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Title: The Syrian Underground Railroad Author: CrimethInc. Date: February 13, 2017 Language: en Topics: solidarity, refugees, Syria Source: Retrieved on 22nd April 2021 from https://crimethinc.com/2017/02/13/the-syrian-underground-railroad-migrant-solidarity-organizing-in-the-modern-landscape
In this report, comrades based on the Syrian border in Turkey describe
how they assisted Syrian refugees in escaping to central Europe and
tease out the lessons for people engaged in similar work in the United
States. Although Syrians themselves led the majority of initiatives to
respond to the crisis, people of all backgrounds can play important
roles in forming networks of support for the targeted and excluded. As
ICE raids intensify around the US, it is time to set up our own
emergency response networks and underground railroads.
“National borders are a bloody stain on the face of the earth. Burn all
nations to the ground.” -Charles Johnson
Xenophobia and racism coupled with nationalist and fascist politics are
on the rise in the United States and much of the Western world. This
puts many different people at extreme risk for a variety of reasons. One
time-tested method of survival and resistance is the Underground
Railroad—the supported illegal movement of targeted people from harm to
relative safety. Decentralized yet coordinated underground railroad
movements existed in the American South, Nazi Germany, and East/West
Germany at various points in history. However, much has changed since
the Second World War including the surveillance and strategic
landscapes. We need to be creative and bold to adapt to these changes,
utilizing whatever points of leverage we can.
In 2015, we established a project to assist the safe movement of Syrian
refugees into fortress Europe. We learned that this work is possible,
meaningful, difficult, and complex. This essay serves as a guide to the
how and why of what we did, in hopes of contributing to ongoing
discourse about this evolving terrain of radical solidarity. We have to
stand together and take the necessary risks to counter the waves of
violence directed at migrants, refugees, people of color, folks with
disabilities, anarchists, antifascists, climate change scientists and
activists, reproductive health advocates and doctors, and the broader
queer and trans communities. Some 450 US churches have already promised
to engage in underground railroad activity under Trump, and groups that
have been doing sanctuary and humanitarian aid work on the US-Mexico
border for decades are gearing up for unprecedented levels of risk for
those attempting to cross. It’s time to build infrastructure and
networks for safety and liberation.
Abbey: One night, Quail and I got a call from some of our close friends
just down the street in Southeastern, Turkey, north of Aleppo, Syria.
They’re a Syrian couple, one a neurosurgeon and one an engineer and
participant in Clowns Without Borders—both detained and tortured
activists from the Syrian Revolution. They told us that a group of their
friends and family were taking a rubber dinghy across the Aegean Sea
from Izmir, Turkey to Lesvos, Greece. Our friends were terrified for
their safety. I realized that Quail and I had a friend in Athens who
could host them. Like many reasonable and decent people in Europe, our
friend in Athens was concerned about the refugee crisis. Quail and I
reached out to her and asked her if she could host them (about six
people) in her apartment in Greece for a night or two as they passed
through, just so that they could have a safe place to sleep with wifi
and a shower. She did, and they arrived about a week later. She made
copious amounts of food for them, helped them navigate the complicated
ferry system, got them European Union SIM cards for their phones, and
passed along portable phone chargers. Our Syrian friends, although
completely exhausted from their journey, ended up getting along well
with her.
Quail: It was an inspired connection. The group that stayed with her
scattered after Athens. Abbey’s closest friend in the group had the
audacity to secure a fake Italian passport and get on a plane from
Athens to Germany, where she could declare asylum (!). Another two,
newlyweds, continued their journey on foot, passing through Hungary
before it shut down its borders completely. I had spent a month in
Budapest, the capital of Hungary, over a year prior, researching an
article on the reactions of immigrants, activists, and artists to the
increasingly racist and xenophobic political climate. Inspired by
Abbey’s earlier connection, I recalled that I knew at least a handful of
Hungarians and expats in Budapest who would be willing to take the risk
to help them. A last-minute ABP to these friends scored them a safe
place to sleep for the night in Budapest, a ride further down the trail,
and made up one more stop on their ultimately successful journey to
Germany. It was an easy favor I had performed for many friends in the
past (sure, if you’re going to this random European city, I have a
friend I can reach out to if you need a place to crash) but now with
much, much higher stakes for all involved.
Both: From this incident, we realized that through Abbey’s connections
in Syrian communities and Quail’s connections in Europe we could
probably do a lot more than nervously wait for Facebook posts and
Whatsapp messages announcing safe arrival to Germany. Quail initially
wanted to organize through Couchsurfing.com, where she had the most
experience connecting with kind and generous foreign strangers, but the
primary platform most Syrians were using on their mobile phones while
crossing was Facebook. As soon as we realized how much potential such a
group might hold, we launched it. Thus began the Syrian Underground
Railroad (SUR), a web-based mutual aid network between US Americans,
Europeans, and mostly Syrian refugees.
