Written by a detainee at the Roj Prison Camp in northeastern Syria, which holds without charge thousands of women and children. Canada refuses to repatriate 5 Canadian children and issue temporary resident permits to their mothers, all of whom have been detained over 7 years under conditions the United Nations describes as "akin to torture." Canada has a choice to make here. As this piece notes: "There is a particular obscenity in being conscious of suffering and still allowing it to become ordinary."
In Roj camp, childhood has been made to wait.
Education has been interrupted long enough for interruption itself to become a kind of upbringing. Exploration has narrowed. Creativity, which requires the small luxury of imagining elsewhere, has been confined by the borders of a place the children did not choose. Years that should have accumulated into knowledge, curiosity, friendships, and the ordinary architecture of becoming have instead accumulated into absence.
And the body keeps its own record of absence.
Medical care delayed by years does not merely postpone treatment. It alters the life that might have followed it. Illnesses linger. Development falters. Needs become complications. What should have been temporary becomes formative. Stunted growth is not only a measurement of the body; sometimes it is evidence of how long a child has been made to wait.
The children grow older without being permitted the conditions by which society recognizes growing up.
They are surrounded by injustice before they are old enough to understand its language. Perhaps this is why rage begins to take root so early. A child who repeatedly encounters power without protection begins to learn a terrible lesson: that the world is governed not by what is right, but by what is allowed. Anger, then, becomes more than an emotion. It becomes a response to a reality that keeps asking children to endure what they cannot change.
Beyond the camp, oil fields burn, releasing toxic fumes into the air. Nosebleeds are among the symptoms repeatedly endured by many of these children, their bodies registering an environment they had no part in creating.
The damage is not always visible. Some wounds announce themselves in blood; others accumulate quietly, cell by cell, year after year. There are mutations that occur within the body, and there are others that occur within the moral fabric of humanity.
Only one of them can be called inevitable.
The other is chosen.
And through all of this, the women and children remain denied something so fundamental that its absence has become almost invisible: legal representation.
They are trapped between the gun nozzles of two armed groups that declare themselves enemies, while those caught between them are left to inherit the consequences. They have neither the weapon nor the political power, yet somehow they are made to carry the weight of the conflict.
There is a particular obscenity in being conscious of suffering and still allowing it to become ordinary.
It's what has been injured most deeply: not only the lives inside Roj, but the conscience of the world outside it.
Silence is not neutral when suffering is prolonged.
It begins to resemble permission.
When women and children are deprived of education, healthcare, legal representation, freedom and the ordinary conditions through which a human being is allowed to develop, what we call a predicament begins to look like arbitrary detention.
The camp may have walls but the silence around it has built another kind of enclosure.
enduring with hope
