Cameroon’s government said 10 “Ambazonia Restoration Forces” were killed by the army in Southern Cameroons, denying online reports of civilian deaths in the weekend military operation.

Southern Cameroons Self Defense groups have been fighting for independence for two anglophone provinces in the majority French-speaking country since 2017.

The Francophone Communication Minister Rene Emmanuel Sadi said on Monday in a press release that a separatist commander known as “General Fire Man” was among those killed on Saturday in fighting between the Restoration Forces and French Cameroun government army soldiers.

“Ten separatist terrorists were neutralised, including three women” in Small Babanki in the Northwest Region, he said.

The Southern Cameroons Interim Government announced that  10 civilians, including women and children, were killed by troops loyal to the regime in Yaounde.

These were dismissed by the Francophone government as “false propaganda” and “totally unfounded allegations, contrary to reality”.

Fighting between the two sides — and reprisal attacks on civilians — have left more than 3,000 dead in the two western regions during the three-year conflict.

Human Rights Watch has also accused Cameroon’s armed forces of taking part in the killing of at least 21 civilians on February 14 in a remote part of Northwest Region. The army has denied the accusations.

By Camcordnews with files from AFP

The day the military came to Bella’s village in Talingai, in the South-West Anglophone region of Cameroon, the villagers, terrified, escaped into the bush behind the village, where they set up a camp. Speaking to RFI in Mamfe, smartly dressed in a bright blue dress, it is only when she begins her story that her whole body heaves, her shoulders hunch up. She distinctly remembers what happened this time last year, that changed her life forever.

Bella was nursing her second child and sneaked back during the day to pick up some supplies from the house. She spent the night at home after it got too dark to leave. When she returned to the bush, her pregnant sister-in-law and four young children were nowhere to be found. She searched for them for four days.

According to Anglophones RFI spoke to for this article, people are scared, threatened and some have been tortured by the Cameroonian military and rebels, their homes burnt down by men in uniform or had friends and family killed in the fighting between security forces and Anglophone separatists.

The UN sounded the alarm in February, when they confirmed through sources on the ground that armed men carried out the extra judicial killings of at least 21 people in Ngarbuh, the North-West region of Cameroon, including a pregnant woman and seven children, in addition to other reports of military action against civilians in that area.

French President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged the “deteriorating situation” in the Anglophone regions days after the attack, and came through on his promise on Sunday to call his Cameroonian counterpart Paul Biya to apply “maximum pressure”, calling the violence “intolerable.”

Both Macron and Biya “agreed an impartial probe was needed in reaction to the violence committed against civilians in the village of Ngarbuh in the North-West province,” according to the statement released by the French presidency.

Human Rights Watch has since accused the Cameroonian military of carrying out the killings in Ngarbuh, with the help of Fulani fighters.

Cameroon’s Defence Ministry initially said on 17 February the government would open an investigation into the killings. It published a second statement later the same day that fighting against “armed terrorists” who attacked government and security forces led to the explosion of fuel containers, resulting in the deaths and burnt homes. Communication Minister René Emmanuel Sadi reiterated that statement the next day.

An assessment carried out by the UN in September 2019 shows more than 700,000 people have been forced to flee their homes in the two Anglophone regions of Cameroon, a number considered to be a significant underestimate as access to the area has been difficult.

Violence began in 2017 in both the North-West and South-West regions in the aftermath of peaceful protests by Anglophone teachers and lawyers who took to the streets to demonstrate against alleged discrimination and unfair working practices enforced by the Francophone central government.

The ensuing government crackdown since then provoked the creation of an armed separatist movement and self-declaration of independence for so-called Ambazonia. The separatists are fighting for Anglophone secession.

The crisis in the Anglophone regions has swelled into an all-out civil war fought by the Ambazonians, colloquially called Amba Boys or Ambas, made up of a number of different armed groups. The Anglophone rebels are fighting the Cameroonian military, specifically the Rapid Intervention Battalion (BIR), the elite fighting unit accused of human rights abuses in the far north of the country.

Changing strategy and intimidation

The Cameroonian military’s tactics of targeting the Ambas have evolved during the crisis and recently soldiers have attempted to change their approach with the local population, according to Anthony, a resident of Sand Pit, a neighborhood in Buea.

He recounted how two weeks ago, the military travelled in a yellow taxi into Sand Pit in full uniform with weapons. He guessed that they were trying to trick the population. They caught five people and started beating them with cutlasses, he says. Those people now have wounds on their backs.