Abbey: Before the Revolution, Syria was an authoritarian police state
run by the Assad family, “The Father and the Son,” who gained power in a
coup in 1971. Despite some fulfillment of Baathist (multi-ethnic and
pan-Arab) socialist policies, such as free college and moderate
healthcare, Syrians lived in fear, unable to hold the ruling elites
accountable. People felt as though they could not even criticize the
Regime to their closest friends without fear that the Mukhabarat (the
secret police) and the Shabiha (paramilitary groups in service to the
regime) would kidnap, torture, and disappear them and their loved ones.
The political system was rife with corruption from top to bottom.
Vicious local elites could rule with impunity as long as they were loyal
to the Alawite (minority religious group) regime in Damascus, stifling
civil society organization or local governance. The many tensions and
fractures within Syrian society (ethnic, tribal, religious, and more)
were forcibly suppressed through strongman authoritarianism.
In early 2011, while the Arab Spring transpired elsewhere in the Middle
East and Northern Africa, a teenage boy sprayed the words “Your turn,
Doctor,” on the side of a school in Dara’a—a taunt to ruler Bashar
Assad, who was trained as an ophthalmologist. The subsequent jailing and
torture of teenagers provoked massive protests, and so began the Syrian
Revolution. The regime killed protestors in March in Dara’a, fanning the
flames of discontent and encouraging the exponential growth of a wide
variety of forms of anti-government resistance.
By 2012, active armed conflict had begun to spread as people pushed to
oust the regime. In 2013, a crucial regime ally, Iran, began funneling
in aid, weapons, and combat forces through Hezbollah and other
paramilitary forces. This initial foreign combat intervention changed
the entire nature of the conflict from an internal revolutionary
movement to an international proxy war. Later, international presences
participated on both regime and opposition sides of the war, with the
US, Turkey, and many Western powers siding with the rebels, and Russia,
China, and Iran siding with the regime. International geopolitical
interventions and neocolonial squabbling (from both “East” and “West”)
set a trend of what was to turn a revolutionary movement into one of the
largest modern multinational wars. Later, Russia abandoned the charade
of proxy support, sending in boots on the ground and extensive weaponry
including fighter jets and blasting the cities and countryside. In this
way, the nations that eventually set about closing up their borders to
refugees contributed to the violence that created the refugee crisis in
the first place.
In August 2013, the regime carried out the first of several chemical
weapons attacks against protestors and civilians alike as fighting
continued to escalate and rebels began making larger territorial gains.
Later, the regime continued to use chlorine gas after the UN attempted
to dismantle the regime’s chemical weapons arsenal. These are but a few
examples of the consistent disregard for civilian lives that became a
common occurrence in the war, perpetuated by most sides, but largely
attributed to the regime and its allies.
In June 2014, amid massive international infighting for and against the
Syrian government and its tactics, ISIS made their first major
appearance in Syria and Iraq, capturing large swaths of desert, oil
fields, key river territories, and some larger cities. These more
experienced fighters, coming fresh out of fighting the US in Iraq under
operation Enduring Freedom, joined the fighting in Syria en masse,
forming their own factions and taking control of many of the rebel units
eventually representing ISIS, Jahbat al-Nusra, and other military
factions. This fundamentalist Islamicization was in part a reaction to
ongoing Western imperialism throughout the Middle East, which has
radicalized, armed, and mobilized fascist elements within Islamic sects.
Throughout this time, a movement for autonomy had continued to take
shape in northern Syria in the predominantly Kurdish-controlled areas
known formerly as Rojava, now declared the Democratic Federal System of
Northern Syria (DFSNS). Their political structure is based on the ideas
of American Anarchist Murray Bookchin and Turkish political prisoner
Abdullah Ă–calan, coupled with their own attempts to practice
horizontalism and cooperation across multiple lines of gender,
ethnicity, and religion. The Kurdish fighting groups coming from the
North were experienced soldiers, especially the former PKK fighters
coming from Turkey, owing to a long history of resistance as a result of
Kurdish statelessness. However, one of the reasons they were able to
sustain themselves in the midst of a massive and multi-pronged war was
that they had made an agreement early on with the Assad Regime,
receiving autonomy and armaments in exchange for agreeing not to join
the anti-Assad resistance. This truce created a sharp divide between
them and much of the opposition movements. The United States and other
opposition-supporting movements began to hesitantly support Rojava’s
fighting units such as the YPJ and YPG due to their effectiveness
against ISIS, further complicating matters on the ground about who was
supporting who, as Turkey continues to violently oppose Kurdish
autonomy.
By 2014 and continuing into 2015, it was no longer so much a
revolutionary movement as an all-out civil and proxy war sustained by
geopolitical power plays from the international community. The victims
were predominantly Syrian civilians; whole cities were leveled. Into
2016, the regime continued to use weapons that violated international
war agreements—including chemical weapons, barrel bombs, and phosphorous
bombs—and targeting civilians (including hospitals). Throughout more
than six years of war, nearly 500,000 people were killed, nearly 5
million refugees fled, and around 6.6 million were internally displaced.
