Acts of settlement

‘Put yourself in their shoes,’ says Zahra Mackaoui, a British-Lebanese journalist who has been following the stories of refugees from Syria for five years, catching up with them as they move on restlessly, searching for a place to settle. ‘Ask yourself, what would I have done?’ That question echoed through her series of documentaries for the World Service as we heard from those who have been exiled by a war in which they have played no part except as victims. What would I have done?

In Beyond Borders (produced by Craig Templeton Smith), the open, frank honesty of Hani, Ayesha, Doaa Al Zamel and Fewaz gave us an opportunity to see deeper into their experiences. All of them have lost everything: the future they had once envisaged; the past, too, best forgotten. The outcome of the war in Syria is the biggest migration of people since the Partition of India, and it will be no less resonant through time.

Hani Al Moulia, now aged 20, fled with his family from Homs and was at first in a refugee camp in Lebanon. ‘We don’t do anything,’ he says of that time. ‘We don’t have repeated actions,’ by which he meant the normal routines of everyday life, going to school, to work, to shop. ‘We are just living,’ by which he meant ‘existing’. ‘When I left Syria, I left part of my personality.’ Hani’s eyesight is compromised by a genetic condition that leads to vision loss and yet he began taking photographs to record the experiences of the refugees in the camp. ‘The camera helped me to see things I wasn’t able to see before.’ One of his early photos is of his three brothers, their backs turned, walking away from the camera along a road in the camp.