Irene Grace says human rights defenders hiding in Kenya fear harassment and intimidation due to a decline in civic rights. Credit: Joyce Chimbi/IPS

By Joyce Chimbi
NAIROBI, Jun 20 2023 (IPS)

While leaving one’s country and becoming a refugee is a last resort, it is a decision that many, like Steve Kitsa, have had to make. As conflict becomes increasingly protracted in many African countries, many others will take this step.

“In a matter of life and death, I fled the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) five years ago and left my elderly mother behind. One day we were seated in a group of young men, chatting and enjoying the morning sun, when a lone gunman in uniform approached us and started firing away unprovoked. Such incidences had become too common in the eastern region, and some of my friends were killed,” Kitsa tells IPS.

Kenya hosts one of the largest refugee populations in Africa. Kitsa is one of more than 520,000 registered refugees and asylum seekers. But human rights defender Irene Grace, who fled Uganda two years ago, says the number is much higher because borders are porous.

Nevertheless, official records show that about 287,000 refugees come from Somalia, 142,000 from South Sudan, 50,000 from DRC, and 32,000 from Ethiopia; many live in Dadaab and Kakuma camps.

Others, like Kitsa, have found their way into the urban centers of Nairobi, Kisumu, Mombasa, and Eldoret. Outdated statistics from 2017 indicate that more than 67,267 refugees live in Nairobi.

“There is a lot of exploitation because we need the locals to survive. Along the highways, you will find many young men hawking peanuts. You can tell they are from DRC because of the kind of Swahili they speak. They sell these peanuts under the hot sun, all day, every day, in exchange for a plate of food and somewhere to sleep as the profits go to the host. Most of us are desperate to go to France,” he explains.

Irene Grace fled Uganda for promoting the rights of the LGBTQI community as the country clamped down on their rights. As the government-endorsed crackdown against the community intensified, so did threats against her life.

“The issue of human rights defenders in exile is one aspect of the refugee situation that is hardly ever talked about. The risk is very high because you are under an alias in a foreign country, and if murdered, you are likely to remain unidentified for a long time, and it might take years to connect the dots. The question of who bears the duty of protection for us remains unanswered,” Grace says.

Her fears and concerns reflect the 2022 report findings by the global civil society alliance, CIVICUS, and the Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC), highlighting the decline in civil rights in Kenya. According to the report, the government was using excessive force to quieten dissent.

Kenya was placed on the CIVICUS Monitor’s human rights ‘Watchlist’ in June 2022. The Watchlist highlights countries with a recent and steady decline in civic freedoms, including the rights of free speech and peaceful assembly.

Kenya was rated Obstructed by the CIVICUS Monitor. There are 42 countries in the world with this rating. The rating is typically given to countries where power holders heavily contest civic space and impose a combination of legal and practical constraints on the full enjoyment of fundamental rights.

In 2021, Front Line Defenders released a report accusing the governments of Uganda and Kenya of giving the South Sudanese National Security Service (NSS) intelligence agency the freedom to target refugee human rights workers who fled the country.

“It is very difficult to continue with activism in such a hostile environment, on top of the many other challenges confronting us, such as a lack of documentation and access to services. Some of us left our families behind, exposed and unprotected. Over the eight years, I have lived in Kenya, I have received many threatening calls from South Sudan, but I know the information of my whereabouts came from within this country,” Deng G, an activist from South Sudan, tells IPS.

“Our situation worsens when local activists are targeted. In exile, you must connect with local networks to survive and continue with your activism. I am aware of activists in Kenya currently being held without trial for protesting against the high cost of living.”

KHRC continues to express concerns over the misuse of laws to undermine peaceful protest and recently responded with speed when five activists from the Social Justice Center, a Nairobi-based grassroots group, were arrested during a peaceful protest against the controversial Finance Bill 2023.

A pre-independence Public Order Act requires activists to notify authorities of protests at least three days in advance. Police have mistakenly understood the provision as a requirement for protests to be approved or denied, using it as an excuse to deem protests ‘unpermitted.’ Even though the right to peaceful assembly is guaranteed in Kenya’s constitution, it is continually undermined, says CIVICUS and KHRC.

Irene Grace says ongoing hostilities have derailed efforts to promote the safety and security of LGBTQI asylum seekers and refugees in the Kakuma Refugee Camp complex in northwestern Kenya whose lives are at risk. She says they are experiencing discrimination, and physical and sexual violence, among other forms of human rights violations.

“I am unable to travel there to determine how we can mobilize and improve their safety, working hand in hand with grassroots activists in Kenya. There are corrupt security officers, and once they discover you are hiding in the country, you become a target. They want you to pay them to turn a blind eye as you go on with your activities,” she says.

Kitsa says the issue of bribes is a most pressing challenge for many refugees seeking to integrate with the locals.

“They usually threaten to send you to the refugee camps despite having refugee documentation allowing you to live among the locals. They can create many problems for you.”

Against this backdrop, Irene Grace says activism is being suppressed from multiple angles, and human rights activists, local and those operating from exile, must now go back to the drawing board to find safer, impactful ways to speak truth to power and take the powers that be head-on.
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Excerpt:

The United Nations Department of Public Information has launched a new animated video on the dramatic story of Yusra Mardini, a young refugee from conflict-torn Syria who achieved her dream to compete in the Olympics last year.

