voices from exile: all articles

From Baghdad to southern California, the journey of a family from one of the Middle East’s ancient communities is a modern epic of survival.

Imelda and her family are economic migrants, in two directions: hunger led them to cross from Mexico to California, poverty made them return.

Y.K.L survived terrible torments in her West African homeland only to be denied asylum in Britain. On London’s streets, she joins the forgotten, global army of the displaced.

In Burundi, political violence by state forces and guerrillas has killed 200,000 people in the last decade. J.R., the child of a Hutu-Tutsi marriage, survived a savage ordeal at the hands of security forces. Now in Britain, but with no right to remain, his past is a daily torment.

M.L.’s defence of Armenians in Azerbaijan and opposition to the Chechen war marked her as an outsider in the new Russia. Her shattered family has paid a price in blood.

A family of Roma origin displaced from Kosovo to England’s north-east are facing deportation back to Pristina. For them, outsiders in their homeland, it is a fearful prospect.

The epic journey of a Sikh man from the Afghan city of Jalalabad to London’s Southall district ended with his deportation to Kabul by the British authorities. If this policy of forced return of Afghans becomes standard practice, what will happen to the legions of the lost in Iran and Pakistan?

The gravest long-term casualties of war in Afghanistan are not the refugees, but the many thousands who were too poor to flee. Among these internally-displaced people, women and children are hardest hit.

The story of three Uganda women whose suffering doesn't end when they leave their homeland.

Having fled to Cairo from Liberia’s civil war, ON was plucked from the mass of waiting African refugees and thrown in jail. Why, he did not know.

The aftershocks of Rwanda’s genocide still shake neighbouring Congo, wrecking innocent lives. BE, now washed up on Europe’s shores, survives to bear witness.

The West African state of Guinea is home to thousands of refugees, in flight from its neighbours’ wars. One mutilated teenager – born in Sierra Leone, raised in Liberia, in limbo in Guinea – has nowhere left to turn.

The childhood of DT, a young man with a richly mixed family history from the Serbia–Macedonia borderland, was made difficult by social tensions. When these exploded on to the political stage, his life became impossible.

A divided family, village brutality, and the burden of dependency make one Ghanaian’s life in exile especially lonely.

What value can be placed on law, democracy, and progress in Uganda after reading of the horrendous abuse of a farmer and his family at the hands of state forces?

Forty years on, Shatila’s Palestinian refugees live in limbo, without the right to have passports, own property, move on.

A young, privileged woman of the Republic of Congo had found a place in an unsettled society. But a change of regime threw her into a spiral of distrust, arrest, torture – and exile.

After ten years in exile from the Taliban, this Afghan farmer has returned from Pakistan to his once prosperous farm. Now his harvest is not grapes and wheat, but unexploded shells.

Mixed parentage in a divided society made this young Kosovan a target from either side in turn – and eventually forced him to flee.

Jawad is a young teacher of Hazara origin; the Hazara are an Afghan people who have suffered especially acutely from the repressions of the Taliban regime. After the rigours of exile in Iran and Pakistan, he is trying to rebuild his life.