Quail: Millions of Syrian refugees fled to Lebanon, Turkey, and Jordan,
the countries bordering Syria that still granted visas to Syrians at the
time; Turkey currently hosts the greatest number, at two million
refugees and growing. Only about one million asylum applications were
submitted across all of Europe from Syrian refugees. As is the case the
world over, non-citizens displaced from their native country enter into
a state of liminal non-personhood which can take years of bureaucracy to
resolve; John Oliver did an excellent takedown of UN and state failure
to be responsive in allowing refugees to work, go to school, or even
qualify as asylum seekers. In Turkey in particular, Syrians faced a
language barrier and political resistance to their existence from both
the left and the right in the increasingly authoritarian and Islamic yet
anti-Arab and anti-Kurd Turkish political environment. In addition, ISIS
carried out several high profile bombings and daylight assassinations in
our city and its neighbors against Syrian and Kurdish radicals; our
friends, the neurosurgeon and the engineer clown, later became targets
of these.
The Syrian refugee community in Gaziantep, Turkey was traumatized and
disaffected, hardly able to find unofficial work with non-profits in the
area that desperately needed their bilingual skills and local knowledge.
This labor only intensified their alienation—they were working for the
country they missed and could never return to, alongside Western expats
earning danger pay (generally triple the Syrian or “local” salaries) who
could and did leave for their wealthy native country at the slightest
sign of danger and travelled in armored vehicles. When we would hang out
with our Syrian friends as they chain-smoked and drank sugared tea,
there were two main topics of conversation: Syrian politics, rehashed
with the fixation of a traumatized person who cannot escape his
tormenter, and their most recent plans for leaving—which embassies they
had visited and been turned away from, how their appointments with the
UNHCR had been delayed, and, finally, when they had found a smuggler to
take them to Greece. All of this was followed by a discussion of the
costs, the risks, the fears, and the goal: Germany, the promised land
for asylum-seekers.
The USA was out of the question unless they won the UNHCR lottery
jackpot (though Trump’s anti-Muslim and anti-immigration rhetoric was as
yet a distant threat), and Canada was only possible through official
means, which our friends had no reason to trust. Among the wealthier EU
countries, the UK was seen as a fortress, France as horribly racist, and
Scandinavia as more or less fine—although news traveled fast when
Denmark started to make clear that refugees were not welcome there,
making it legal to steal from them. Although we had friends end up in
all of these places, Germany was perceived to have the best economy, and
took measures to improve asylum-seeker quality of life, such as allowing
asylum-seekers to obtain legal employment a mere three months after
entry. Despite Germany’s culpability in arming and profiting on the war
in Syria, the comparatively pro-refugee stance that Angela Merkel, the
Chancellor of Germany, maintained at the time, made her a hero in many
Syrians’ eyes. In addition, especially later on, Germany was where all
of their friends already were. Germany being the most desirable
destination, our friends made their arrangements with the cousin of a
friend of a friend with a smuggler contact to get on an overloaded
dinghy and then employ the free passage granted by Schengen to cross the
internal borders of the EU to their destination.
It was a race against the clock, as the constant flow of refugees had
begun to crack the infrastructure of European immigration, setting the
stage for xenophobic political parties to seize power. Our Syrian
friends feared that the internal borders of the EU would close. In the
end, they were right.
Abbey: I’d been following the Syrian Revolution from the beginning as a
result of my interest in the Arab Spring and revolutionary political
movements in general. This eventually led to me making connections and
obtaining an invitation from a Syrian organization with which I worked
for the following eight months. In the beginning, I had no idea how much
worse the war would get. I wanted to help without intruding, but I also
just wanted to understand.
Aside from my sense of horror and powerlessness, I also felt
particularly drawn to the Syrian context due to the numerous parallels I
saw between it and the fractious nature of US politics. Of course, so
much of the violence in Syria, even before the war, is beyond what most
Americans can comprehend. I shudder now when people call the US a police
state—I know from stories how much worse it can get. But aside from
this, there were certain similar contexts in Syria and the US: religious
tensions, urban/rural divides, lurking racial and ethnic injustice,
repression (albeit significantly less in the US), and burgeoning
resistance movements regularly flaring up in spite of violent reprisals.
Before I left, I also developed a strong interest in the revolutionary
democratic movement in what was then referred to as Rojava. It was not
until I had built complex relationships with Kurdish radicals from the
region that my conception of the Bookchin-inspired multiethnic anarchist
movement fighting ISIS became complicated with the ethical realities of
war and power. The part of me that had considered heading to KobanĂŞ
(where I was invited to a later cancelled wedding), Efrîn‎, or Qamişlo‎ to
support and witness was overcome by the reality of how
resource-intensive it was to get foreigners in, how dangerous it
actually was, and how mixed my Kurdish friends’ feelings were about the
movement and me going. Further, whatever dark part of me wanted to be a
war tourist was squashed by my debilitating empathic response to extreme
violence.
Quail: Abbey and I worked alongside our Syrian friends from the summer
of 2015 to early 2016 in various non-governmental organizations. We both
had Masters degrees in Peacebuilding and had been working from the US
but in international contexts. We knew that our role as white outsiders
was fraught—on the macro level with colonialism, imperialism, and
general US domination, and on the micro level with the privilege of our
nationalities and statuses, native language, and education.