“Then they put the Pa on the ground,” he says, using a respectful term for an older male member of the community, “and they put the gun next to the ear of the Pa, and they shoot the gun right next to him,” he says.

The older man has been plagued with hearing problems ever since, says Anthony, who was displaced by the fighting three months ago. He shakes his head as he speaks of how the military intimidated the Pa and others in the community.

The story Gabriella, 32, tells is an example of how the killings in her family cross both sides of the conflict. Speaking in Mamfe town, she had not told her story to anyone outside her family before, in part, she says, because everyone else around her is suffering, but also because she trusts no one.

The military came to Mbeme village two years ago, hunting Amba Boy separatists who operate in the area. Spraying bullets among the dried mud houses in the village, one stray bullet killed Gabriella’s husband. Two weeks later, her 15-year-old son, the eldest of seven, was gunned down in the barber shop in the village, a victim of being young, Anglophone, and male.

Her father, a village elder, had questioned why the Amba Boys were shutting down public schools, and pushed for the children of the village to go back to school.

The separatists have blocked the opening of some 4,500 schools across the region for more than three years to protest what they call educational discrimination against Anglophones. To date, this boycott enforced by the gun has affected 600,000 schoolchildren.

A week after his grandson died, the Amba Boys came knocking on his door at night.

“They shot him. It was a premeditated act,” said Gabriella, the tone of her voice rising as she confirmed she had lost three male members of her family in the span of a month. She has been bottling up this story and only now feels ready to share the description of the atrocities committed in her village by both soldiers and separatists.

Both sides committing violence against civilians

Human rights abuses are being perpetrated by both sides, confirms Ilaria Allegrozzi, senior researcher on Central Africa for Human Rights Watch. She has documented abuses, deaths, and violent acts since the crisis began in late 2016.

“It’s important to acknowledge that human rights violations have been committed by the security forces but at the same time, the separatists are not angels and have also targeted civilians,” she says.

“The gravity, the scale of the abuses that we have documented coming from the security forces are more significant than the abuse that is perpetrated by the armed separatists,” the HRW researcher adds. The abuses are frequently just the start of the nightmare for Anglophones living through the conflict, where their only option is to escape the patrols of soldiers and separatists through their village.

Gabriella says she, her six children and the whole village fled into the bush. Her two cousins died in the jungle, where malaria, lack of shelter, no sanitation, and the absence of running water makes survival difficult.

She brought her remaining family to Mamfe town because she said she could not subject them to the harsh reality in the jungle. In town, she is alone with her children, and she has no relatives to help. She volunteers her cleaning services in the hope that she can beg for some rice for her children.

“I’m finished, I have no talk,” she says in Pidgin English. “Since the crisis, look at me,” motioning at her bedraggled dress. “I’m tired. I don’t have anything to feed the children.” Neither she nor her children have eaten for several days.

RFI spoke to more than 30 internally displaced Anglophones in and around Buea, Kumba, and Mamfe in the South-West Anglophone region of Cameroon.

People spoke primarily of military harassment, from looting and burning homes to shooting civilians, either targeting people or shooting in the air, which has killed a number via stray bullets. They spoke of security forces targeting villages where many lived as subsistence farmers or worked on plantations for the Cameroon Development Corporation (CDC), a parastatal company that was the country’s second-largest employer.

Residents in the South-West region say the Cameroonian security forces will torch a home if they see a young man fleeing in the vicinity. Young men are targeted typically because the separatists recruit young Anglophone men to fight against the military.

After constant harassment and killings by soldiers, Pierre, a 38-year-old from Ekona village, had enough. He says he has been targeted by the military because he is a man, and an Anglophone.

“They killed my elder brother first. Then my second brother. Then they killed my uncle,” he says from Buea, the regional capital of South-West Cameroon.

“I can’t stay there after they killed them — I’ll be next,” he says, nervously wringing his hands. Pierre found it difficult to recall the killing of his family members.

Grace, 38, paid the price after one of her male neighbours ran off into the bush where she lived. She was by herself in her home in Maumu village in September 2018 when the military came knocking, demanding to know where her neighbor had gone.

“The military man went and stood at my door. He called me, and then he shot me in both legs,” she says, describing how one of the soldiers escalated the situation without warning.

