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Our Shared Home: Exileland

Pages, pictures and video clips on media channels and other platforms document the swelling ranks in the family of exiles as news spread from Ukraine. Hundreds of thousands of women, children and the elderly seek a new home away from the devastation and suffering. The new colour of migration is blue and yellow; the colour of hope is still black…

I have recently attended two major conferences held to bring light into this darkness… One gathered exiles from all over the world, and the other, exiles from Turkey.

The first was a virtual meeting hosted in the USA; on the screen were exiled faces from all corners of the globe: politicians, writers, diplomats, artists, academics… Dissidents from a vast swathe from Africa to the Far East flung by a violent storm all the way to Canada or Australia spoke out from the spots where they now try to set roots.

They all acknowledged the solidarity seen amongst the autocrats of the world. Putin, Xi Jinping, Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán… they may have come to power through different ways, but they use similar methods to stay in power: spreading hatred against the ‘dissimilar’, polarising society, creating enemies, calls for ‘unity’ against the enemy, use of force, instrumentalising religion, election manipulation, censorship…

And the consensus was:

Given they unite for a common goal and use the same methods, we should also develop our own tactics and work shoulder to shoulder for a more democratic world.

You will soon see the results of this global cooperation, this solidarity of exiles. They will be the first fruits of uprooted trees assumed to have withered…

The second conference was held in Berlin, the capital which had inflicted and suffered the worst kind of annihilation…

Close to 200 exiles torn from another type of agony got together for a ‘free and democratic Turkey’. Participants ranged from relatives of unsolved murder victims to sacked academics, journalists sentenced to life for a single news report, politicians imprisoned for something they’d said in parliament, students defending their universities, villagers defending their forests, labourers resisting exploitation, relatives of prisoners, torture victims, women resisting male violence, LGBTQ+s…

In the words of writer Aslı Erdoğan, ‘the collective pain of those in the hall’ was immense. Yet they had successfully extricated themselves from the ruins of those toxic hatred campaigns, and did so untainted by hatred. They still had scruples, they were still able to empathise and forgive, and they still sought the good. They dreamt of what Germany had accomplished three quarters of a century ago: to build a brand-new start on the ruins they would inherit. Instead of waiting for a Saviour, they resolved to put their heads together, work side by side, and carry water from abroad to douse the fire in their homeland.

Thus did one more exiled tree burgeon in Berlin.

Yesterday it was Afghans who had joined the family of exiles; today it’s Ukrainians…

Every wave of violence rips out new roots from soils scorched by war in different corners of the world. Some convoys migrate into the unknown, others to hope; but they all become rootless…

Who knows: perhaps Exileland is our new shared land…