Your country – MY future!

The contro­ver­sial campaign of the German Federal Ministry of the Inte­rior to finance migrant’s volun­tary return to their home­land has sparked resent­ment. Nour Alabras, who fled from Syria to Germany in 2015, tells Dennis Belt­chikov, Suleiman Maswadeh and Miral Nasha­shibi how she feels when confronted with the offer to go back to ​“your home country”.

Imagine walking through the streets when suddenly a poster catches your atten­tion and makes you stop. What it says causes you to feel the urge to leave. A strange feeling of discom­fort starts to spread through your entire body: You’re unsure whether to feel uncom­for­table, unwel­come or rejected?

Since the middle of November, this is exactly what has come to the minds of many people living in Germany. It is since then that the German Federal Ministry of the Inte­rior has been promo­ting a campaign provi­ding migrants and refu­gees with finan­cial support if they decide to volun­t­a­rily return to their ​“home country”.

Return in ​“winter sale”

The campaign called ​“Your country. Your future. Now!” is in addi­tion to the volun­tary return program already started by the Federal Ministry last year. The campaign addresses migrants with a parti­cular status, who are obliged to leave the country (German: ​“ausrei­se­pflichtig”). Due to a decline in the numbers of people making use of the offer in 2018, the ministry decided to estab­lish a bonus payment between 1000€ for a single person and up to 3000€ for a whole family.

While the ministry defends its campaign as a legi­ti­mate way of raising more aware­ness of the program, other asso­cia­tions see it as obtru­sive and pushy, with the Green Party even compa­ring the advert to an offen­sive ​“winter sale”.

“The idea of the campaign is distur­bing, because people who have migrated to Germany did not do it for nothing – they had a reason – they ran away from war”, explains Nour Alabras, a 25-year-old Syrian photo­grapher who studied graphic design in Syria and fled to Germany in October 2015. Even though Nour is not directly addressed by the campaign due to her status, she feels mixed emotions. The campaign has caused her to wonder where she actually belongs: ​“I feel like I’m stuck in the middle”.

“I wanted to make a big change”

Before the Syrian revo­lu­tion started in 2011, Nour regarded her reli­gious beliefs as playing a signi­fi­cant role in defi­ning her iden­tity. She described herself as a ​“very devout Muslim” who wore a hijab and prayed faithfully at the mosque.

Ever­y­thing began to change when the war started. Even though Nour’s home­town Alnabek felt the conse­quences of the war much later, she felt the urge to protest against the Assad regime very early: ​“Protest seemed to me like the most righ­teous thing to do. I also felt that I was chan­ging during the war. My thoughts started to change drasti­cally, I read many books about revo­lu­tions in other count­ries: I wanted to make a big change!” However, due to low levels of parti­ci­pa­tion in protests in her home­town, she started to demons­trate in other cities in the region.

As well as her own active enga­ge­ment, Nour thought it neces­sary to mobi­lize more people to raise their voices against the regime and convince them of the importance of protesting.

A safe place to express your iden­tity

If you would meet Nour these days – who curr­ently lives in Berlin – you wouldn’t get the impres­sion she is a very reli­gious person. She’s neither wearing a hijab nor does she go to the mosque.

When discus­sing this with Nour, she attri­butes the changes in her reli­gious iden­tity to the diffe­rent social surroun­dings after coming to Germany. Nour perceived Germany as a safe place to live out her beliefs and be accepted as an atheist. At the same time, the fear of what her family in Syria would think didn’t leave her: ​“Even after I was already in Germany I found it diffi­cult to confront [them] with the changes I had under­gone.”

For Nour the result of this freedom to express her newly acquired iden­tity in Germany has opened up the ques­tion more and more of where she actually belongs. Nour appre­ciates the freedom she has in Germany to express herself and defi­ni­tely considers herself ​“inte­grated”. But she also has to face aspects of life in Germany that make it diffi­cult for her to fully regard it as ​“her country”: ​“I don’t think I will ever get along with the cold here, but I hope that one day I will accli­ma­tise to the system and speak the language fluently”.

When it comes to choo­sing whether she belongs in Germany or Syria, Nour feels conflicted. She is aware of her Syrian back­ground but feels rejected by the Syrian commu­nity on account of her not being reli­gious and describes her first contact with other Syrians in Germany as extre­mely tense. She and her husband had to deal with very aggres­sive reac­tions: ​“They moved us to coll­ec­tive accom­mo­da­tion with three other Syrian couples. We stayed there for two months but my husband and I had a lot of problems because we weren’t Muslims (…) and the other couples were. They weren’t even ​‘conser­va­tive’ but still they had big problems accep­ting us being diffe­rent.”

When Nour talks about the campaign of the Federal Ministry of the Inte­rior one can perceive her inde­cisi­ve­ness about whether she would call Syria or Germany her ​“home”. She describes mixed emotions concer­ning the campaign: ​“Obviously I miss my home­town, but no way would I go back to Syria as long as Bashar Al-Assad is there – because there will be no benefit in that. [If I did that] I would go back to zero. All this suffe­ring would be for nothing”.

Today Nour is part of a commu­nity of Syrian people who have expe­ri­enced similar iden­tity changes in Germany. In her case this change is marked by her reli­gious conver­sion and stan­ding by her own beliefs. At the end of the day the changes one expe­ri­ences after living in another envi­ron­ment are irrever­sible: ​“If I would go back to Syria now, I would have to lie about my real iden­tity”.