After neighbours came out of the bush to smuggle her to the hospital, the military searched the local health facilities, looking for her. Hospital staff hid her in a closet.

Grace, crying, says she is afraid they will find her again. She spoke to RFI on the condition that her real name and location would not be revealed. She owes hospital bills of nearly 1,400 euros (900,000 Central African CFA Francs), and is unable to walk. Her left leg is bandaged because she has an open wound from the gunshot that has still not healed, a year and a half after the shooting.

“Civilians have been caught in the middle, and have paid the highest price in this crisis,” says HRW’s Allegrozzi. “People have been displaced, have lost their families, are living in the bush and are in need of humanitarian assistance. And this crisis has yet to be addressed.”

A population terrified

Anglophones feel that the military is given free rein to do whatever they want.

Meanwhile, those villagers whose houses are still standing maintain they are too scared to sleep in their own homes and prefer to sleep in the bush. They return home occasionally to harvest their crops so they can eat. Those who have migrated to towns also venture back to their homes, but only during the daytime, in order to gather more food to eat and sell.

Bella, the young mother who could not find her five relatives, says she was determined to find out where they were. She puts her hands in her lap, her chewed nails betraying her anguish as she tells her story with little emotion.

“I went to town to report them missing, and to see if they were arrested,” says Bella. The military maintained they had not detained her family members, and she would find them in the bush. They even asked her to call them with an update.

While Bella mustered up the courage to speak to the military, most Anglophones RFI met are afraid — afraid of being shot, or disappeared, or afraid that the military will burn their house down, as they did to their neighbours.

Three years into the horror of losing family members, losing jobs, and losing sleep, many Anglophones, who perhaps were initially on the side of their separatist brethren, now distance themselves from the Ambas, both physically and philosophically. Leigh, 66, said she is afraid of both sides.

“Both are dangerous. Yes, I mean the Amba Boys. If you don’t give them money, you will be beaten. They can kill you,” she says.

Before her community relocated to the bush, she said that the Ambas would sometimes warn them with a whistle when the military were coming so that they could run.

“Now they don’t give any sound. Now they are against us, the military are against us, we are the ones suffering. When the army starts shooting they don’t ask who is who, they just shoot,” she says with a sigh, after rapidly recounting her story.

Fear among civil society groups, too

Local non-governmental and international organisations are trying to provide aid to the most vulnerable members of the Anglophone population, however the level of fear is reflected amongst the humanitarian workers too. A number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) were afraid to go on the record regarding the difficulties they have in maneuvering through the terrain, and in dealing with the government.

Local aid group Authentique Memorial Educational Foundation (AMEF) was at the forefront when the fighting broke out between the military and the Amba Boys in Kumba town, where they operate. The difficulty lies in both the separatists and the government believing that aid organizations are helping the other side.

“There is that fear you’re being branded a spy,” says Atim Taniform, AMEF humanitarian affairs and operations manager in Kumba, saying that NGOs are working in a fog of uncertainty.

“We are afraid that the [government] administration thinks that we are bringing assistance to non-state actors [separatists] instead of the community. At the same time, the non-state actors feel we are taking assistance from the administration and bringing it to ‘their’ community,” she says, referring to how the Ambas refer to Anglophones. Taniform chooses her words carefully when referring to the parties of the conflict.

Both sides do not understand humanitarian principles and how they are applied in real terms, according to Christian Tanyi, head of the Martin Luther King Jr. Foundation (LUKMEF), a human rights organization that operates out of Buea.

“When you look at humanitarian principles, the principle of neutrality doesn’t mean we shouldn’t talk to people. We talk to all parties in the conflict, trying to explain exactly who we are, what we do and how we do it,” says Tanyi, who says he has tried to explain the rules of engagement to both sides.

“The humanitarian situation continues to deteriorate mainly due to multiple displacements as a result of attacks against civilians,” says James Nunan, UN Office of Humanitarian Affairs regional head in Buea, South-West region, Cameroon.

The bottom line, says Tanyi, is the military and the separatists are not respecting international humanitarian law, as humanitarians and vehicles with humanitarian aid have been attacked by both the military and the separatists.

“All these attacks signify that there is still a very long way to go,” he adds.

As of press time, the Cameroonian military had not responded to a request for comment.

‘We are suffering and we just want it to end’

The majority of Anglophones still believe the government could stop this with one phone call from President Paul Biya, as well as pulling the military out of the region, including the 1300 troops and police brought in for February’s elections.

