On World Refugee Day, UNRWA Commissioner-General Pledges to Keep Hope Alive

By Karen Koning AbuZayd


	A Palestinian youth carries his share of aid distributed at UNRWA’s storage warehouse in Gaza City, June 18, 2006, as UNRWA began distributing emergency food aid to an additional 90,000 Palestine refugees in the Gaza Strip (AFP Photo/Said Khatib).

I’D LIKE TO extend a warm welcome and a sincere thanks to all of you for being with us this evening to commemorate World Refugee Day. I’m particularly pleased to be joined by my U.N. colleagues this evening, a sign of the importance we all attach to Palestine refugees.

World Refugee Day was first declared by the U.N. General Assembly in the year 2000, an evolution from Africa Refugee Day, which had been “celebrated” for many years.

UNRWA’s schools and community centres in the refugee camps have held Refugee Day events since then, but this year we felt it appropriate to give Refugee Day a higher profile than in the past.

We want to make sure everyone knows that World Refugee Day commemorates all refugees, whether they are in a camp in the Congo or in Jenin; whether they fled two months ago from Darfur or whether their grandfathers fled Haifa decades ago. It is a day to celebrate the resilience and spirit of those, the world over, who have been forced to leave their countries and their homes fleeing persecution and human rights abuses in all forms.

World Refugee Day is an opportunity for us to stand up and say to the refugees: we recognize you; we acknowledge what you have been through and the difficulties you continue to endure; we respect and admire your amazing strength and ability to rise above adverse conditions; and we will stand with you and do whatever we can to be advocates of your cause and to be your partners as you strive to maintain your dignity and to become self-reliant.

Our theme this evening focuses on the most indomitable of any of the refugees in our care—the children of Gaza. Gaza is alive with children, a fact we witness at the end of each school shift when the streets seem to explode with children. Groups of girls link arms in long lines, giggling as they pour into the narrow streets, behaving as schoolgirls do on their way home from school in every part of the world.

Wherever there is a dusty patch of land, there are crowds of boys, in teams 20-strong, playing chaotic, endless games of football. In the summer, homemade kites flutter impossibly high from the roofs of concrete shanties and all along the beachfront. I see these as a small sign of joy in a sometimes despairing landscape—because I know there is a child at the end of the kite string.

One of the reasons the streets seem entirely mobbed by children is because all of the UNRWA schools in Gaza work on a double shift. When one school’s pupils finish at midday and make their way home, another group of pupils is on its way to use the same building. And because of the scarcity of land, we have often built our schools in clusters. In parts of Rafah and Khan Younis camps, where three or four schools are close together, there may be around 9,000 children on the streets and in the schoolyards as the shifts change. This is also why, before the Israeli withdrawal, random shots fired from settlement watchtowers or near the Egyptian border often had such tragic consequences—because the bullets were almost bound to hit a child at certain times of day.

One of the films we are screening this evening, “Hoda’s Story,” tells about a young girl hit in the head by such a stray bullet. Gaza Field Director John Ging and I met her this past Saturday when she joined us in a get-together of the Community Mental Health Program in Gaza. The UNRWA filmmaker, Johan Eriksson, followed Hoda and watched how her terrible experience impacted on her and her friends and family. The story conveys many complex messages. Hoda is an ordinary girl and in the two years that the filmmaker follows her recovery we see her maturing into an ordinary teenager. And yet, there is nothing ordinary about a stray bullet finding its way into the head of an innocent little girl sitting at her desk in school. There is nothing ordinary about the profound strength of Hoda’s spirit as she overcomes her injury and struggles to manage her disability. And there is nothing ordinary about how Hoda’s family and community sustained her. It is this spirit of survival against the odds that we seek to celebrate on World Refugee Day.

Now that the settlements and the border posts have gone, UNRWA schools, where three girls were killed and several injured during the intifada, are once again places of relative safety for Gaza’s children. However, another place of rest and refuge for the young has recently fallen under the shadow of the conflict.

I want to read something to you. Najwa Sheikh Ahmed is a mother of two and a secretary at UNRWA’s headquarters in Gaza. She lives in the Nuseirat refugee camp. Last week she wrote an e-mail to some of her international colleagues, in order, she said, to release some of the feelings pent up inside her. She wrote:

“As you all know, and some of you have tasted the life in Gaza, it is considered by many to be a big prison. The only way to amuse ourselves and, mainly, our children, is the beach. Children and adults, we await the summer so we can go to the beach; my children also were waiting for this summer with anticipation. Daily they made enquiries about when we are going to take them, talking about what games they would play, what kind of toys they would take—all this in childish, excited words.

Suddenly, came this scene of brutal killings on the beach. I am sure all the people in Gaza felt the same as I felt, paralyzed, unable to switch the TV off, or even change the channel so the children could not see it. The time stopped at that moment, and we all felt the pain and anger, as if we too were a running, screaming child.

Tasting these feelings has not been easy, either for me, or for my children. I have this feeling of anger towards Gaza, for all that is going on, toward the Israelis, and more importantly, toward myself as a mother, who brought two children into this ugly world, where you can’t afford them safety, a good future, or even that simplest of things—a place where they can have fun.

Two days later, Ahmed, my youngest son, was asking me ‘when are we going to the beach?’ Suddenly Mustafa, my eldest, interrupted him: ‘What? Do you want them to kill us too?’

I am sorry that my e-mail was long, but I needed to convey this message.

Najwa

Mustapha, who asked, “Do you want them to kill us too?” is only five years old.

For many of the hardships suffered by the children in Gaza there are responses offered through programs that deliver quality education, health and social services, and that improve housing and environmental conditions in refugee camps. Under a recently launched emergency appeal we plan to deliver more food aid and to expand job creation and other programs that strengthen the ability of refugees to weather the current crises.

All this and more can be done with the generous support of our donors, and we are very grateful for that support. But much more important is the urgent need for political solutions that will create a future for the refugee children of Gaza, and, indeed, all Palestine refugee children. Genuine progress toward a just and lasting solution for Palestine refugees is the only way to ensure that the next generation does not inherit the anger and pain of dispossession.

I believe there is hope because where there are children there is always hope. Hope is present in the many after-school clubs and the democratic activism of groups like the Children’s Parliament. It is there on the faces of the thousands of children scurrying in their matching T-shirts to the countless summer schools run every year by the U.N. and Palestinian and international NGOs. Hope is there in the exam results and attendance figures that speak so eloquently of the proud Palestinian commitment to education and self-improvement.

In these extremely difficult times, across the 58 refugee camps of Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan, where one-third of the Palestine refugees live, we should use World Refugee Day as a day not just to mark suffering and celebrate fortitude. It should also be a day when we make a pledge to the refugee children of Palestine—a pledge that we will do what we can to keep hope alive.

The title of this evening’s event is “All I Have.” It is taken from a poem by the late Tawfiq Zayyad, poet, former mayor of Nazareth and Knesset member. I invite Hana and Bara Shehadeh to the stage to recite Tawfiq’s poem to you in Arabic and English.

ALL I HAVE

I never carried a rifle
On my shoulder
Or pulled a trigger.
All I have
Is a lute’s memory
A brush to paint my dreams,
A bottle of ink.
All I have
Is unshakeable faith
And an infinite love
For my people in pain.

Karen Koning AbuZayd is the American-born, Gaza-based commissioner-general of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East. She gave this speech in Jerusalem on June 20, 2006.