Crossing Borders

Why did you decide to join the Steering Committee of ALF? Firstly, the invitation to become part of the Committee came from good friends and people that I respect in the field of international development, but also I consider myself personally invested in the cause of ALF since I have lived and worked in the Middle East. The murder of the Swedish Minister Anna Lindh came as a shock and a kind of wake-up call for me. I think that a network such as ALF is needed now that the world, more than ever, is increasingly polarized and radicalized. One of the negative trends of this pandemic is that everything is easily turning either black or white and the extremes are becoming more and more polarized as we witnessed during the last year in the US and other countries. Although I advocate for the perks of digital platforms in times of social distancing, I am not naive about it and I am aware that the continuous use of social media has created frustration and hostility amongst those people that feel isolated and lonely and thus feel the right to ventilate all their dark thoughts on strangers on-line. In this regard, social media are definitively not supporting a peaceful and beneficial dialogue: generally, people tend to be quite aggressive on social platforms and they lose the nuances that are an essential feature of the face to face encounters. We are experiencing challenging times, but therefore it is even more important to have an organization building network in order to reach out to people before they become too radicalized and before they start cornering themselves in crystallized opinions and stereotypes about their “enemy”. There is a lot of work that needs to be done in Denmark too and we certainly need to continue to build and re-establish the ALF Danish network. I hope that we will invite and engage many more members, especially those that are not traditionally part of this type of sector. I am thinking beyond NGOs because if you really want to achieve change in society, you need to reach out to those actors who are more critical and hesitant because they might not see the point in participating in the conversation right away.  It is much easier to agree with those who have the same idea as yourself. Nevertheless, the real work starts when we approach those who do not agree or have different opinions because the differences allow us to expand beyond the comfort zone of organizations that already share the same ideas and goals. We need to open the dialogue at many levels, and we will take a small step towards this goal; we owe it to the rest of the network and to our neighbors in Sweden. In your opinion, what are the major strengths and flaws of ALF? I firmly believe in the importance of networks.  I am also part of other networks such as the Nordic Women Mediators Network. I think that creating networks and relationships, formally and informally, is the only way we, as humans, can evolve and manage the challenges that we face politically, socially, and military. ALF and its network have had a good start particularly in the Middle East and the Mediterranean region. I do not think that there are any flaws in creating networks, on the contrary, it is essential to have people meeting, discussing, building alliances in order to push agendas, raise awareness and help change things. Have you had the chance to work in the Mediterranean area? My experience in the Middle East started as a child living in Cyprus, where my father worked as a UN peacekeeper during the conflict between the Greek and the Turkish Cypriots. I grew up looking at the border, watching people fleeing from their homes and losing their families as I witnessed all the suffering that that caused. Amongst them, there were also refugees from Lebanon fleeing from the civil war, so I was exposed to the consequences of bad leadership in the Middle East at an early age. Then, years later I returned to work in the Middle East. I negotiated agreements with authorities, undertook assessments during conflicts, and opened offices in Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. I have a great affection for the region and its people, in fact, I have maintained contact with the region as I am the chair of the Executive Committee of the European Endowment for Democracy which provides grants to organizations and individuals promoting democracy in the European Southern neighboring countries. The concept of dialogue is at the core of ALF, how important is it for the DIPD? What are the differences between the political dialogue of DIPD and the dialogue of ALF? In Denmark, we have a history of cross-party political dialogue and negotiation enacted to achieve what we think is the best for our society and we have refined this culture for over a hundred years. This is the history and the principles that DIPD brings along when engaging internationally in partnerships with developing countries that do not share the same historical path or background of democratic culture. Through peaceful and constructive dialogue, we show that it is possible to discuss with someone with a completely different view. DIPD facilitates dialogue between or within political parties, whereas ALF enables dialogue between civilians, people, and organizations. Nonetheless, the two types of dialogue observe the same principles. This is the whole point of building societies – to listen constructively and peacefully not to fight those with different opinions. In the current times of isolation due to the pandemic, it seems difficult or even impossible to foster dialogue. Would you suggest a strategy to keep the conversation open and active across the Euro-Med region? I do not completely agree with the assumption that it is difficult to foster dialogue during these times. During the lockdown, we were able to reach out to people that otherwise would have been excluded either because they