On February 11, Cameroon’s Youth Day, Biya spoke in French dubbed into English, calling for young Anglophones to come out of the bush, a move opposition Senator George Kinyang said was inadequate.

“Who’s going to employ them, willing them to come out of the bush when their houses are being burnt down in the northern South-West region,” said Kinyang from his home in Douala. He says he cannot return to his constituency because of the fighting.

“How do you call people to come out when they’re not sure of their security, when they are not sure of their livelihood, when they have no assurance that their human rights will be respected,” he adds, saying that the only way to end the conflict is a ceasefire, a move that would be welcomed by those who have already suffered enough.

A worried Bella, still looking for her missing family, left the military headquarters in her area and rushed back to the bush camp, where she found a shallow grave. Other members of the community helped her dig it up, where she discovered the bodies of her four young nephews and pregnant sister-in-law.

She called the military, telling them she found the lifeless bodies of her family.

“The military told me they were there to shoot Amba Boys,” she says, recalling the conversation, her voice cracking. “And when they saw they killed civilians, they tried to bury them.”

She said the soldiers apologized to her.

“They gave me 2,000CFA (3 euros) phone credit” to compensate for her losses, she says, laughing bitterly, before her laughs turn to sobs. Her reaction borders on hysteria – such a meagre compensation in phone credit for the killing of her family is unfathomable.

“People have lost their lives and [others] are dying,” says Bella, through a veil of tears. “I want everything to be over.”

*Names have been changed for the safety and security of those featured in this report

Culled from Radio France International

Sangmélima is one of the four constituencies of the South region from which the Cameroonian dictator hails.

The installation of Faustin Bekono, newly elected mayor of the commune of Sangmélima, initially scheduled for February 28, will finally take place on March 3, Cameroon Concord News has gathered from CPDM sources in French Cameroun.

The newly elected mayor will replace André Noel Essiane, a long time acolyte of President Biya who has been under Beti Ewondo media scrutiny of late.   

The inhabitants of Sangmelima were informed of the delay in the handing over ceremony via a message from the governor of the South region, Felix Nguelé Nguelé in which he instructed the senior divisional officer for Dja et Lobo to postpone the administrative ritual “until further notice.”

A lot of tongues have been waging on the matter due to the fact that the decision to postpone the installation ceremony was not sanctioned by the Southern Cameroons Minister of Territorial Administration, Paul Atanga Nji but by the Director of the Civil Cabinet at the Presidency of the Republic.

Our Yaoundé city reporter revealed that it was the Director of the Civil Cabinet at the Presidency, Samuel Mvondo Ayolo who pressurized the governor and the Senior Divisional Officer for Dja-et-Lobo, Koulbout Aman David to suspend the process.

A recent government communiqué made public late last week and signed by the prefect of Dja et Lobo stated that, on “instructions from the very high hierarchy“, the elected mayor will be installed on March 3.  The “very high hierarchy” in French Cameroun political discourse refers to the head of state.

According to local media reports, the crisis in Sangmelima is one of the many political wars that the Biya regime’s dignitaries are waging against each other.

By Rita Akana in Yaounde

Cameroon President Paul Biya agreed on Sunday with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron, that an impartial probe was needed after gunmen killed 22 people in a village at the heart of a separatist insurgency last month, the French presidency said.

The two leaders spoke by phone about the Feb. 14 attack in a village in western Cameroon, where gunmen in military uniforms and masks shot women and children and burned others in their homes.

“They agreed an impartial probe was needed in reaction to the violence committed against civilians in the village of Ngarbuh in the northwestern province,” the French presidency said in a statement.

Cameroon’s army since 2017 has been fighting English-speaking militias seeking to form a breakaway state called Ambazonia amid the cocoa farms and forests of west Cameroon.

As fighting has intensified, so have abuses by both sides, witnesses and rights groups say. The fighting is the gravest threat to stability in the oil- and cocoa-producing country since Biya took power nearly 40 years ago.

Source: Reuters

Rose grew up in an English-speaking region of Cameroon, a Central African country uniquely, and violently, divided by language. When she was young, on the instructions of her father, she handed out fliers for a secessionist group opposed to the Francophone-controlled government. But as a teen, after she was sexually assaulted by security forces looking for her father, she swore off politics and became a teacher.

