Hibr

“The human brain cannot imagine”

“The human brain cannot imagine what they have been through”

2011 Human Rights Film Festival - Day Two: The Rights of Refugees

The second day of the 2011 Human Rights Film Festival at Cinema Metropolis Empire Sofil in Achrafieh focused on refugees’ rights in Lebanon. The evening started with “I Come from a Beautiful Place” by Carol Mansour, a documentary that showed the suffering of a sample of Iraqi and Sudanese refugees in their homelands before they came to Lebanon.

Tragic stories were revealed in the movie. A Sudanese man ran away from Darfur to Lebanon after surviving alone the massacre of his entire family on the same day. An Iraqi woman fled to Lebanon after she lost hope of finding her husband who went missing for five years in Iraq. A teenage brother and sister managed to escape severe domestic violence and exploitation in Iraq. The most shocking story was about an Iraqi man who, when imprisoned in Iraq for “economic crimes” (being in possession of US dollars), suffered all kinds of brutal torture and even witnessed humans being slaughtered.

“It was painful to hear the stories of these refugees and how they ended up in Lebanon,” Carole Mansour said during a question and answer session after the screening. “Sometimes the human brain cannot imagine what they have been through.”

Then an Iraqi refugee gave his testimony: ”I am Saad Ismael. I moved from Iraq to Lebanon in 1980, due to the Iraqi regime. I was condemned for a felony in 2007, and sentenced to two months in Roumieh Prison.”

This was just part of his shocking story. “I stayed in the jail for three years, with other Iraqi refugees, even though I was sentenced to two months,” he continued, adding, “[only then] to be surprised that I was forced to leave Lebanon.”

An improvisational music performance came after the testimony, followed by a discussion about refugees’ rights in Lebanon, led by Wadih Asmar, the secretary general of the Lebanese Center for Human Rights (CLDH); Ninette Kelly, a representative of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR); and Nizar Saghieh, a lawyer specializing in refugee rights.

“The refugees’ situation in Lebanon is ‘gray’,” Saghieh explained. “The Lebanese authorities can’t force them to leave, fearing international criticism, so they decided to practice the policy of neglect  and punishment in order to put the refugees under pressure to leave Lebanon.”

The second movie, “Gaza Hospital” by Marco Pasquini, documented the work of Gaza Hospital, which overlooks the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila, during the massacres that took place there in 1982 and again during the ‘camp wars’ in the mid-1980s. The story of the hospital and the camp is told by foreign and Palestinian nurses, including the London-based orthopedic surgeon Dr. Swee Chai Ang, American Jewish nurse Ellen Siegel, and Palestinian Dr. Aziza Khalidi. Current residents of the dilapidated building, which no longer serves as a hospital and shelters hundreds of Palestinian refugee families, also told their stories.

Five other movies were screened, “Till When”, “Life from the BBC (Bourj al-Barajneh Camp”, “60 Units of Time”, “Dream of Return” and “The Kingdom of Women”. All movies and testimonies aimed to raise awareness among the audience about the situation of refugees in Lebanon, and to tell the stories of their suffering.