This sentiment is shared by many Syrians in diaspora and provides an opportunity to cultivate a better understanding of how to support this population so they can flourish, and one day return to rebuild the country they left behind.
Refugees are not immigrants. A 2015 Canadian study conducted by Dr. James Kirkbride and his team on refugees and immigrants demonstrate this point. Immigrants leave their countries willingly while refugees are forced from home under harsh conditions. Mental illness, mal adaptation and guilt often haunt refugees while immigrants do not suffer the same consequences.
Feelings of anger, guilt and betrayal can cast a shadow over refugees for a lifetime and may even affect their children, crippling a family’s ability to adapt and thrive in their new environment.
It is a heavy burden they carry even when they leave with the intention of helping those who remained behind. A recent comment by a Syrian living in Norway explains this sentiment, “We betrayed our homeland. We convinced ourselves that one day we will build our country to be like a paradise.”
The Syrian refugees I interviewed in Turkey, Serbia, Germany, Norway and the United States expressed similar ideas. They left with every intention of one day returning to rebuild. They set out with expectations to continue their education, work in order to send money back home or to resettle their families in a safe environment. Instead, many feel frustrated, depressed and ashamed they left. Yet the success of refugees’ aspirations greatly depend on the structure of asylum policies in each country and not only on individual initiative.
Refugees are seldom successful without substantial support from local and federal government agencies. Cuban and Vietnamese refugees in the United States received extensive support to buy homes, attend university and start businesses, and as a result are amongst the most successful groups in the U.S. Conversely, Bosnian, Somali and Iraqi refugees in the U.S. received less than basic support and remain vulnerable to the ill effects of being refugees even into the second generation.
Lack of support is not the sole variable to a successful outcome; nostalgia may also act as a diminishing factor. Dr. Salman Akhar in his book Immigration and Identity refers to this phenomenon as “the poisoning of nostalgia.” He further links a “half-hearted reception in the host country” as a factor that makes “the exile’s assimilation arduous.” The combination of pain and loss, “can hinder the process of integration,” Paul Elovit and Charlotte Kahn write in Immigrant Experiences, and fractures their sense of belonging because it “prevents a full internal integration of the past and present.” This split caused by forced migration essentially impairs refugees’ ability to accept their new environment, causing them to remain mentally in their country of birth, rather than embracing a new life. The destruction cause by years of systematic bombing by Assad forced millions of Syrians to become refugees. It is a trauma refugees carry with them.
Assad and his allies attempted to kill Syrians in every way possible so that survival became a victory. Starting a life in a new country is not a betrayal, but an act of defiance and a blow to a regime that tried to exterminate the people who revolted against it.
Syrian refugees will need to adapt, thrive and move forward without the burden of survivor’s guilt and toxic nostalgia to one day return home strong and mentally resilient for the task ahead. A country is only as strong as its human capital, its people, and for better or worse, Syrians now in the West have an opportunity to acquire skills, many of which were not available in Syria.
When Syrian refugees can return home is uncertain, but they certainly can start now to develop the skills they will need to rebuild. It will be a way for Syrians to reach the goal they set out to accomplish, ultimately to return home and build a paradise.
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Anisa Abeytia is a freelance writer who contributes to a good number of media outlets. Abeytia is actively engaged in advocating for the Syrian cause since 2012 and more recently for refugee rights. She produced/directed three documentaries on Syrian refugees. Abeytia is a graduate of Stanford University with an MA in Post-Colonial and Feminists Theory.
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