War Resisters League is accepting applications for our 2017 Diaspora Delegation to Greece to work with refugee communities in Athens.
The delegation is an opportunity for politicized service: exploring what solidarity with communities impacted by war/conflict looks like when bringing together political education and direct service. The delegation will also focus on building networks and relationships across diaspora communities in order to expand capacity and organizing opportunities. Application will close on June 20th. Financial support will be available for travel and lodging expenses.
APPLY TODAY!
To learn more about the ongoing refugee crisis, how refugees are organizing, and steps to build internationalist solidarity, WRL hosted a webinar report back from members of the Iraqi Transnational Collective, recently returned from working with refugees in Athens, Greece.
Watch the video below, to learn about the remarkable groups ITC collaborated with, the ways refugee communities are supporting each other in the face of war trauma and harsh criminalization, and the role diasporas and campaigning can play to build solidarity across closed borders. Read more on speakers + resources here.
To learn more about the ongoing refugee crisis as well as ongoing work by groups such as SWANAconnect to send delegations to Greece, check out these writings, videos + campaigns:
The War Followed Us Here
An interpreter navigates a broken legal system for refugees.
By Weyam Ghadbian
"As I watched the death count rise from where I sat in the U.S., I felt a sharp, gnawing sense of survivor’s guilt — the knowledge that it was pure luck that allowed my family to escape Hafez al Assad decades ago.
Were it not for this luck, I knew that I, too, would be facing the horrors of barrel bombs, imprisonment and torture. In an attempt to fend off hopelessness, and to mobilize this sense of guilt and compassion into action, I joined a delegation of Arab youth volunteering as translators with refugees on the Greek islands this summer."
Exodus - Frontline films (2016)
The first-person stories of refugees and migrants fleeing war, persecution and hardship — drawing on footage filmed by the families themselves as they leave their homes on dangerous journeys in search of safety and refuge in Europe. WATCH the entire feature length documentary here.
City of Refuge: 24 Hours of Action for Refugees
(Recent solidarity action in NYC by African Communities Together)
"Stop the Refugee Ban - Defend Asylum- Save Temporary Protected Status"
Greece; SWANAconnect Dignity, Survival & Community for Refugees
"As the Palestinian Youth Movement, we believe the position, experience, knowledge and role of the refugees in the Palestinian struggle is critical for the liberation of our homeland. We understand the position of being a refugee is compounded with all the disadvantages of being placeless and displaced and that these disadvantages can make the refugee population a particularly vulnerable one. However, we also believe that refugees are critical agents of social transformation and that their position has given particular experiences and forms of knowledge that speak back to the confines of the nation-state in the making of new political realities and possibilities. We recognize refugees, whether they are Palestinian, Syrian, Iraqi or other refugees, as central to our struggle but do not believe in tokenizing them or glorifying them symbolically. We understand that people undergoing mass scale catastrophe must be able to achieve basic rights and services in order to thrive and continue surviving. Furthermore, we stand steadfastly against the criminalization of refugees and particularly the way in which policing and containment of refugees is informed by the global ideological and structural regimes of the "war on terror." For this reason, we offer services as a means of empowering our community and respecting the dignity and agency of refugees as people who are integral to our collective community."
For more on which languages are most needed by refugees in Greece now, check out this article by Translators Without Borders, "This is not unusual: almost 80 percent of the refugees coming across the waters are Arabic or Farsi speaking. The Arabic speakers from Syria tend to be more educated with someone in their group able to communicate in English, whereas the Farsi (or Dari) speakers from Afghanistan often do not understand English at all. The other 20 percent of refugees do not speak or read in either of these languages. TWB has had requests from our partners for translation support in languages as various as Kurdish, Urdu, Dari, Pashto, Tigrinya and French. Time- consuming and disempowering interaction is all too common in this crisis because those working on the ground simply don’t have access to these languages."