We are meeting Mu’ayyad in the heart of Østerbro, in Copenhagen, where we are having a chat over a cup of tea and an inevitable slice of the delicious Danish carrot cake. Mu’ayyad Mehyar is the newest member of the Steering Committee of Anna Lindh Foundation – Denmark (ALF-Denmark). We want to know more about his life, his experiences but, most and foremost, we are eager to learn what Dialogue truly means for him. Mu’ayyad’s life seems to be quite exceptional: Born and grown in Jordan, he started off his career as a Mechanical Engineer but after seven years he decided to change his career path. He moved to England where he graduated from the University of Bradford in International Conflict Resolution. Mu’ayyad says that he aimed at studying International Conflict Resolution, because this have helped him to professionalise his active engagement in the Middle Eastern societies to further promote peace and understanding in a region that has lived protracted conflicts. Why Dialogue and why do you believe in the potential of Dialogue? “I wholeheartedly believe that dialogue is a fundamental tool as well as a way of communication whose aim is to have a deeper understanding of things as well as to explore and discover global perceptions and ways of thinking about global rights, standards and values. Also, dialogue can serve to finding the root causes of, for instance, a crisis, in order to avoid to simply deal with its symptoms. Dialogue it’s not just a huge part of my career, but a fundamental side of my personal life: I experienced it first when I was young and sitting with my big family in Jordan (being the youngest of eight brothers and sisters). Then, through my mum’s monthly receptions when, for over 35 years, she used to host more than 60 women of her friends, every 3rdand 4th of each month. I also learned it through my civic engagement activities during the teenage period and later at the university in Jordan, where I was studying Mechanical Engineering. Together with university peers in Jordan, I founded a debate club in 1987 to discuss issues of mutual concerns and controversy amongst the students at the university premises. During that period, I co-founded a Pan-Arab Youth Forum in 1989 and started to dialogue not only about national issues but also regional issues of common concern to Arab Youth. Needless to say, I am into intercultural marriage, which entails, as an imperative, some sort of dialogue to have deeper understanding of my partner, my Danish lady, with whom I have been married for more than 20 years.” According to you, what are the fundamental grounds for an effective Dialogue? “In a dialogue process, we should listen actively to each other, deeply enough, to be changed by what we learn from those we are dialoguing with. In a dialogue process the intention should not be to advocate for certain things but to inquire about these things. Further, it should not be about arguing with the participants, but exploring and discovering things together with them, without trying to convince them of certain thoughts and ideas. In a dialogue process we should ensure that there is a safe and open, trustful, and enabling space. Moreover, there should be some sort of commitment and absence of a desire to win the dialogue to your own direction. In addition, we should ensure inclusive, equal, respectful and transparent values. I believe that reflecting upon dialogue is fundamental, both through self and collective reflections. Moreover, we should aim at going through a collective inquiry not only to take into consideration the words spoken by the participants, but also the context that brought them to such conclusions, including their underlying motivations, assumptions and beliefs. Most importantly, in a dialogue process there has to be a joint sense of ownership and enthusiasm for the dialogue process and in turn outcomes that would lead to positive change. Dialogue should lead to a set of recommendations, which afterwards form a common framework and guidelines for the standards and procedures.” During our meeting, Mu’ayyad happens to be with his dog Charlie. Since he has just moved back after staying in Jordan for three years, he did not want to leave Charlie alone. For the last three years, you have been living and working in Jordan. What, do you think, characterizes Jordanian culture? “Jordanian culture is considered to be a ‘high-contextual’ culture, which communicates indirectly rather than directly, through implicit ways. We should understand that as important as the explicit content of a message, is the context in which it occurs. Arab people in general, and Jordanians in specific, put the group before the individual, they are keen and concerned about how they will appear in the eyes of the others. It is a so-called ‘collectivist’ culture that values interpersonal relationships, whose members form stable and close relationships. Speech is therefore more about upholding and promoting social interests than transmitting information. And that is why Jordanians weigh their words carefully, for whatever they say will be scrutinised and taken to heart. Face-to-face conversations contain many emollient expressions and comprise words that have socially lubricating function of respect and courtesy, in fact Jordanians feel acutely uncomfortable about delivering a blunt ‘no’ since they want to please others and prefer inaccuracy or avoidance of painful accuracy”. Can you tell us about your recent experience in Jordan working at the UNFPA (United Nation Population Fund) for the department of “Sexual and Reproductive Rights”? “Jordan is, in its vast-majority a Muslim country. The 95% of its population are Muslims, who follow Sharia for all marriage-related issues. So, in my last job as an International Consultant to UNFPA Jordan it was challenging to work with sexual and reproductive rights, in a conservative society that taboos talking about sexuality. This could possibly be because of the deeply rooted patriarchal culture in people’s mentality as well as in some institutional laws. Yet, I do not want people in Jordan to live against

