Honoring Refugees on World Refugee Day

This is a message for our world’s forcibly displaced people. World Refugee Day is devoted to you, the uprooted people among us. To honor your humanity, acknowledge your plight and to offer you our solidarity.

Artwork by Lukas Hueller, Tree of Hope, shot with Syrian refugee children at the Zaatari Refugee Camp in Jordan. I have a print of this image hanging on my office wall at UnitedNations HQ in New York

In my ten years working for UNHCR, I traveled to where you fled to hear your stories. Of what you lost, how you survived and what gives you hope. You moved me to tears. I couldn’t fathom what you endured and how you survived. The resiliency of your spirit always left me humbled but also inspired.

With my UN Refugee Agency colleague, Kate Otega (right) and refugee students who made it to the top of the class in their school in the Kakuma Refugee Camp, Kenya

There are nearly 80 million of you — women, children & men who have been forced from your homes. Ten million of you fled in the past year alone. You are called refugees, or IDPs. This label is there to offer you protection or humanitarian assistance. It pains me when instead you are excluded, shunned, stigmatized and marginalized. Even worse, you are too often politicized with twisted propaganda for xenophobic. nationalist agendas.

Refugees blocked from entering Hungary in 2015

Your trauma travelled with you. You have flashbacks of beautiful times of peace, and the hellish emergence of violence that drove you away. You left all that was precious behind, including that elusive sense of belonging that you took for granted, but now miss most of all.

The lucky refugees among you arrived in welcoming countries with enlightened policies. You were helped to settle, to learn the new language and customs, to start learning and working again. To contribute your skills, talents and the richness of your culture to your new communities. To heal.

Vienna University students offering refugees a welcoming service

A sign I saw at the train station in Vienna, Austria, welcoming refugees. In most of Europe, this welcoming spirit, and policy, would be shortlived.

But too many of you live an existence in exile where you are barely tolerated. You live on the margins, in city slums or desert refugee camps. The worst part is the limbo drawn out for years when the war back home doesn’t end. That space of time in between where your human potential is squandered.

For those of you who are internally displaced, your existence is often even more precarious. You are so close to home, yet so far way. Home is too dangerous to return to. UN humanitarians and their local partners negotiate and take dangerous journeys to try to reach you, but are often hindered, blocked by actors who are perversely using your misery, your hunger and your suffering as a weapon of war.

A boy I met while walking through the destroyed old town of Homs, Syria. He told me, “this missile killed my father

And now COVID-19 threatens and haunts you. We know most of you have only limited access to water, sanitation and health facilities. Social distancing is hard when you are living in crowded camps and cramped apartments. Your host communities are also in danger.

I know UNHCR and other humanitarian organizations are doing all they with the funding they can raise to boost public health and hygiene to limit coronavirus infections. And to give you the knowledge and the tools to keep yourselves, your families and your communities safe. Many of you are meaningfully contributing to the response.

UNHCR staff register Venezuelan Warao refugee families who have been relocated to a safe shelter in Manaus, northern Brazil.

That is why I am standing with you in solidarity on World Refugee Day. And every day.