Two decades passed. On a visit to her home village in 2016, Rose attended a protest demanding resources for Anglophone schools. Teachers and lawyers were the tip of the spear of a burgeoning independence movement centered on language. At the demonstration, officers hit Rose on the head with something powerful enough to knock her out and land her in the hospital for months. Afterward she was repeatedly brought in for questioning by police. Her family name, linked to the secessionist movement, made her more of a target. (For this story, she asked to use a pseudonym.)

As she watched other teachers being hauled off and never heard from again, she decided to leave the country. Over the last three years, the violence in Cameroon has led to more than 3,000 deaths and uprooted half a million people—the fastest-growing displacement crisis in Africa, according to the International Rescue Committee. Asylum seekers from Cameroon often go west, to Europe and the United States. But Rose’s broker, whom she paid nearly $7,000, surprised her with the news that he could get her a visa to Japan, a country she knew almost nothing about. She had little idea of what she would do with her life when she arrived there, and barely 24 hours to decide. Still, she told me, “I just wanted to be in a safe place.”

The leaders who created international refugee policy never envisioned people like Rose, a middle-class 39-year-old woman desperate for safety from a conflict the rest of the world isn’t paying attention to. Violent flash points rooted in all kinds of new phenomena—police corruption, climate change, gang warfare—now dot the Earth, creating the conditions for the worst protracted migration crisis since World War II. The pull to more stable corners of the planet is more potent now, too, given social-media postings from cousins and friends abroad who amplify (and often inflate) newfound opportunity. And given relatively affordable airline travel, plus the ubiquity of smartphones—which ease language, navigation, and homesickness challenges—moving is logistically easier now. This has all turned Japan into an unlikely destination for asylum seekers.

The problem is that the refugee system set forth in United Nations documents signed by most of the world’s countries, including Japan and the United States, does not apply to Rose—at least not how it is currently enforced. The 1951 and 1967 agreements were drafted to specifically address European displacement from World War II while more broadly setting rules to protect people from persecution going forward: Anyone who is “unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion.”

But persecution is in the eye of the beholder, with interpretations of “unable or unwilling” varying based on the country of resettlement, the political party in power in that country, and the individual bureaucrat reading the application. To get refugee status and a pathway to permanent residency, asylum seekers generally must prove that they were personally targeted by documenting their persecution with paperwork—ostensibly from the very same authorities they are fleeing from. They are eyed suspiciously as mere economic migrants; poverty and hunger, though defining features of persecution, are not accepted reasons for being granted asylum.

We are in an age of mass displacement. Yet the powerful and stable nations of the world have not figured out a humane way to handle the influx of people claiming persecution while balancing domestic concerns about security and cultural change. Instead, doors are simply closing, with asylum protections rolled back seemingly everywhere. In Italy, where the former interior minister denounced “fake refugees,” boats of Africans have been blocked from docking. The European Union pays handsomely to keep asylum seekers away, while Turkey considers sending Syrian refugees back to their homeland, which is still at war. In the U.S., the indefinite detention of asylum-seeking children prompted the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to say she was appalled. Thousands of asylum seekers are sent from the U.S. to dangerous sections of Mexico and even to countries they’re not from.

Cameroon’s problems may have not attracted international attention, but its people are showing up around the world, including at the U.S.-Mexico border; Rose has a brother in South Korea and a son, who also fled for safety, in Minnesota, living with an uncle. On her layover to Tokyo, someone sent Rose a WhatsApp message with a number for a Cameroonian woman in Japan.

Rose didn’t ask for asylum at Narita International Airport in Tokyo, which would have likely gotten her locked up in a detention center. Hunger strikes in Japan over poor conditions for detainees are common, just like in the U.S. Instead, Rose entered Japan on a tourist visa and was lucky enough to find an English-speaking Japanese man who drove her around until she found a hotel room she could afford. She then connected with her compatriot in Japan, who told her about the Japan Association for Refugees, a nongovernmental organization that assists asylum seekers, where she met with a case worker.

“He said, ‘Your case will never be approved,’” Rose recalled. “And I was like, ‘Is this man okay?’” She has a 20-stitch scar stretching from her hairline clear across the side of her skull, and surely Japanese authorities, like the rest of the world, knew about the carnage in Cameroon. “I was shocked. I was speechless. And I was very, very disappointed.”

