(Zaman Al Wasl)- It has been five years since the Palestinian-Syrian blogger Taghreed Dawas saw her daughter, who is living with her father in the United Arab Emirates. The mother could not see her daughter because their European documents as refugees were not recognized, which led her to launch a campaign titled "I am a refugee ... I am human" to demand reconsideration of decisions that deprive many parents from seeing their children in the Arab Gulf states and other Arab countries.
The campaign started recently with activists and journalists posting solidarity videos and spreading the titled of the campaign as a hashtag on Twitter.
Dawas lived in Yarmouk camp in Damascus before leaving in 2014 to live as a refugee in Germany, while her daughter and father lived in Abu Dhabi. She has contacted the UAE Embassy in Berlin more than 20 times only to find out that the embassy does not accept any asylum documents.
German law does not allow holders of asylum to enter the regime’s embassy to obtain their original passports. Hence the idea of the campaign came to be with the help of activist Lama Saleh, whose daughter is in Abu Dhabi.
Taghreed recounted that she received large number of messages from people in the same situation. "We are suspended parents; our motherhood and our paternity depend on a governmental decision.”
Dawas, a social worker providing social support for children in Germany, said that her campaign includes all Arab countries that prevent the entry of asylum holders in general and the Gulf countries in particular.
Zaman Al Wasl
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