Syrian refugee in UK uses catering business to highlight Assad atrocities
A London-based Syrian refugee is using food to spread awareness of the plight of people in her home country. Majeda Khoury, 49, is originally from Damascus and arrived in the UK in 2017. Two years later, she set up her own company that enables her to combine her two passions: Food and human rights activism.
She launched The Syrian Sunflower in August 2019 with the support of The Entrepreneurial Refugee Network (TERN), a social enterprise that supports refugee entrepreneurs in the creation and development of their businesses.
Khoury’s catering business supplies human rights organizations with food. She is keen to speak at events held by these organizations to highlight the suffering of the Syrian people.
“I run a catering business and teach cookery classes as part of it. I supply human rights organizations and companies that are interested in refugees and allow me to speak at events,” she told Arab News.
“My company is also a platform for other Syrian refugee women who want to start their own businesses in the food industry, and I train them.” Khoury said showing the world the atrocities that the Assad regime has committed is a “very important job.” She added: “I started participating in human rights activism in 2011 after the revolution and documented violence against women. I also worked with relief organizations that helped displaced people in Syria. “From the first moment of the Syrian revolution, the situation was very scary but we were excited. Syrians had been waiting for that moment for the last 50 years, since Hafez Assad became president. He was a dictator and Syrians have always had this dream to find a way to go against the regime.”
Khoury was arrested
and imprisoned in a detention center in Damascus for six months in 2013.
She said the center “wasn’t fit for animals,” and “is one of the most dangerous detention centers in the country. Many prisoners didn’t make it out alive.”
She added: “It was a horrible place, and as a human rights activist I highlight the rape and torture that takes place there to the whole world.” Khoury said she started documenting the torture that she witnessed and experienced in the detention center with an organization called Urnammu after she was released.
Urnammu is a Syrian grassroots organization registered in Canada that documents violence against women and children in detention centers. It has members all over the world.
“This wasn’t just activism, it was a very important mission in my life to document these human rights abuses,” Khoury said.
“We need the whole world to highlight this and support both Syrians inside the country and abroad to get justice.”
Khoury was forced to leave Syria because of her advocacy against human rights violations, first to Lebanon and then the UK.
Far from home and everything familiar, she found herself using food and cooking as a way to continue her human rights activism in London.
FASTFACT
For Majeda Khoury, it a ‘very important job’ to show the world the atrocities that the Assad regime has committed.