In hopes of being more a part of the solution than the problem, we
followed a rough ethical outline: we only took on work we were invited
to join in (thus, they consented to our presence), we only worked for
Syrian NGOs (decreasing the income disparities between us and our Syrian
friends), and we sought to support these Syrian-led initiatives by
leveraging the privileges we had. I could write in proposal-speak
English, so found myself as the Grants Coordinator at a Kurdish
humanitarian aid organization, representing the work to other
English-speaking donors. Abbey had exposure to data work so she could
run reports for Syrian grassroots programming while training the staff
there to do the same in the future. We did our best.
Quail: First and foremost, we were trying to support our friends and
their friends and families. I know for me, part of my motivation was to
do something, anything, in the face of the refugee crisis, particularly
in Greece, where thousands were dying crossing an international border I
could easily cross via boat or plane with my US passport. These were
senseless deaths of people already fleeing mortal violence. The
injustice was palpable.
The political energy surrounding the crossing of the refugees was
crackling: hundreds of thousands people beating the odds against
them—women crossing while pregnant, whole extended families, the urban
poor, farmers, and people from the middle class who had never slept
outside before. I couldn’t help but cheer on such brazenness. The media
and Facebook groups that popped up around the crisis were full of
shocking and, yes, compelling stories about people dodging customs
officers and ducking fences, being forced at gunpoint to pay double at
the last minute by smugglers, dressing up as wedding parties, getting
out of boats and pushing when the gas ran out, babies born on the beach
upon arrival. It was the unfamiliar that I’d been privileged not to know
(namely, war—at least, I hadn’t been on the receiving end), brought to
the same beaches where I’d spent a sunny spring break in high school. I
think it was this juxtaposition that grounded my desire to
counterbalance the privilege I knew myself to have and to support those
willing to take on such an impossible journey for the sake of their
children. It wasn’t until well into the work that I learned there were
words for this: mutual aid and open borders.
Abbey: I am invested in open borders as the result of diligent research
into the ethics, economics, and net human benefit that they create (see
Appendix below). I saw the Syrian crisis and the plights of my friends
and their communities as a chance to put those values into practice.
Abbey: It was some time into working in the region that we founded the
Syrian Underground Railroad. We created it as a secret Facebook group,
so a person could only get added by someone who knew them; that way, it
wasn’t otherwise searchable. This was our attempt to ensure that only
people with at least one person who could vouch for them entered the
space. Because of this limiting factor, we knew that the group would
have less far-reaching impact than other resources—there were other
groups with thousands of members—but also less chance of drawing the
attention of racist trolls or law enforcement.
Then we added every European and Syrian friend we could think of who
would be interested and encouraged them to add others that they trusted.
Overnight, there were over 200 people and it kept growing every day. We
encouraged the Syrian members in transit to post about what they needed
and for the European members to offer what they could. We set the
group’s core values as mutual aid, solidarity, respect, and kindness. It
wasn’t long before requests for various things started pouring in. The
process immediately became overwhelmingly disorganized.
Quail: It was both a blessing and a curse that we were able to launch
something immediately. We made connections of potential mutual aid, but
we had to navigate several hundred people on a fixed platform. The legal
concerns were real. We felt exposed running the group on Facebook
accounts. We tried consulting with a friend of mine involved with
immigration law; given the dozens of countries involved, she didn’t know
where to start in advising us, though she was enthusiastically in favor
of the work we were doing. Ultimately, we ended up setting up the best
stop-gap we could against the kind of illegal activity we believed would
be most dangerous. This was an admin statement reading:
“The admins of this page cannot offer anything that involves the
exchange of money and additionally do not support paid “fixers,”
smugglers, and the like. Any paid services such as these will be deleted
or blocked for security reasons. This page is a free mutual aid support
network. The admins of this page cannot support or condone any illegal
activities, nor can we take responsibility for potentially dangerous
decisions members of the group might take. We do, however, believe
supporting refugees in the way we are will prove to be on the right side
of history.”
We hoped that this would be sufficient.
Abbey: We brainstormed ways to keep things as user-friendly as possible
for ourselves and for those seeking aid. I compiled a spreadsheet of
those offering help: their contact information, where they lived, and
what they were willing to offer. Once we had this, it was easier to
refer or tag people as necessary. From the list of those willing to help
emerged a core group of three people who had extraordinary willingness
and capabilities and were especially responsive to requests. We made
them into admins on the page. One was a tech whiz living in Germany, one
was an asylum expert in Europe, and one was a bilingual Syrian mother
still in Aleppo. She ended up enthusiastically translating all our
English materials into Arabic and helping with other things as
needed—amazing, considering the fragility of her own situation. This
enabled our Syrian friends to post in Arabic if it was more comfortable
for them.
Additional concerns included security and accessibility. We set up the
initial video meetings through somewhat secure mediums such as Jitsi, at
which we discussed our short- and long-term goals, security, and
capabilities. We then created a riseup.net email account to handle
whatever secure email dealings we needed, though it was little
used—quite a bit more happened over Facebook messenger, despite the
security risks. This was just because so many Syrians are fluent in
Facebook, while other tools are not always accessible. At that time,
Whatsapp did not even have the Whisper Systems end-to-end encryption
yet, which would’ve been ideal as Whatsapp was the texting medium of
choice for our Syrian friends. We also used Signal or Telegram (secret
chats) for international texting where possible, teaching members of the
group to use them for messages that might be illegal or cast undue
suspicion.
