The Meaning of Words and Institutional Interface

Asylum Seeker Certificate Held By All Registered Iraqi Refugees

Refugees spend a lot of time navigating institutional bureaucracies.  They hold appointment slips.  They have file numbers.  They stand in long lines.  They wait for phone calls.

Iraqi refugees here in Amman, Jordan interface most frequently with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR), but also with NGOs large and small.  While Iraqis are grateful for the assistance they receive, I can sum up the quality of their institutional interface as delayed, deceptive, and unilateral.

The delays are agonizing.  Iraqi refugees wait for months, even years, for returned phone calls from UNHCR on matters of resettlement: “If UNHCR calls you and you don’t pick up– maybe you are showering– they won’t call back for another six months!” Raed (name changed) told us.  I confirmed this policy with UNHCR.

Refugees are also often given “the runaround,” hearing their file is in one office or another.  They feel deceived: a UN employee admitted to me that she does this intentionally to “avoid having a bunch of refugees appealing their status.  It’s a huge HR issue– we don’t have the staff to handle angry refugees, so we avoid telling them if they have been rejected or anything.”  While I sympathize with UNHCR’s heavy case load, dishonest communication seems unnecessary and unethical.

Lastly, refugees face a unilateral system with zero accountability.  They do not know the names of the employees who help them, and when mistakes are made, refugees pay the price:

“One of the lawyers made a mistake writing the date in my story.  So I was rejected for resettlement by the resettlement office.  But later they realized it was his mistake.  Nothing happened to him, but I waited here for two extra years of my life,” said Mohammed (name changed) about his file.

These three qualities of communication within UNHCR and other NGOs are not listed here to undermine the efforts of these organizations and employees: they do incredible work and help thousands of people.  However, I do want to highlight systematic flaws in the structure of communication between Iraqi refugees and the institutions that serve them, and try to understand some of the causes.

I feel that part of this disjuncture in communication is based on differences in language and meaning. For example, UNHCR speaks in numbers and definitiveness.  Conversely, refugees’ lives are defined by uncertainty.

So when asked in a UNHCR interview what would happen to him if he returned to Iraq, Ahmed said “Only God knows!”  This was the wrong answer.  He did not highlight pending threats or certain death and was thus not granted the opportunity to resettle.  What was lost in translation was that Ahmed had been threatened and would face certain death upon return.  His sense of the future was different from that of the UNHCR employee who interviewed him, and their expressed meanings of Future conflicted.

Another example: Family.  Institutions treat the nuclear family as a definitive unit.  However, Iraqis operate in large, complex family structures, relying on their extended family to play vital roles in child rearing, financial support, community, and employment.

Jamila, a Mandaean who was just resettled to Australia told us, “I have my mother and 9 siblings.  We are spread all across the globe now, one seven continents.  This is just one family!”  The institutional language of Family contrasts sharply and painfully for Jamila, her mother, and siblings.

There are other key words that determine a refugee’s future: Ransom is a good example.  Anyone who paid a ransom to save the life of a relative is not eligible for resettlement to the US because they are seen as aiding terrorists.  One thing I know is that almost every family I have spoken with has had a child or woman kidnapped, and had to pay a ransom to keep them alive.

The chances of resettlement for these families is based on their choice of words, rather than their real needs.  If they omit the kidnapping story from their narrative altogether, they might not convey the gravity of their threat in Iraq and lose opportunities to resettle.  But if they divulge the entire truth, they might be excluded from some host countries.  The stakes are high in this game of words, and most refugees try to balance the truth with careful language.

Words are everything for Iraqi refugees, and yet they very often find out the importance of key words after they lose opportuinties within institutional interfaces.  This seems like an unfortunate consequence of institutions’ delayed, deceptive, and unilateral communication with refugees, which forces refugees to guess about the outcome of their words on their own futures.  I look to Iraqi refugees, UNHCR employees, as well as my creative peers at home, to find solutions for this not-so-flawless process.

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