It Takes a Humanitarian Village: Navigating Complexity to Reunite a Family
Mahmoud Suji, a stateless Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, had been separated from his his wife and children more than nine years apart. It took an entire humanitarian village to bring them back together.
On 6 November 2024, Mahmoud Suji, a stateless Rohingya refugee from Myanmar, was reunited with his wife and children after more than nine years apart.
If the way back to each other had been mapped out by the heart, they would have been reunited instantaneously. No sooner would Mahmoud have set foot on Greek soil than his wife and two children, who had stayed behind in Myanmar, would have surrounded him with laughter and joy. But the world is not led by the heart. It is governed by legal and administrative systems that can lead to dead ends or, even more terrifyingly, back to where one started. And without a guide to navigate the bureaucratic wilds, Mahmoud and his family – and many families like his – would still be separated.
Mahmoud’s journey through the bureaucratic wilds began in 2020 when a lawyer for the Greek Council for Refugees contacted the ICRC, following a referral from the Hellenic Red Cross. Mahmoud arrived in Greece in 2017 and was recognized as a refugee and therefore had the right to request support for family reunification. Under Greek law, travel documents are required for requests for family reunification. Mahmoud and his family, however, are stateless and did not have any travel documents other than his registration with the UNHCR. Dead-end number one.
The ICRC had been negotiating with the Greek authorities for ICRC-issued emergency travel documents (ETDs) to be accepted for entry, exit or transit. In 2021, the Greek authorities agreed to accept ETDs, but for them to be recognized, the transit and host countries would need to issue visas, or at least commit in writing to issuing the visas. Mahmoud’s family had fled to Bangladesh to escape the violence in Myanmar, but there was no Greek consulate in Dhaka and the nearest Greek consulate was in India. In a Kafkaesque twist, to obtain the ETD, they would have to exit Bangladesh to pick up the visas they needed to get the ETD, but they needed the ETD to be able to leave Bangladesh. Back to square one.
To untie the bureaucratic knot, the Athens delegation pulled on two threads. First, to move forward with the reunification request, the delegation worked with the Central Tracing Agency to issue a “letter of commitment”. A letter of commitment would guarantee that the new ETDs would be issued once the visas had been obtained, and therefore, a formal request for reunification could be sent by the lawyers to the Greek authorities. By November 2023, Mahmoud had an answer: approval to move ahead with the reunification, setting a precedent in Greece for stateless people without travel documents. To get the visas for Mahmoud’s family, the ICRC worked with the International Organization for Migration (IOM), which was instrumental in negotiating with the Indian and Bangladeshi authorities for the final approvals. After four years of relentless pursuit and intense collaboration, the ICRC’s delegation in Dhaka issued the ETD and the IOM collected and delivered the visas to his wife Mariam, and their two sons Maher and Mahdi.
But these were not the only obstacles that the family faced in their quest to be reunited. They also had to prove the family was related by DNA sampling; then, because of a wildfire in Cox’s Bazaar, Mariam and her sons were displaced for a second time; there was the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of all this, they needed dozens of staff members to coordinate between themselves in three ICRC delegations (Athens, Dhaka, New Delhi) and staff in the Hellenic Red Cross, the Greek Council for Refugees, the Greek Ombudsman, the IOM, the UNHCR and several embassies and consulates, all of which involved hundreds of emails and plenty of staff rotation. Sebastian Bustos, a protection coordinator in Athens, says of the experience, “Our work in restoring family links, the missing and detention is central to the wider question of migration, but does not cover the whole issue, hence the need to collaborate with other agencies to put the puzzle together.”
The efforts to find a pathway through the legal and administrative complexities to reunite the family at times seemed almost ridiculously obtuse – why should the simple impulse to reunite a family require such a Herculean effort? But, for once, thanks to the collective efforts of the Movement and the wider humanitarian community, the way through the legal and administrative wilds intersected with the way of the heart. On 6 November 2024, after more than nine years apart, Mahmoud, Mariam, Maher and Mahdi were finally reunited as a family.