Quail: Since most migrating refugees were operating entirely on
Facebook, I solicited, researched, and compiled all of the relevant
Facebook-based resources for making the journey, organized by location
(which Greek island, which country), affinity (anarchist groups,
apolitical groups), and purpose (to organize and inform volunteers, to
update everyone about specific needs and situations). Alongside this
resource page, I kept a list of reputable places asking for volunteers
and donations, for our friends and family who wanted to help. Before we
knew it, the group had over 500 members, with multiple posts a day and
several responses to each post. Although at the beginning we were
scrambling to plug every leak in the systems as we developed them, what
we were doing was starting to work. We also began to connect with other
autonomous groups doing similar things, and to exchange resources and
services.
Both: Through endless posting, messaging, contacting, and networking,
though limited by our desire to remain on the legal(er) side of a
chaotic situation and by our means, time, and contacts, we directly
supported dozens of Syrians in achieving their goals of migration and
asylum. We recognize that in the face of a multi-million-person refugee
crisis, this accounts for very little—we were one tiny facet of a truly
remarkable spontaneously emerging network of thousands of initiatives
that responded to the crisis in the best ways they could. There were
many other groups like us. With that sense of scale in mind, here is
what we achieved:
Facilitated the money transfer that got a wounded civilian out of
Yarmouk (a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria) and into Lebanon for
emergency medical care
Abbey: I was able to link someone in the US who had access to money and
a preference for direct transfers to a friend who was connected with the
wounded man in Yarmouk. Because of numerous legal restrictions in moving
money to the Middle East and the corruption in Syrian money transfer
services, the money was sent to me first. Then I passed it on to a
friend who had a bank account in Damascus that he could deposit into
from abroad. In Damascus, someone withdrew the money and gave it to the
person, who was almost immediately able to leave. He could certainly
have died without the care.
Helped one member to reunite with his wife in France, connecting him
with contacts in the local mayor’s office to facilitate his asylum
process
Quail: A coworker’s wife had found asylum in a small town in France. The
friend was trying to gain asylum legally, but needed some political heft
to succeed. Abbey reached out to a French anarchist group, part of the
International Anarchist Federation; within a few days, she had secured
the phone numbers and emails of the people he needed to speak with. He
and I unsuccessfully tried to Skype in with these people for several
days, until he decided to take the situation into his own hands and get
on a boat. Once he arrived on a small Greek island, he messaged us for
help; Abbey was able to get him an Airbnb with an apparently pro-refugee
host (as hosting undocumented refugees is illegal and punishable by jail
time), gaining him a night of good sleep and a shower before his long
journey to France. When he eventually arrived in France, he was able to
use the contacts we had procured to push forward his difficult asylum
process.
Helped dozens of people find housing, a shower, internet, phone access,
water, and food along their travels from Syria to Europe
Abbey: The numbers for this are difficult because we were more concerned
with doing these things than documenting them, but also because we don’t
actually know the full extent of how many connections occurred through
the group off the main feeds. Lots of people told us how essential these
little “comforts” could be. A shower could help one appear less like a
haggard traveller, making one less suspicious to prowling police or
anti-immigrant groups. A short wifi connection allows a person to tell
her family that she survived the boats. Food and water are heavy and
expensive, and Halal is difficult to find in prepared food restaurants.
A home-cooked meal does wonders for nutrition and morale.
Provided emotional support to countless people struggling with the many
dilemmas of migration
Quail: Many times, admittedly, we were powerless. A Syrian refugee
posted from a literally miles-long queue outside of a refugee camp in
Germany in a panic: he was being rained on, he was very hungry, and he
was afraid that he wouldn’t make it inside by nightfall. I tagged our
German contacts on the post, but it was already late evening. A few
others tagged their own friends. If nothing else, people offered their
empathy—“That sounds so terrible, I’m so sorry.” Eventually, he made it
inside (snuck in, if I remember correctly), from which he reported
triumphantly and gratefully for all of the support we had offered. Such
support yielded nothing tangible, yet it had heartened him. That counts
for something.
Abbey: We spent many long nights just helping people sort through all of
their complex considerations, dilemmas, fears, and hopes. But when there
was nothing fruitful to be said, even just listening was warmly
welcomed. I remember receiving frantic Whatsapp messages from a friend
who was trying to get through the closed Macedonian border and was stuck
in the pouring rain without food along with thousands more people, many
of whom were injured, pregnant, sick, elderly, or young, with no idea
where they could go. He called us, panicking, as heavily militarized
soldiers began herding them to unknown destinations. He feared that they
were being led to the slaughter. In situations like this, often the best
we could do was to call the Red Cross, border patrol agencies, and other
local NGOs to try to get a sense of the situation and alert anyone who
could possibly help. Many times, this was fruitless: everyone, at every
step, seemed overwhelmed, and either numb or hostile to the plight of
the lost refugees. However, we were able to confirm that the location
they were being led to was a different migration route, and inform our
friend so that he could then inform others in the crowd in Arabic—many
times, groups of soldiers would not even have translators, only guns and
dogs. Throughout these tense moments, even in our helplessness, many
people reported how much better they felt just to know that someone,
somewhere, knew where they were and what was going on—and cared.
