

His story

No matter how the New Zealand High Court concludes on Mr. Teitiotas’ appeal, his story is also a story about the nation of Kiribati, as an icon for other islands regarding the challenges they face concerning overpopulation, resource management, poverty, sea level rise and climate change.

The following text is adapted from the official decision from the Immigration and Protection Tribunal of New Zealand.

Ioane Teitiota was born in the 1970s on an islet situated three days journey by boat, or two hours by plane, north of Tarawa, the main island and capital of Kiribati.

As is common in the Kiribati island group, his home island is a low-lying atoll with houses built on coral debris which has accreted over time. When in his early teens, he was sent to school on a nearby island.

Republic of Kiribati

In 2002, Teitiota married his wife and moved in with her family in another village situated on Tarawa. He lived there with his wife’s family in a traditionally constructed dwelling which had been built on coral, which had accreted on a sea wall built some years previously. The dwelling was situated on ground level and had electricity. Water was obtained from a well and from supplies provided by the Government. There were no sewerage facilities.

Over time, the villages on Tarawa in which Teitiota resided became overcrowded. People travelled to Tarawa from outlying islands because this was where most government services such as the main hospital were located. Land was purchased from existing landholders or acquired through kinship ties to Tarawa.

As the villages became overcrowded, tensions were generated and there were often physical fights in which people were injured, and on occasion, killed. When this happened, the police intervened, taking the injured to the hospital and arresting those responsible.

Life generally became progressively more insecure on Tarawa as a result of sea level rise. From the late 1990s onwards, Tarawa suffered significant amounts of coastal erosion during high tides. Also the land surface was regularly flooded and land could be submerged up to knee-deep during king tides. Transportation was affected as the main causeway separating north and south Tarawa was often flooded.

This caused significant hardship for Teitiota, his wife and family as well as other inhabitants on Tarawa. The wells upon which they depended for water became salty. Salt water was deposited onto the ground destroying crops. Crops were difficult to grow and the land was stripped of vegetation in many places.

The Government’s supplies of water are coming under pressure through overpopulation and because people can increasingly no longer rely on well water for an alternative source. The sea wall in front of the Teitiota’s parents-in-law’s house was often damaged and required constant repair. The family existed largely by subsistence fishing and agriculture. One of the appellant’s brothers-in-law works at a local government port agency and provides cash income for the whole family as best as he is able. However, life is generally becoming more difficult. More

 

The return to Iqrit

Descendants of those expelled from one Palestinian village during the creation of Israel are trying to reclaim the land.

Al-Jazeera – 9 June 2013

Iqrit, Israel – A dream long nurtured by hundreds of thousands of Palestinians made refugees during the establishment of the state of Israel has become a concrete reality at a small makeshift camp atop a windswept hill.

A dozen young men have set up the camp at a site in the Upper Galilee from which their grandparents were expelled more than six decades ago.

Today, all that remains of the village of Iqrit, close to Israel’s border with Lebanon, is a Catholic church on the hill’s brow. But in 1948, the village was home to 600 Christian Palestinians.

Walaa Sbeit, one of the camp’s leaders, said the group had been inspired by a vision of rebuilding their village.

“We never lost the connection to this place,” he said. “Every summer we hold a summer school here for the children to learn about the village and their past. And once a month the villagers hold a service at the church. For us, this was always our real home.”

The nakba

In 1948, some 750,000 Palestinians were expelled from more than 400 villages as the new state of Israel was declared on a large part of their homeland – an event known to Palestinians as the nakba, or “catastrophe”. The refugees – mostly descendants of those driven from their homes – now number around five million, according to the United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

Nearly all the emptied villages were later destroyed by the Israeli army to prevent the inhabitants, and the generations which would follow them, from ever returning home.

“Until we moved in, the only way back to our village was in a coffin,” said Sbeit, a 26-year-old music teacher in Haifa, 50km away. “We have the right to bury our dead in the village cemetery, but not to rebuild the homes that were taken from us.”

Sbeit and his friends have been staying at Iqrit in shifts since August, living in an improvised annex to the church that houses a sitting area and kitchen.

They have tin shacks nearby serving as a toilet and shower, and two donkeys. Saplings they planted and a chicken coop were destroyed by the police, Sbeit added, as he perched on the edge of one of the outdoor beds the group have been using since the winter rains ended.

The villagers of Iqrit belong to Israel’s minority of 1.4 million Palestinian citizens, a quarter of whom were displaced from their orginal homes in 1948. Today, the Palestinian minority live in more than 100 Palestinian communities that survived the Israeli army’s advance.

A practical plan

Sbeit and his companions are at the forefront of a movement among the refugees inside Israel to turn the right of return from an what has sounded like an increasingly empty slogan into a practical plan of action.

Although Iqrit’s 80 homes are long gone, a residents’ committee is due to publish a master plan for the village in the summer, showing how it would be possible to build a modern community of 450 homes, including a school, for the villagers-in-exile, who today number 1,500.

The plan has been drawn up by a professional planner from the Technion, Israel’s leading technical university.

Iqrit’s refugees are also involved in a pilot project to work out the practicalities of implementing the right of return, understanding the legal, technical and psychological problems facing the refugees.

“This really is a historic moment for the Palestinian community,” said Mohammed Zeidan, head of the Nazareth-based Human Rights Association, which has been helping to organise the project. “For the first time, we are acting rather than just talking.

“The villagers are not waiting for Israel to respond to their grievance, they are actively showing Israel what the return would look like.”

Broken promises

It is not entirely surprising that Iqrit should be leading the way on the refugee issue.

Iqrit’s inhabitants were neither expelled nor forced into flight, as happened in most other villages. They surrendered in November 1948.

