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Dear colleagues,
I’m submitting my self-nomination as a special reporter for the fifty-one session of the UNHRC on the human rights of internally displaced persons stated by the Council resolution 41/15. I’m highly interested in your reference and cooperation to include in my report many concerned subjects which we could contribute from academia.
My main geographical focused area would be mostly the global-south with special attention to the Iraqi, Syrian and Yemeni cases, Africa and LATAM, especially the Colombian case, and I’d make special attention to the Chornobyl case as a comparative long term policies and results.
My focus topics would be the:
- Time facture of deployment policies, and mostly the denomination of displaced-migrantes, the duration of the deployed policies, and international comparatives.
- Climate displaced as silenced displaced.
- Urban in-out displacements impacts, urban policies, narratives, memories, bias, resilience, post-traumatic policies.
- Displaced recognition status, documentation, relocation facilities-overcoming.
- Women trauma, mostly girls and teenagers life destruction, generational and educational policies.
- Demographic and intergenerational alterations.
Kindly refer to me if you would be interested in providing your notes, comments, critics, comparative works, and article studies that I could include in my agenda and bridge it in this mission in case I’d be nominated.
Your contributions are highly appreciable to me, please refer to me directly, or through social media @SamerAlnasir, or by hashtagging #samer_UNHRC44/8
Sincerely,
Motivation letter submitted to the UNHRC
In the first stage, I would focus on the Middle East, mostly Iraq and Syria, not because they are the most known for their massive numbers of displaced persons, nor because I have first-hand experience with the situation, but because displacement or settlement concerns in these contexts become a part of the cultural identity of the country itself. The drama, trauma and calamity of displacement have become shamelessly normalised as part of the culture itself, thus solutions are often devised ad hoc, in pursuit of survival. These chronic concerns have solidified into a substantive identity crisis in these groups and converted them into perpetual savagery, state of terror and unease, leading to greater waves of emigration.
I would problematise these bloody calamities from an empirical perspective and bring them to the Council not as foregone conclusions, but as a foreshadowing of what is happening or what will soon be going-on. I will not simply be reporting on these struggles, but instead hoping to shape eventual public policies. I am keenly aware that UNHRC 41/15 has requested durable solutions to these concerns. To achieve these, I believe it should mean more than just the eventual resettlement of the displaced, as happened in Iraq in 1959 and Syria through 1973, by creating a new social segment of the ‘resettled’. Instead, I believe in solutions from a more thoughtful and complicated context. Durable solutions must be transcendent caring for people’s trauma, memories and cognitive vulnerabilities and focusing on their psychical cognition, not just physical, resettlement.
There are many experiences on which it’s possible to draw in this context, not only those well-known from the Middle East but also the recent Kampala Convention. But lessons to learn where the common policy was eventual urban-forced co-location which caused later emigration. Meanwhile, when comparing these experiences with the recent natural disaster in Spain caused by the La Palma volcano, we can see that the solutions are not comparable to what has occurred in other countries, which have confronted the need for simple and dramatic, though forced, relocation. All experiences are lessons to learn from.
With the above in mind, I would bring many elements of practical perspective analysis together to address the issues at hand. By targeting holistic cognitive solutions related to national identity, and re-enforcing the UN’s role as the promoter of global perspectives, I hope to provide sensitive local solutions. I would achieve this by conducting not only local visits to the displaced communities, but also visiting academic institutions, not to review individuals’ relocation, but to urge and promote their roles as social activists, local promoters of local perspectives and individual sources of ideas and solutions. Then, I would encourage them to build permanent academic debates toward constant and continuous reflections on how to find new cohesion dynamics to confront trauma and pave new ways for social integration, avoiding the chronic crisis of belonging and never-ending emigration-related troubles.
Looking at the legal policies themselves, as in Iraq, I have already taken part in advising for legislative reforms, so my mandate here would reinforce my advisory position before the Iraqi government and empower me to provide first-hand, independent feedback on what is going on, suggest further steps and bridge these experiences, wherever possible, to other contexts, hopefully in Syria, Libya, Yemen and many other nations, such as Colombia, Peru and – hopefully very soon – Ukraine.
In conclusion, my proposal is a mostly conciliative one. I want to target holistic solutions with cognitive effects and, based on first-hand evidence, provide a sense of educational and academic commitment to the issue and promote public legislative policies.