Ultimately, we aided migration out of Syria into Europe in over 40 known
instances.
Quail: There was great potential for us and our more privileged friends
to tokenize, fetishize, and in other ways express racism, xenophobia,
and white savior mentality in our relations with our Syrian colleagues.
Wherever possible, our network attempted to cultivate a spirit of
solidarity, not charity. We tried to be vigilant about the risks at play
in our dynamics, though we didn’t let that fear paralyze us. We
ultimately had to trust ourselves to do our best and be accountable.
From staying in touch with many of the people who accessed our services,
it seemed that the bulk of relationships between hosts and refugees were
substantive and respectful. Many remain friends to this day.
Abbey: One critique leveled against an organization that was doing
similar work was that, in aiding migration, they were encouraging people
to run the risks associated with the journey. This critique could
certainly have been leveled at us; it’s something we thought about a
lot. It implies that refugees are somehow incapable of making decisions
for themselves, which is condescending. However, our perspective on the
risks did change in the course of the work. In the beginning, we had a
more hopeful outlook on the migration process, because in general, the
risks and costs were lower and people were frequently succeeding. In
addition, we felt that if people were already deciding to migrate, they
deserved to be supported in minimizing their own risks. It is possible
that our trust in the process influenced people, but fortunately none of
the people we spoke with were harmed beyond receiving physical abuse
from border police—which, terrible as it was, wasn’t comparable to
drowning in the Aegean. As time went on and the situation became more
and more devastating, however, we began to grow pessimistic about the
risks of entering Europe and began trying to focus on asylum processes
wherever possible. Quail’s desire to do this work beyond the computer
led her to volunteer on Lesvos. On that island, she witnessed some of
the atrocities that became common. As we grew bitter about the process,
we began to discourage people more, though still ultimately supporting
their decisions regardless. Throughout these shifts in perspective, our
goal was simply to provide people with the most accurate information we
could and to support their decisions.
Quail: Information-sharing networks connecting settled refugees and
fleeing refugees were fully operational at every juncture of the
refugees’ journey, mostly in the form of extended networks of family and
friends communicating updates via Whatsapp. Such networks were more
likely to avoid the pitfalls we navigated as white US citizens. But the
downside of Syrian-only support networks was that, without many
linguistic and cultural translators able to access the contexts in which
they were traveling, rumors calcified into fact, fueling and
misdirecting the travelers’ already overwhelming hyper-vigilance.
Smugglers trying to make a sale, friends and media exaggerating, the
refugees’ own idealism and desperation—all these came together to craft
a distorted picture of the journey. We tried to keep updated resources
on all the different situations along the various paths. While I was in
Lesvos, I connected an Arabic-speaking volunteer to a radical Syrian
press to address some of the rumors and misconceptions, mostly in hopes
of spreading information about how dangerous the journey was. Internews
also started a RUMOURS project in Arabic, Farsi, English, and Greek,
addressing some of the most recent rumors that had been repeated by
arriving refugees. A member posted these regularly on the Facebook
group. This interchange between Europeans, Syrians, and other refugees
was vital to confirming the validity of information passing through
migrant networks.
Both: Probably the biggest ethical issues happened in situations where
we didn’t have access to any means of helping people in extreme need or
we were just so traumatized and exhausted that we couldn’t do it
anymore. Those were the most heartbreaking moments. It became clear in
those moments how many volunteers were frantically scrambling, just like
us, yet unable to meet all the needs. We did our best, building networks
of trust where duties could be distributed according to ability and
capacity to ensure sustainability. But this was an international crisis
and we were only a handful individuals, connected and resourceful though
we were. Our offers of help may not always have lined up with our
capabilities. We were not the UNHCR, the IRC, or any sort of official
group with a budget and influence, although volunteer-driven groups
consistently proved more responsive, principled, and effective. To
paraphrase the working definition of disaster used by emergency
professionals—disasters fundamentally overwhelm a community’s ability to
take care of itself. If every need could be addressed, a situation would
not be a disaster. The so-called migrant crisis was a man-made
disaster—and we could not begin to meet every need, let alone address
the causes.
Both: The will to support targeted people through less-than-legal means
can take many forms beyond a web-based mutual aid network. Here are some
of our favorite examples from throughout history, organized both by
those affected and by people acting in solidarity. Hopefully, they can
provide you with further inspiration as you determine the best form for
your resistance to take.
