Charting Little Amal's odyssey across Europe

When Abdul Saboor made the treacherous trip across Europe in search of asylum, he was met with racism, violence, incarceration, rejection and squalid conditions in refugee camps before reaching a safe haven.

Seven years later, Saboor would walk the same route in the footsteps of a 3.5-metre-tall puppet called Amal. It could not have been a more dissimilar experience.

“It’s so different from when I was a refugee,” he tells The National. “This time, I was able to easily cross borders and not hide from people or the police.

“I was staying in nice hotels. There wasn’t any fear. I was just working hard to take pictures.”

Saboor, 28, was one of the photographers documenting The Walk, the 8,000-kilometre journey from the Syrian-Turkish border to the UK taken earlier this year by Amal, an animatronic representation of a 9-year-old girl fleeing war and looking for her mother.

The aim of the travelling festival of art and cross-border collaboration, produced by Good Chance Theatre and the Handspring Puppet Company, was to highlight the urgent needs of displaced children, while celebrating the contribution that migrants and refugees make to the countries where they eventually settle.

Many of the pictures taken throughout the odyssey illustrate texts produced by award-winning writers. These include the Syrian PEN Pinter International Writer of Courage, Samar Yazbek, and the British author and Waterstones Children’s Laureate Cressida Cowell. Their words appear in a new official companion book, The Long Walk with Little Amal.

Saboor, who now lives in France, fled his native Afghanistan after receiving death threats from the Taliban because of his work as a recovery service technician with Nato forces in Kabul.

His mother and sister are still there but his two brothers and father were killed two years ago.

“I left Afghanistan to Pakistan then Iran, where they put me in prison and then deported me,” he says from his home in Paris.

“Then I was in Turkey and was kidnapped by smugglers. When I escaped, I went to Bulgaria, Slovenia and then Serbia, where I was put in prison again.”

It was in a camp in Serbia that an unexpected gift changed Saboor’s life. A volunteer, recognising his interest in photography, asked him to take some pictures of his fellow refugees with a digital single-lens reflex camera she had brought with her.

Although Saboor had taken photographs on a Polaroid in Afghanistan, he had no experience with a digital camera and the device had seen better days. Yet the results were so impressive that she let him keep it.

“It was very old and difficult to use,” he recalls. “The focus wasn’t working well so I always had problems with it. But there was nothing else to do, so I kept taking pictures.”

He began chronicling life in the camps and the rest of his journey to France where, after buying a new digital camera, Saboor gave the old one to another refugee to use as he had done.

Looking back, Saboor says he could not have imagined the impact that the battered gift would have on his own future.

He is now an award-winning photographer, working for international newspapers and NGOs, but cannot help thinking of his work on a project such as The Long Walk with Little Amal as a bittersweet experience.

“It reminded me of my journey, but during my journey I wasn’t welcomed like Little Amal was,” he says. "People are happy welcoming a puppet but not necessarily real humans.”

Despite Saboor’s official status and residency in France, the cross-border bureaucracy he encountered when trying to see the trek through to its end in Manchester, England is testament to the progress yet to be made.

The UK entry visa never came through. Saboor regards this as indicative of the continued, and possibly increasingly, hostile attitude towards refugees in some western countries.

The pride taken in his many accomplishments on The Walk is tempered by a sense of hopelessness that such seismic political and social shifts will ever fully come about.

But Saboor says there are moments of optimism when he thinks that his photographs may help bring about the change of which he and others have long dreamt.

One scene in particular stands out in his memory: when thousands of well-wishers in Italy came out to greet Little Amal, surrounding her giant frame in a waving, cheering throng.

“It gave me hope,” he says, “and it felt that we weren’t alone, that people wanted us. But I think it is a long process.”

Chapter 1: Justice for Little Amal,
Syria-Turkey border by Samar Yazbek, Syrian PEN Pinter International Writer of Courage

Translated from Arabic by Jonathan Wright

The low hills on the Turkish-Syrian border have been a lifeline for Syrians seeking safe haven from the horrors of a decade of war.

