by PHYLLIS BENNIS & KAREEM FARAJ
It was after midnight when the small refugee Olympic team strode into the stadium in Rio, the very last before host country Brazil’s huge contingent danced in to the samba-driven opening ceremonies. Ten amazing athletes, originally from four separate countries but sharing their status as unable to return home, marching under the Olympic flag.
It was an extraordinary sight — moving and powerful far beyond the cheering for the national teams.
Some of them — the young Syrian swimmer Yusra Mardini in particular — had become familiar to many, her story told and retold in the run up to the games. It was an amazing story indeed. She and her sister, both top swimmers in their native Syria, had been forced by the brutality of the civil war to flee. Like so many hundreds of thousands before and after them, they managed to find places on an overcrowded rubber dinghy for the last leg from the Turkish coast to safety in Greece.
But also like so many before them, they found the boat overcrowded, taking on water, and in danger of sinking altogether. Mardini and her sister, along with the one other person on board who knew how to swim, jumped overboard and swam the three and a half hours alongside the boat, lightening the load just enough that the boat — and its exhausted accompanying swimmers — made it to safety, landing on the rocky coast of Lesbos.
The others — five runners from South Sudan and one from Ethiopia, another Syrian swimmer, and two judo competitors from the Democratic Republic of Congo — had powerful and inspiring stories of their own. All of them had faced the loss of home, family separations, and despair. Their athletic prowess, strong enough to bring them to international stature despite all they had lost, and despite the grinding poverty in which many of them grew up, brought them to Rio.
It’s all been a moving and powerful exemplar of what the Olympics are supposed to represent, but rarely achieve: the celebration of individual athleticism, beyond national borders.
And yet, what does it say about our world of wars today that massive refugee flows — and the conflicts that cause them — have become so normalized that war refugees now constitute the equivalent of a nation?
Refugee Nation
That’s no exaggeration.
There are 65 million forcibly displaced people desperately seeking safety around the world — the highest number since World War II. That’s about equal to the population of France, Thailand, or the United Kingdom, and greater than Italy, Spain, or South Africa. Together they give what might be called the Refugee Nation the 23rd largest population in the world.
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