As mentioned throughout this essay, Quail spent several weeks on Lesvos
Island in the Aegean Sea, one of the major boat arrival points for
Syrians and other refugees. There, she worked with the Starfish
Foundation to help welcome refugees arriving by boat and transport them
to the other side of the island so they could move on to Athens. There
are many more volunteer reflections of the experience, as the untrained
20-somethings who had the free time and the gumption to join in the work
confronted the harsh realities of a humanitarian disaster. The
spontaneous emergence of local-led volunteer initiatives offered hope,
even as they included their share of frustrations and shortfalls. We
ushered refugees off their boats, got them to a transit camp pitched on
the parking lot of a nightclub where there was water, gave each of them
a sandwich and, hopefully, shelter, and coordinated bussing thousands of
them daily to the next camp, where they could be registered so as to
legally take a ferry to their next destination. Starfish, like the other
organizations on the island, was semi-official, working in conjunction
with the UNHCR and the Greek government. However, our work was only
legal because the law had yet to catch up to the crisis. Once it did,
Spanish lifeguards and other volunteers were arrested and refugees were
imprisoned while awaiting asylum processing—where they remain to this
day, withstanding regular riots and a large-scale fire.
Border caravans are a time-honored method of moving people through
militarized border areas in a protective cluster of transportation
vehicles. The basic tactic is to gather a large group of documented
people with undocumented people protectively interspersed throughout and
then rush a border, crossing all at once so as to overwhelm any sort of
border protection in order that the undocumented people cannot be
captured. The route many refugees took in their trip towards central
Europe constituted a sort of caravan; thanks to sheer numbers, refugees
were able to overwhelm border control agents, especially those with
unclear orders. Solidarity caravans also took place throughout the
crisis, including in the Balkans and Germany. There are also many
variants to border caravans. The School of the Americas Watch
Convergence which took place in Nogales, Arizona and Nogales, Sonora
(Mexico) culminated in a checkpoint shutdown. Two hundred people
obstructed the functioning of the checkpoint, facilitating the free
passage of the hundreds of cars that passed along I-19 that day
traveling North. This border checkpoint has the blood of countless dead
on its hands, as many migrants die in the surrounding desert trying to
circumvent it. Another creative and funny example was the group that
dressed up as a wedding party to push through checkpoints with migrants
hidden amid them.
As thousands of refugees arrived on the shores of Greek islands, many
began to realize that the most difficult period of travel was still
ahead of them. The difficulties were myriad, ranging from logistical
(Where am I going to sleep tonight if it’s illegal for me to stay in a
hotel and the transit camp is about a thousand people past its
200-person capacity?) to cultural (What language is being spoken here?
Is this food halal? Is that person glaring at me because I’m wearing a
hijab?). Many anarchists stepped up to address these difficulties,
organizing heartwarming pro-refugee rallies. Anarchists opened several
squats, notably in Greece, to house migrants passing through. In Tucson,
Arizona, several communally-organized homes serve as landing spots for
migrants who have been recently released from Border Patrol/ICE custody.
Providing regular housing to migrants is not without risk: one squat in
Athens withstood a serious arson attempt. Fortunately, no one was hurt.
Going back in history, in the Great Dismal Swamp spanning Virginia and
North Carolina, “maroons,” or fugitive slaves, maintained horizontal
communities in locations so inaccessible that they could live free.
These stories are often erased in the whitewashed history of slavery
resistance that focuses on white abolitionists and minimizes black-led
resistance efforts throughout the US. Yet as early as the early 1700s,
communities of runaway slaves, Native Americans, and escaped white
indentured servants were raiding nearby swamps for food and livestock,
and establishing more or less permanent settlements that lasted until
the US Civil War. Today, we might consider establishing similar
communities based in mutual aid and mutual protection, although much has
changed since slavery when it comes to living off the grid.
Among the many amazing tales of people escaping from East to West
Germany during the Berlin Wall era are the stories of the escape agents.
Sometimes professionals and sometimes concerned citizens, escape agents
would facilitate the passage to freedom, outfitting cars and trucks to
smuggle people, assembling small aircraft, and falsifying passports.
Although the erection of the Berlin Wall deterred a great deal of
migration, it never fully prevented it. This history lesson should be
useful under the new US regime: walls can staunch but never completely
block the free movement of human beings. Human ingenuity is boundless,
particularly when people confront seemingly impossible situations. The
German organizing site fluchthelfer.in linked the work going on during
the Syrian refugee crisis to this heritage that their country now is
proud of, in spite of the fact that it was illegal at the time. They set
up underground networks of transportation systems for refugees and
trained people on how to do the work.
As long as there have been imperial nation-state borders, there has been
indigenous resistance. National borders are inherently colonial, and
they often cut through traditional tribal territories. The Tohono
O’odham tribal reservation in Arizona (and Sonora) was divided by the
violent acquisition of what had been Mexico and the creation of the
contemporary US/Mexico border. Not long ago, in 1994, migration between
Mexico and the US was shut down amid fears of mass migrations as a
result of NAFTA. Resistance to the borders continues to this day.
Members of the O’ohdam tribe continue a long tradition of providing
hospitality towards migrants crossing into their lands, including simply
providing aid from their back porches. Despite some pro-Border Patrol
and anti-immigrant political stances from reservation government, much
of the O’ohdam leadership has stood by their longstanding resistance to
border militarization and declared that a wall will never be built on
the 75 miles of the border that they control. The tribal Vice Chairman
has stated that Trump’s wall will be built over his dead body. This
stand mirrors other Indigenous, Chicanx, and undocumented resistance to
colonialism (see Appendix).