By UNHCR
UNITED NATIONS, Jun 20 2017 (IPS)

The United Nations Department of Public Information has launched a new animated video on the dramatic story of Yusra Mardini, a young refugee from conflict-torn Syria who achieved her dream to compete in the Olympics last year. Yusra Mardini was appointed as a Goodwill Ambassador for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR) on 27 April 2017. The video was produced by the Education Outreach Section in support of the Together Initiative to mark World Refugee day on 20 June and highlight the advent of the International Day of Peace on 21 September.

A Syrian pastry chef in Little Syria. Photo courtesy of Save Washington Street.

By Sudeshna Chowdhury
NEW YORK, Jun 20 2013 (IPS)

A brick red, six-story tenement house, St. George Melkite Church and a community house in desperate need of repair are nearly all that remain of a once thriving Arab-American community in downtown New York City.

High-rise buildings now populate the area of Lower Manhattan formerly called Little Syria that has been a gradual casualty of industrialisation and urbanisation and which Arab-American youth are fighting to keep alive.

With the church declared an official landmark in 2009, one organisation, Save Washington Street, hopes to preserve other remnants of this neighbourhood. Its primary goal is to achieve landmark designation for the community centre, which used to provide immigrants with resources ranging from jobs to glass bottles of milk, said Carl Antoun Houck, director of Save Washington Street."The Syrian refugees and their history are...not so new to this country."
-- Carl Antoun Houck

Norah Arafeh, an undergraduate student at University of California Berkeley, serves as the outreach director of Save Washington Street and was drawn to the cause by her Syrian roots.

Arafeh’s father was raised in a neighbourhood of Damascus, Syria and came to the United States when he was 17, said Arafeh, who joined the Little Syria campaign almost two years ago and now reaches out to various groups to solicit support for the neighbourhood.

“The importance of preserving history – both in the U.S. and in Syria, in this case – cannot be understated,” Arafeh said.

For many Arab Americans today, Little Syria was where ancestors arrived in pursuit of the American dream. Among them were Houck’s mother’s family, who emigrated from Lebanon.

Preserving the past is a huge part of every Arab American, Houck said, raising his voice amid the din of construction work in the area.

With the Obama administration considering resettling of hundreds of Syrian refugees in the United States, Houck pointed out, “The Syrian refugees and their history are, after all, not so new to this country.”

A lost melting pot

Little Syria once extended from what was the World Trade Centre down to Battery Park and to the west of Broadway behind Trinity Church to West Street, according to Joe Svehlak, an urban historian and preservationist.

“It was a melting pot with 27 different nationalities living together in harmony and peace. They were Syrians, Lebanese, Slovaks, Germans, Irish,” he said.

In Little Syria’s heyday, from the late 1800s to the mid 1900s, it wasn’t surprising to find a German living next to a Lebanese, who would be living adjacent to a Syrian, with all of them trusting one another, Svehlak added.

Peddling was the main occupation of the immigrants living in the area, which was comprised of merchant houses, restaurants, cafes and factories making the linens from which immigrants earned livelihoods, said Todd Fine, a historical and strategic adviser for Save Washington Street.

While economic factors were the main impetus for emigration from Greater Syria, many others also left to escape persecution and conscription in the Ottoman army, according to historians.

Those who lived in the area, Svehlak said, actually referred to it as the “Mother Colony”, while outsiders from other parts of the city called it Little Syria, dubbing it thus because the majority of residents were Arab Christians from Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Jordan, as well as parts of Iraq, which was once part of Greater Syria, said Fine.

The decline begins

In the early 1900s, some immigrants in Little Syria moved to other parts of the city, primarily Brooklyn, where the burgeoning population could have more space, and real estate prices were reasonable.

Still, it remained a robust community until the 1940s, according to Svehlak.

It was when families were told to move their homes to accommodate the entrance to the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, built in 1948, that dealt a huge blow to Little Syria, and a majority of the neighbourhood was destroyed, according to Fine.

Many families temporarily vacated the area after the attacks of Sep. 11, 2001, and some of those who remained were asked to leave during the subsequent reconstruction of the World Trade Centre.

At that point Edward Metropolis, 52, had to leave his studio apartment, where he had lived his entire life and which is part of the last standing tenement in the area.

“I came back after four months, and some of the people who left never came back,” he said.

Fine said that in a way, the years after 9/11 encouraged construction and thus contributed to the destruction of the history of the area, said Fine.

“Rampant development did the rest,” Svehlak concluded.

An ignored past

With Jun. 20 observed as World Refugee Day, the history of a community who immigrated here more than a century ago is largely forgotten by New Yorkers, according to experts.

“It’s a tragedy,” lamented Fine. “While everybody knows about Chinatown and Little Italy, everybody seems to have forgotten about Little Syria.”

For Sarab Al-Jijakli, a Syrian-American who has been involved in raising awareness and humanitarian aid since the beginning of the Syrian revolution in March 2011, the neighbourhood is more than just a piece of history.

“It helps to build confidence regarding our role and presence in the American narrative – our history in this country, which did not begin on 9/11,” he said. “Little Syria helps reclaim this narrative from Islamophobes and bigots who wish to bury it.”

History links generations of immigrants and teaches people about Arabs’ contributions in building America, Al-Jijakli added, even as the existence of Arab history in the city has been overshadowed by the current unrest in the Middle East, especially in Syria.

According to the United Nations, close to 93,000 people were killed in fighting between the government and rebel forces in Syria between March 2011 and April 2013.

Arafeh believed that in the United States, the importance of preserving Arab American history has been trivialised.

“The demolition and raiding of major cities of history denies future generations of the privilege and historical heritage that is their patrimony,” she concluded.