According to 70-year-old Lutfallah Atallah, the villagers agreed to leave Iqrit after receiving a promise that they would be allowed to return when the army had completed its operations in the area. Shortly afterwards their village was declared a closed military area.

“We were put in army vehicles and driven to the village of Rama, and told we would be allowed to return within 15 days,” said Atallah. “We’re still waiting.”

Israel does not deny that the promise was made, and the villagers’ right to return was backed by the country’s supreme court in 1951. Six months later, the army blew up the houses in a move designed to stop the ruling being enforced.

Shadia Sbeit, coordinator for the Iqrit residents’ committee, said that in the early 1990s, under growing pressure to honour its pledge to the villagers, a government panel agreed to set aside a small area for Iqrit to be rebuilt. The deal fell through when the prime minister of the time, Yitzhak Rabin, was assassinated.

A later prime minister, Ariel Sharon, decided in 2002 that the promise to the villagers of Iqrit and another village, Biram, could not be implemented because it would set a precedent for the return of other refugees and threaten Israel’s Jewish majority.

Zeidan called that reasoning “nonsensical”.

“The refugees from Iqrit are all Israeli citizens,” he said. “Letting them back will not make Israel any less ‘Jewish’.”

Ethnic cleansing?

The villagers’ push to recreate Iqrit comes as Israel’s treatment of the refugees from 1948 is under renewed scrutiny, particularly in relation to the circumstances in which the refugees abandoned their homes – and whether Israel’s leaders ordered a program of ethnic cleansing.

Documents recently unearthed by an Israeli researcher, Shay Hazkani, confirm suspicions that a historical claim Israel has used as its chief justification for denying the refugees’ right of return to their homes was invented by Israeli officials.

The files, located in the state archives, reveal that David Ben Gurion, Israel’s prime minister in 1948 and for many years afterwards, set up a research unit in the early 1960s to try to prove that Arab leaders had ordered the Palestinian villagers to leave.

Israel’s move was a response to growing pressure from the United States president of the time, John F Kennedy, that it allow several hundred thousand refugees to return to their lands. More

 

Hama Exodus of Helfaya People Across the Orontes River on May,10 2013 | SYRIA

After being subjected to shelling with canons and missiles by the regime's checkpoints and camps , the people of Helfaya were forced to leave their city and to flee across the Orontes River because of blocking the roads and entrances of the city with checkpoints.

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Warning: This video contains horrifying scenes and we don't recommend it for weak hearted people.This scene is just to document the crimes that are being committed by Bashar al-Assad and his regime. It is not to shock our viewers or to encourage violence; we just want to document what is happening in Syria.
محتوى الفيديو قاسي جداً و فيه مشاهد مؤلمة و لا ينصح لأصحاب القلوب الضعيفة بمشاهدته , هذا المقطع فقط لتوثيق الجرائم التي اقترفتها القوات الأسدية التابعة لنظام بشار الأسد , والمقطع ليس لصدم المشاهدين هذا المقطع هو مقطع لتوثيق الأحداث التي تحدث في سوريا , وليس للتشجيع على العنف.
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Eyewitness Account—Syria: A Report From the Field

This is a rare, personal report of a trip into Syria’s beleaguered provinces. Koert Debeuf, a Belgian working for the European Parliament, travelled with commanders of the rebel Free Syrian Army into the Aleppo region. Back from “the hell called Syria,” to use Debeuf’s own words, he describes his impressions and conclusions from talks with soldiers, civilians and refugees.

From January 18 to 23, I visited Turkey and the Aleppo region of northern Syria. In the city of Antakya in southern Turkey—known in ancient times as Antioch—I met commanders of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) and people responsible for distributing humanitarian aid in those regions. They gave us a very good overview of the situation on the ground.

On January 21, we went into Syria with General Abdel Nasser Farzat, the FSA commander for the Aleppo region. As the Bab al-Salam border crossing was temporarily closed, we were smuggled into the country. Using minor roads to avoid shelling and regime soldiers who still occupy a few strongholds in the Aleppo region, we arrived at about 8 p.m. in Azaz at the house of an FSA officer who offered us a meal. After dinner we headed to the headquarters where we met Ahmed Abeit, the commander of the revolutionary High Council of the Military Council.

It was clear from the beginning of our trip that nobody really knows who has exactly which function in the military opposition. There are two overlapping structures: the FSA—dominated by former generals from the Syrian regime army—and the revolutionary forces. Both have commanders; they work together but the hierarchy is unclear. Ahmed Abeit told us that he had been elected general commander of the revolutionary structure for the whole of Syria. The next day, when we visited the battlefield at Quweris airport, we saw Abeit again and realized he really was in charge.

A DEEP DISTRUST OF THE WEST

It was not easy talking to the senior commanders. They are deeply suspicious about anything European or American. Every one of them kept repeating how they have seen nothing at all materialize from the many promises that were made by the international community. We—the international community—promised them support if they organized themselves militarily. Nothing came. We asked them to organize civilian councils. Nothing came. We promised them humanitarian aid. Nothing came. We promised weapons. Nothing came. Every single one of these commanders is convinced that the West is on the side of President Bashar al-Assad, and it is very difficult to disprove these accusations.

Despite the distrust, they really did appreciate that I had come. Because of security concerns—mainly a fear of kidnapping—only the most senior officers knew that I work at the European Parliament. They were glad that at least one European official made the effort to come to the region and was trying to help (without promising anything). After a conversation of about two hours, we went back to the officer’s house in Azaz, where the four of us and the general slept on the living room floor. That night we heard bombs being dropped from planes on a neighboring town. The officer said it was most likely the bombing would reach Azaz by morning. Luckily that didn’t happen. More