No Más Muertes/No More Deaths is a solidarity humanitarian aid
organization that came out of the sanctuary movement of the 1980s in
Southern Arizona. It runs an aid camp south of the internal Customs and
Border Patrol checkpoints that litter the roads up to 100 miles north of
the border, providing food and shelter to migrants forced to cross the
deadly Sonoran desert. It also maintains a network of water and food
caches along the various migrant trails in the area, supports shelters
south of the border for migrants and deportees, documents abuses that
the Border Patrol perpetrates against migrants and aid workers, and
supports a legal clinic for undocumented people in Tucson. The work
involves legal challenges of its own; in 2005, two volunteers
transporting undocumented patients to a hospital received a felony
charge of aiding and abetting, which was ultimately dropped thanks to
community organizing around the campaign “Humanitarian Aid is Never a
Crime.” No More Deaths volunteers remain on the frontlines of a highly
politicized border struggle, especially now that Trump is moving forward
with his plans to build a wall.
Abbey: The Syrian refugee crisis across Europe and the Middle East is
not unique in the global landscape. The US Southwest has a parallel
situation, with folks crossing into the United States predominantly from
Mexico and Central America. As xenophobic, Islamophobic, racist, and
sexist sentiments and legislation proliferate, we may need to resurrect
the underground railroad as a means of resistance and supporting
targeted persons—whether that means escaping into, within, or from the
United States.
For undocumented persons in the United States, an underground railroad
might look like decentralized networks of safe houses, aid, or
transportation including emergency response networks. For activists and
antifascists, there will likely be a need not only for safe houses and
go-bags/bugout-bags (tailored to the needs and threat model of the
individuals), but also for paths out of the United States, such as to
Mexico or a non-extradition country. Anyone who might be targeted by the
state (or other organizations that act in tandem with and sometimes more
overtly than the state) should have a plan figured out ahead of time. To
arrange a safe house, think of a friend that you trust but are not
regularly connecting with over Facebook, email, or any regular contact
that could be monitored—someone you can trust, but that your pursuers
would never think to investigate.
In Syria and Europe, with a million refugees in transit, our group of
less than 500 people was such a small drop in the bucket that even
through a medium as intensely monitored as Facebook, we seem to have
been able to fly under the radar. In the United States right now, you
should assume that anything you type or like on any social media or
unencrypted media is being handed directly to government surveillance
programs and being monitored according to the interests of the current
regime. The risk in the US is much higher, even for smaller groups.
However, you can still accomplish some things on Facebook if need be.
Just take precautions: keep things on a smaller scale, employ coded
language (arranged offline), and use secret groups to increase the
likelihood of group member accountability. For conversations over
Facebook, the end-to-end Whisper Systems encryption function of Facebook
messenger is live, although it remains imperfect, as Facebook still
collects and uses metadata from those encrypted conversations, unlike
Signal.
If we are to employ underground railroads in the current US surveillance
landscape, these efforts ought to be decentralized, based in affinity
groups, cells, neighborhoods, and horizontal networks. Without leaders,
our movements present no easy targets, so it won’t disable us if one
person is caught. The fewer figureheads, the less hierarchical
bureaucracy, the more stigmergic, adaptive, efficient, and complex our
organizing can be. Complexity can be our saving grace in a political
climate of great pressure. We need to be creative, careful, and flexible
in choosing platforms and organizational models. The forthcoming
crackdowns in the United States will be intense, but if we build
networks of trust, plan ahead, and practice strong security culture by
using accessible anti-surveillance tools, we can make this work
sustainable.
Abbey: This work was not just a responsibility—it was also a sheer
delight. By and large, refugees are just people fleeing extreme
difficulty, genuinely grateful for whatever support was offered without
pretense or condescension. I can’t tell you how many times Syrian
refugees made me dinner or offered to have me stay in their houses.
Syrian culture emphasizes hospitality, and that lent itself naturally to
mutual aid and deep friendships. Solidarity, even across boundaries of
power and privilege, can be a form of mutual aid in that the benefit is
mutual. Our liberation is interdependent. We cannot be free or get free
without each other. I have Syrian friends who I count on to be there for
me. We didn’t earn each others’ trust with empty words or rhetoric about
“allyship.” We earned mutual trust through actions. I earned theirs by
being an accomplice.
Both: To create a network like SUR, all it took were a few people with
connections on both sides of the border, in multiple communities in the
target area, who could cross the divides between cultures. Those of us
positioned in wealthy Western nations have a responsibility to those
exploited by our military, government, and corporations. Solidarity just
requires the explicit consent and interest of those involved, the
willingness to run a certain amount of risk, and the intellectual and
emotional diligence to resist casting oneself in the role of savior. It
can start small, even stay small, and the impact can still be
meaningful. Build or join a community that redistributes power and
access to resources. There are myriad ways that we can make Trump’s
America safer for those at risk.
Alternatively, if you’re reading this as a migrant, keep that hustle
game strong. We’ll try to have your back.