The world has been recently unsettled by the emergence of the pandemic COVID-19. People all over the globe find themselves facing many changes in their everyday life which are needed to control the spread of the virus. Amid this global health crises, it’s visible how some “humans” matter more than others so I decided to address the low position that migrants hold in the global hierarchy due to a well-constructed and regulated system aimed at the dehumanization of those subjects. In order to do so I will start with an overall characterization of Moria: the biggest European refugee camp, located on the Greek island Lesbos. Afterword I will briefly report the episode of an unwanted British cruise ship and of its passengers eventually rescued from international diplomatic intervention. The comparison between the refugee camp Moria and the British cruise ship Braemar emphasizes the durable inequality and colonial settled mindset that characterizes European thought which, by now, has been assimilated and accepted by the rest of the world. Lesbos Lesbos is one of the many Greek islands facing the Turkish coast that have been literally invaded by migrants in the last twenty years: more than 42,000 men, women and children are now estimated to be on Lesbos, Samos, Chios, Leros and Kos. Refugees are unable to leave because of a containment policy determined by the EU, and they are forced to remain on the islands as detainees until their asylum requests are processed by long and complicated burocracy. Moria, situated on Lesbos, is the biggest refugee camp in Europe with its 20,000 inhabitants living in a space initially designed to host only 3,000 people. One might ask how did the camp become so overcrowded? In two words: “Fortress Europe”. In 2015 the EU commission in Brussels decided to turn refugee camps into “hotspots”, or detention camps. Hence, their “undocumented” inhabitants of which many are unaccompanied minors, became illegal detainees. To make matters worse, the Greek government has recently decided to suspend asylum rights in order to stop the stream of immigrants from the islands to the mainland. Is no surprise that the Greek islands’ population has been growing exponentially since then. Apostolos Veizis, director of the medical operational support unit for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF) in Greece referring to the decision to suspend asylum rights, stated that: “the imposition of the restriction of movement on the people of the camps and not for anyone else on the islands is unacceptable and discriminatory (…). You are locking children, women and men into severely overcrowded camps where the sanitation and hygiene conditions are horrific” (Spinney L., 21-03-2020). Even thou Greece is part of the EU, it has been treated as part of Europe’s borderlands, as a giant prison camp where to block and detain migrants to minimize the risk of “invasion” for the core EU nations. This “Fortress” strategy has had tremendous outcomes for the people on the islands, especially for Moria where there is limited access to running water (toilets and showers regularly block due to overuse), restricted access to electricity, complete absence of a trash collecting system or health care. In addition to this, the living space for the detainees is very limited (an average of 3sqm per person) and the refugees houses consist in shacks built with recycled materials and garbage (Camilli, A., 2017). In a situation already at the limit, a new factor of fear and crises has recently entered the scenario. The first case of Covid-19 was confirmed at the beginning of March when a Greek woman from the town of Plomari was tested positive. The Greek government showed no interest in intervening to prevent the spread of the disease among the refugees and neither the EU acted in this direction. In the absence of support from the Greek authorities, an increasing sense of urgency about hygiene and health care has grown on Lesbos. Moved by their own initiative, refugees started organizing sewing homemade masks, placing antibacterial soap on olive trees and educating kids about the many precautions to adopt. Nevertheless, the situation seems hopeless and preventing a humanitarian crisis seems unlucky to happen. The pandemic resulted worldwide in the closure of borders, the discouragement of movement and a general increase of fear and xenophobia which intensified the European Fortress politics. At the beginning of March, the EU has financed Greece with €700m destined to the “upgrade of the shield”. Therefore, the so called “shield”, meaning the Greek border, has been reinforced with new infostructures and highly militarized means placed to block “undocumented” people and defend Europe from the “invasion”. I would like to emphasise that I do not want to focus on the most recent events concerning the spread of the Corona virus as such, I simply take the occasion to use this global crises to highlight the inequality of the system in which we live in, as a litmus paper that inevitably shows two different behaviours, two different ways of being “human” and two different ways of representing humanness. My aim is to bring on the table a reflection on the inequalities that are consistent part of everyone’s everyday life, but which are easily forgotten in case you stand on the “innocent”, privileged and democratic side which controls, and have controlled for centuries, among many things, knowledge creation. As Gloria Wekker states: “The claim of innocence, however, is a double-edged sword: it contains not-knowing, but also not wanting to know. Precisely because they tend not to understand the racist world in which they live, white people are able to fully benefit from its racial hierarchies, ontologies and economies” (Wekker G., 2016, pg. 17). Braemar Cruise Ship The British cruise ship Braemar with its 682 passengers and 380 crew members was supposed to spend only 14 days in the Caribbean Ocean in the beginning of March, but after the first case of COVID-19 outbroke on board, the cruise has been turned away from several ports in the Caribbean, including the Barbados and the Bahamas. The Braemar had