So many stories of the children of war haunt me. But Nujeen’s is an inspiration
This brave teenager who made it from Aleppo to Cologne in a wheelchair and is now fluent in German offers us an example of triumph over adversity
THERE are no happy endings in war. The best we can hope for is that the survivors find respite, and that ruined nations are re-made as peaceful places. One heartening story of triumph over adversity cannot dilute the immensity of Syria’s agony. Why do I feel the need to say this? Because I am thinking of Nujeen, whom I have just said goodbye to at her new home in Cologne. I remind myself that her story — heart-lifting as it is — cannot speak for the millions who have been cast out of their country. I am feeling so inspired by the example of this teenager in a wheelchair, and the narrative of hope she is forging, that I must state the obvious human truth of war here at the outset.
There are hundreds of thousands of Syrians languishing in refugee camps. They are going nowhere. At this moment, thousands more are stranded in the desert between Syria and Jordan. The EU and Turkey have cooked up a deal to make sure that fewer and fewer ever reach European shores.
It is exactly a year since I first met Nujeen Mustafa. The great refugee procession that began on the Greek islands had just come to a sudden halt on the Serbian-Hungarian border. There were new barbed wire fences and gates. Hungarian riot police were firing tear gas. Thousands of people sat out under the sun with their children, trying to figure out where they could go next.
Nujeen was with her older sister Nasrin. Their journey had begun in Aleppo and continued via Gaziantep in Turkey, where they were forced to leave her elderly parents behind. They could not have taken the strain of the exodus across the sea in the smuggler’s rubber dinghies, or faced the trek across fields and along railway tracks through the Balkans.
Nujeen suffers from muscular dystrophy and was unable to walk. Nasrin pushed the wheelchair. A brother was smuggled into Europe on a truck, at around the same time 71 people had suffocated on a similar journey from Hungary to Austria.
Nujeen got to me. There have been many children of war in my life. Each dead, maimed, traumatised kid has a place in my memory. Often they return unbidden, in the sleepless dark or in a dream. The boy stiffened into death in his father’s arms after the Israeli airstrike in Qana in 2006, the six-yearold girl with the most perfectly calm face and the arm mangled by a cluster bomb in the hospital in Hilla, the hysterical baby on the Syria-Lebanon border and the mother telling me how other refugees wanted her to strangle the child for fear it would alert Assad’s troops. The room of war memories is a crowded place and I try not to go there often.
But Nujeen sat in my foreground all year. This girl was luminous. She had taught herself English by watching imported soap operas back in Syria. Within five minutes of meeting her, she had told me — in this order — that she did not see herself as weaker or a lesser being than anybody else, that she wished to study and become an astronaut and possibly discover alien life, that she dreamed of going to London to meet the Queen, and that her journey to Europe was an adventure that she relished. There was immense energy around this 16-yearold — and what a sense of humour.
I followed her trail across the border into Croatia and then to Slovenia, where she and her sister were detained by immigration police. Through the steel fence she told me: “I’m stronger than I look.” So it proved. There was an outcry when we broadcast the story, and soon she was on the move again. By late autumn Nujeen had made it to Germany. I always knew she would. Just as I knew that when I saw her last week in Cologne she would have learned to speak German fluently and would be thriving at school. During the summer break she read War and Peace, Anna Karenina, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities and Catcher In the Rye.
“Poor Holden Caulfield, he is so lost,” she said, empathising with the teenage hero of JD Salinger’s novel.
Germany welcomed Nujeen and opened its doors to over a million migrants and refugees in the last 12 months. The atmosphere has changed. There is more resentment now, not least since the wave of sex attacks in Cologne on New Years Eve, the majority blamed on young men who were asylum seekers or economic migrants.
Nujeen was infuriated by what happened. “When you come here you are an ambassador. They are ambassadors for their countries and it doesn’t matter what you may have gone through, you have no right to treat other people like that.”
So far she has not encountered any intolerance. But the hard right is gaining ground politically. Across Europe, populist anti-migrant groups are forcing centrist politicians into a tougher stance on immigration. I do not present Nujeen as the representative of all refugees. There are millions who have fled their nations across the world and they are as diverse as any other population.
Nujeen deserves to be recognised for who she is, not for what any group decides she represents. Her greatness lies in her individuality.
I have a feeling we will be friends for a long time.
IHAVE always had the Munster man’s vague suspicion of the Irish midlands. It was the flat land that sat between Dublin and Cork and where not a lot happened, a part of the journey to be tolerated, although I remember as a child in the 1960s there was a cafe in Urlingford that did good soup.
So I was delighted by the revelations of beauty on a recent tour of the backroads of Laois and Carlow while my offspring were enjoying the fruits of the Electric Picnic. Such a landscape. The gentlest of hills and fields thick with stacked hay. I was in full lyrical mode by the time I reached my hotel for the night. I will not name the hotel or the town. In the light of what follows here, it would be unfair. For why should they be blamed for the actions of outsiders who ruined my midlands idyll?
It started around 1am. A family group from Dublin, which contained in it at least two gouger brothers and several shrewish females began to argue in the room next door, and in the room next to that. Here is a sample of the invective hurled at the girlfriend of one of the brothers:
“You’re a fat f ****** slag, you know dat! That’s all ye are. Ye f ****** hoor.” At one point the gentleman announced that he would kill himself. He thought better of it and lapsed again into verbal abuse.
Management was called. Negotiations took place. The gougers agreed to be quiet. The verbally abused girlfriend left the room, slamming the door. There was a short period of calm. Then the other brother started up. Before long, the entire family group was in the corridor exchanging the language with which they were most comfortable. The guards were called. In the old days some seven-foot broth of a boy from
‘Within five minutes, she had told me that she didn’t see herself as a lesser being than anybody else, that she wanted to be an astronaut and meet the Queen’
the far reaches of West Kerry, well nourished on buttermilk and spuds, would have arrived with baton drawn and resolved the matter speedily. But we live in more civilised times. Those of the gouger class have figured this out. So they gave cheek to the guards. I even heard one brother say he knew his rights. The guards warned and went away. There was brief calm. Then off it went again. The night ended with one half of the gouger twins and his female friends being ushered into the night by the police. I will return to the midlands. I just cannot say when.