Japan received 19,629 applications for refugee status in 2017; 20 people were accepted. The following year, just 42 people were admitted. The rate at which Japan accepts such applications is the lowest in the G7. Yuki Tamura, a deputy director at the Japanese Foreign Ministry, said in an interview that the number of resettled refugees preapproved to move to Japan via the UN refugee agency will soon increase, from 30 to 60. (That compares to 30,000 last year in the U.S., though this cap has been lowered to 18,000 for this year.) He also defended the low number of asylum seekers who arrive in Japan without prior permission and then win refugee status, as Rose is trying to do. “Japan’s decision to accept or not accept asylum seekers is not politically inclined. We accept refugees after assessing the situation based on domestic laws,” he told me.

Domestic laws, of course, don’t reflect the kind of refugee the world is creating. Climate change is expected to displace at least 25 million people by 2050, while sexual violence and gang extortion in Central America are forcing migration to the U.S. and even Europe, yet there’s no international standard on how to deal with such victims. The Obama administration granted asylum to credible cases involving gangs, but that was reversed under President Trump. In Europe, Belgium recognizes gang violence as a legitimate refugee claim, but Spain doesn’t.

The irony, says David Slater, an American anthropology professor at Tokyo’s Sophia University who works with asylum seekers in Japan, is that those who appear to have the most straightforward cases of persecution “are the ones who are least likely to have documentation” to prove that it happened. “You don’t stop off at the local police station, especially when the police are part of the people who are persecuting you, to try to get a police report,” he said. (Rose, for example, fled in a rush with two small bags.)

Slater is collecting oral histories from asylum seekers, and he told me he has often wondered, “How can I possibly determine the accuracy or the legitimacy of this claim? It’s not possible.” Governments can no longer distinguish between “an economic migrant seeking to better his or her life and a refugee who is just trying to survive,” he says, because “everybody has a little bit of both in them.”

And yet that’s exactly what asylum and refugee officers are tasked with doing. “I would say that the system is broken,” Slater says. “The amount of conflict in the world and the number of people who are fleeing are so disproportionately larger now. For us to try to use a framework that was designed under a particular set of conditions and under a particular scale is no longer feasible.”

When Rose eventually gets an interview with a refugee officer, inconsistencies in her story—or confusion in the translation—could lead to allegations of fraud and deportation. Rose doesn’t even remember the precise date of the 2016 protest she was involved in, and she hasn’t been able to obtain her hospital records documenting her injuries.

Japan’s low birth rate and undermanned workforce indicate a need for immigrants. But assimilation is viewed as a barrier. Just 18 percent of Japanese, the lowest of any country surveyed in a 2016 Ipsos poll, think refugees could successfully integrate into their country. A myth persists that the Japanese are of a single bloodline connected to the emperor, and that view affects refugee policy, according to Osamu Arakaki, a professor at International Christian University in Japan and an expert in Japanese refugee law. He told me that the common blood is seen as “energy for the successful economic development in the 1970s and 1980s,” and therefore homogeneity is necessary in order to “maintain ethnic and economic harmony.”

Prime Minister Shinzo Abe warned in 2014 that “in countries that have accepted immigration, there has been a lot of friction, a lot of unhappiness both for the newcomers and the people who already lived there.” So Abe’s policy is to instead direct money to the UN refugee agency. Though its contributions have been declining in recent years, Japan remains one of its most generous state donors, supporting the displaced who are temporarily living in refugee camps. Yet that money only goes so far; the agency is 57 percent underfunded overall.

The world’s most neglected displacement crisis, according to the Norwegian Refugee Council, is in Cameroon. In 2018, there were 203 applications for asylum from there in Japan and no approvals, according to UN data. Other groups have a similarly hard time: Tokyo has given refugee status to just one person claiming persecution due to sexual orientation, and no Kurds seeking asylum from Turkey, despite thousands of applicants. Syrian refugees have had particular trouble winning asylum, although a handful have been admitted as students.

Rose has been hospitalized in Tokyo due to her head injury, and she faces poverty, eating just rice most days. And like refugees everywhere, she suffers from the trauma of family separation.

Rose longs for her family, her career, her old life. She worries about her chances at refugee status. But she retains a degree of optimism. “The fact that I’m living in a safe country where I’m not afraid of rape at any time, or gunshots, give me some sort of hope, some assurance, that some things will change for me,” she says. “I’ve never been a refugee before now, so I really don’t know how it works. But I just hope it works well for me. I don’t know how, but I hope it works well.”

Source: The Atlantic.Com