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One summer night last year, I received a phone call from a friend. His asylum application to remain in Sweden had just been rejected for a third time, and he was now scheduled to be deported to Afghanistan—a country he’d never even been to. He cried and told me he couldn’t take it anymore. That night, I couldn’t take it anymore, either. I was so angry with the Swedish government’s neglect of Afghan asylum seekers, I knew I needed to do something. I called up everyone I knew and asked them to join me for a sit-in in front of the Swedish parliament. At the time, I didn’t know that we would remain there in protest for 56 days.
Many years earlier, my parents fled from Afghanistan to Iran. Even though my siblings and I were born in Iran, we were considered illegal immigrants without rights. Second-class citizens. We lived under threat and couldn’t get any help from the government, or the police. I couldn’t go to school, but there was a mosque where some volunteers taught refugees like me how to read and write.
Life was hard. When I was eight or nine, my dad was deported to Afghanistan. We never heard from him again. As a 14-year-old, I provided for my family by publishing poems and drawings. I always wanted to be an artist—to tell my family’s story through images and words. I really felt like I wasn’t a part of Iran even though I was born there and I knew the language and the culture. Nobody ever told me, “This isn’t your country,” but I could feel it.
My brother Mostafa traveled to Sweden alone in 2013. He was allowed a residence permit with family reunion rights. Two years later, my siblings, my mother, and I followed him there. In one way I felt like I didn’t belong in this country either. But this time it was because of more superficial things—like my hijab. I didn’t have the same deeply rooted feeling of being an outcast that I had in Iran. Now I could go to a regular school, and I didn’t have to hide from the authorities.
Despite this sense of welcome, the Swedish government has been deporting Afghan refugees to a country many have never been to. (A good number, like me, were born in Iran.) In Afghanistan, where chaos and the Taliban reign and explosions are an everyday occurrence, there’s no future for young people like me. It was maddening to see the Swedish government deport my peers to this place.
In June this year, the Swedish parliament passed a law that was supposed to allow 9,000 of the young refugees to stay. We were hopeful, but the courts refused to recognize the validity of the law. The intentions with the bill were good, but it’s simply not enough.
Right now, there are still youths facing deportation. If they get to stay in Sweden, they can keep seeing their classmates and play soccer with their friends. If we deport them to Afghanistan, many could become members of the Taliban, because unfortunately that’s the easiest way to survive. Sweden will feed the war and create the next big wave of refugees.
I think that if we want world peace, we need to start right here, right now. If today we give love to those brought up in hate, we will create the future that we all deserve.
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