What If?
What If?
By Caroline Kennedy
What if? What if you made your way home from work one day, or from shopping in your local supermarket or, like 14 year old Merima, walking home from school and, just as you do everyday, you turn the corner to enter your street… But…what if…where your street used to be there is a huge, gaping crater…and, further up the road, past the sprawling bodies, the scarred buildings, the rubble and the debris….is the crumbling, smouldering shell of your home. Everything you once owned is gone….and worse….everyone you once shared your house with has vanished.. perhaps missing, perhaps injured, perhaps even dead…..What if this happened to you….?
This is exactly what did happen to Merima, one of many refugees I was involved with during the course of my work over the past decade. Today the UNHCR is protecting more than 27 million people like Merima, primarily women, children and the elderly, who have fled war, conflict, disaster, ethnic violence or persecution. Add to those the number of displaced people and it reaches a staggering 50 million, in other words, one in every 115 people on this earth. In Bosnia and Croatia where I was working at the time refugees and displaced people numbered close to 3 million.
Merima was just one of them…And her crime? Being an ethnic Muslim…I found her, alone, frightened and withdrawn in an illegal refugee camp at Culineca on the outskirts of Zagreb , the capital of Croatia. The conditions there were among the worst I had seen in any camp. There were over 6500 people living there with no clean water, no electricity, no cooking, no sanitation and no medical facilities. Typhoid, hepatitis, head lice, scurvy, respiratory and intestinal ailments were rampant, not to mention cancers, kidney diseases, heart diseases and diabetes.
Slowly, with the aid of an interpreter, I managed to coax Merima’s story from her:
“I was naughty that day,” she began, dabbing her eyes with her sleeve, “I was wrong….and now I shall never be able to tell my mother I’m sorry….I came home from school so late…I stayed behind to play with my friends…I arrived home about dinner time…..It was winter. It was dark..I couldn’t see anything…I couldn’t see my house…I didn’t know what to do….But then someone grabbed me, told me to run with them….told me there were trucks leaving, that we had to get on them…there was no time to look for my family..they told me the mosque had received a direct hit…the mosque was right next to my house…they had seen my father come out of the house…they had seen him fall….and that was it.”
Gradually, over two days, I heard Merima’s whole story. Prior to this her two older brothers and her father had been rounded up and taken to Tronopolje, one of the worst of the Serb concentration camps where they had been subjected to the most appalling and brutal torture. To this day, nothing more has been heard from her brothers. But her father, suffering ill-health on top of his torture, was likely to die in camp and, in a rare display of compassion or embarrassment by his Serb captors, had been released.
Naturally Merima, her mother and sister were overjoyed to see him alive. Their elation, however, was to be short-lived. A week later the bombs dropped on their village. This was 18 months earlier and Merima had heard nothing from them since. She had no idea whether they had survived, whether they were in another camp somewhere or whether they had all perished together in their house.
I was determined to find out. Merima lent me the only mementos she possessed of her family – some small faded photographs she kept in her purse. It was not much to go on. I contacted all the main aid agencies in Croatia, such as the UN, the Red Cross, Medecins sans Frontieres and the UNHCR. I showed them Merima’s photographs and they all shook their heads.
On my return to England some weeks later I looked up an international Muslim aid group in Birmingham who I knew had been organizing mercy flights for severely injured Bosnian Muslims to receive medical treatment in the U.K. and Europe. It was a long shot, I knew. But God or Allah must have been on my side that day. Someone there recognized the family name. They were fairly convinced that Merima’s father had been flown on a medivac flight to the UK for treatment. I couldn’t breathe…The excitement was almost too much. I didn’t dare believe my luck. I mean, what if he was actually here?….What if he was in this country?
I waited for what seemed like an eternity as files were scrutinized and names and photographs were checked and compared. Finally confirmation was made and I found myself ferried by chauffeured car to the General Hospital in High Wycombe. There I found Merima’s father, still a very sick man, her mother and her younger sister at his bedside. Then came the problem. How was I to break the news to them? In the back of the car on the way to the hospital I had rehearsed it again and again but now the time had come I was still totally unprepared.
In the end I couldn’t find the right words so I simply hugged Merima’s mother and pressed photographs I had taken of her lost daughter into her hand. With tears in my eyes I made a promise, a very rash and foolish promise, a promise I knew I would instantly regret. Not knowing whether I could possibly fulfill it, I promised her I would return to Culineca camp and bring Merima back to the UK with me.
Eight weeks later I arrived at Culineca. I was appalled by what I saw. The place was now a bomb site. I was told it had been declared a health hazard by the government, a political euphemism for “undesirable”, and just the day before I arrived had been razed to the ground by bulldozers. The refugees, I was informed, had all been rounded up, loaded onto trucks and transported to various other camps around Croatia. Unwilling to board the trucks, some had fled, others had hidden themselves. I panicked…Oh, my god, what if Merima was lost? What if I couldn’t find her…? What would I tell her parents? I couldn’t bear to think about it…Amid the rubble, I shed tears of frustration, disbelief and bitter disappointment..
But, suddenly, as if by some miracle, there she was standing in front of me, a mere child but one of the few who had stubbornly refused to leave. I rushed towards her shouting the good news as though she could understand. She threw her arms around me sobbing. I handed her a letter from her parents and an English postcard of a bright red London bus from her sister. Through an interpreter I explained that, in order to be reunited with them, she would have to travel with me through seven countries and seven borders and I only had her parents’ papers and a letter from the Muslim organization to get her through. I told her there could be very serious problems, setbacks and delays, we might even be turned back and, at the last minute, she could even be refused entry.
Merima had never travelled before in her life. She was very car sick, terribly frightened and eerily silent the whole way. She knew so little about me and I realized it must have crossed her mind more than once that I could be kidnapping her. We had no interpreter on the journey home so all I could do was hug her, squeeze her hand and smile reassuringly despite the dreadful lingering fear we would not succeed. The British border was the one I feared most and, by the time we reached there, I had decided the only thing to do was to smuggle Merima in, by whatever means necessary. If caught I knew I risked imprisonment. But,at this final stage I could not take the chance of her being interrogated by some unfriendly immigration officer and turned away because of her lack of papers. So, as we climbed back into our truck after crossing the English Channel, I hid Merima under a pile of sleeping bags. In sign language I told her to keep completely still, completely silent. I then held my breath as we approached the immigration.
Fortune again was on our side. The officers on duty asked a few simple questions but failed to look in the back of the truck and waved us through. Again, I hardly dared breathe. I felt the sweat pouring down the back of my neck. All I could think of was what if we both got caught. Merima would have been returned immediately to Croatia and I probably would have ended with a custodial sentence.
But we had made it, the final hurdle. A few miles down the road, when the coast was clear, I called Merima to emerge from her hiding place. “We are going to find your Mummy now,” I said, hugging her as she clambered over the seat and joined me in the front. I think she understood me for this was the first time I had ever seen her smile.
Finally, two hours later, on the concrete steps outside number 48 Dersingham Road in High Wycombe Merima and her family had a tearful reunion. Merima’s first words to her mother were: “I’m sorry”.
Merima and I had both been extraordinarly lucky. On an illegal operation such as this any amount of things could have gone disastrously wrong. But it helped that she was a very trusting and very brave little girl.
Even so, ever since then, neither of us can stop asking ourselves questions….all of them beginning with what if?
February 1994
