The Survivors Brigade

Opinion

February 19th, 5:16am

Samir Atallah

Samir Atallah - Lebanese author and journalist, who worked for the Annahar newspaper, the Al Osbo' il Arabi and Lebanon’s Al-Sayad’s magazines and Kuwait’s Al-Anba newspaper.

As crises and disasters storm through the region, the afflicted have found a steady helping hand in its immigrants. The community of around four million Turkish-German dual nationals was the first to help its kin. The approximately one million Syrians who had taken refuge in Germany amid the political turmoil have sent as much as they can back home. With Egypt's economic crisis, around ten million Egyptian immigrants send their families the money they need to make ends meet. Lebanon's expatriates send over 7 billion dollars a year to family members who have not emigrated, which has helped delay the collapse of the banks, the economy, and every other sector of the country's economy. The Lebanese were the first Arabs to emigrate. First, they went to the Americas (North and South), then to Africa. Many Yemeni flew to Britain and East Africa, while people from the Gulf went to India, albeit in limited numbers, in the early twentieth century. Egyptians had not immigrated to distant lands before the fifties because of their famous attachment to their territory. As economic conditions declined, every country in the East became a country of immigrants. Iraqis, Syrians, and of course, the Palestinians have become immigrants, escaping refugee status and seeking a normal life abroad. Far from the sorrows and problems plaguing their countries, these immigrants have formed a "survivors brigade" that serves their people. Most of them have succeeded in turning their exile into beautiful homelands where they live in freedom and prosperity. They sent money used to build villages, mosques and schools. Since the middle of the twentieth century and the rise of the oil boom, immigration has been primarily channeled to the Gulf. In the Gulf, the less fortunate migrated to the more fortunate. The ambassador and thinker Abdullah Bishara tells us, for example, that the former Minister of State for Foreign Affairs in the Sultanate of Oman, Yusuf bin Alawi, had been an officer in the Kuwaiti army in his youth. Indeed, Kuwait recruited many Arabs when it was first establishing its independent state, including the chief of police and the Kuwaiti ambassador to Russia, to say nothing about the people of Hijaz and university education. The "brigades" that survived the pitfalls or impulsive actions in their countries of origin have channeled a lot of money and effort into helping their homelands. The expatriates of Lebanon had, to a large extent, kept it alive during the war that killed over 150 thousand human beings. While their compatriots were fighting in the country, the survivors sought refuge from the seas of death and brutality. The "survivors brigade" will continue to expand amid the ongoing cold war. The process will be even more brutal from here on out.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/4167071/samir-atallah/survivors-brigade