One day in August 2013, I was there in a large crowd of people waiting – young and old, some families complete, others reduced by war. The sun was scorching hot. I waited with the women at the checkpoint manned by the Islamist forces. I had to get through before we could go up into those hills.

At my side was a young mother carrying her baby and by her side a girl of six clutching her mother’s dress. The girl and I exchanged fleeting glances. She wasn’t the same age as Little Amal who is now travelling through Europe. She was a little younger.

I tried to draw her into conversation, but she looked frightened and temperamental. I guessed that she too was waiting to walk through the hills though I couldn’t be sure because she and her mother disappeared within an hour and I didn’t see her when we crossed the border clandestinely.

In the queue she was standing by my side, with dust all over her black trousers and in her short and boyish flaxen hair. Her mother told me that their house had been bombed and her husband killed and she was now travelling with her brother.

The mother was no more than 25 years old – a slim, beautiful woman in a headscarf that she lifted up from time to time.

We stood in line like soldiers, and we could still hear explosions in the distance. I decided to speak to the little girl, who was avoiding me and taking cover in her mother’s skirts. I started playing a game with her – I would hide my head behind her mother’s back, then pop out on the other side laughing. But the little girl didn’t smile.

Her face showed no reaction. She tried to escape my teasing, which annoyed her. I didn’t give up, although the sun was at its zenith and our faces were dripping with sweat. The saltiness was irritating on our skin and I saw how the girl was writhing in discomfort.

I felt that we were all in the same boat – the war had taken a frightening turn, ISIS columns were moving into Syria and Islamist forces controlled the areas that had previously been liberated by the Free Syrian Army. International intervention had hijacked what began as an uprising by the Syrian people, leading to open warfare.

I hadn’t yet written my book The Crossing, but I was carrying much of the material I had collected in my suitcase, including interviews with children the same age as this girl, children I had lived with in shelters or visited in hospitals or sometimes whose bodies I had carried after they were killed.

I tried to speak to the mother again. She replied with a sigh and said that her brother had gone on ahead with their papers. I asked her about her daughter and she said she had hardly spoken for a year. She said this as if it were almost normal, part of a normality I was used to and of which I had become a part.

The little girl stopped speaking most of the time when she was five years old, when their house was bombed and she escaped with her mother and father. For a while she might say a few words, her mother told me, then added: “After her father was killed by a shell in the market, she lost the ability to speak altogether.”

The girl could hear us and was looking at me inquisitively. My sunglasses hid my eyes and I was worried I might cry. Actually crying would seem stupid amid such tragedies.

The day before I had seen a beautiful 5-year-old boy lying in hospital with a black mark the size of a pea on his lower stomach where a piece of shrapnel from a cluster bomb had hit him. The boy died and I didn’t cry. I just heard a clicking sound in my throat.

So there I was, looking at the girl who wouldn’t speak and thinking of the boy who had died yesterday without so much as a groan.

In the distance a man waved and shouted and the mother ran off, with the girl running after her, and then they disappeared into the crowd. That girl might have been called Amal.

An hour later, as we were climbing the hill through the woods I found another girl about 8 years old by my side. She was scrambling up the hill with us to get into Turkish territory. We could hear gunfire: the Turkish gendarmes were firing at refugees trying to cross the border and we could hear screams in the woods.

The girl was single-mindedly moving forward on her elbows. Her eyes didn’t look like a child’s eyes. They were hard eyes, full of a savage fear. In them I could see death. Her long hair was hanging loose around her, picking up the dust, and she was sweating.

I tried to get close to her, but she moved away. Her mother was right behind her, looking at me anxiously. The guide ahead of us was gesturing at us, asking us to make no noise.

The girl was the best of us at scrambling between the low thorny bushes. Then I saw that one of her shoes had slipped off, but I couldn’t pick it up. She just left it and moved on. She had no socks and I noticed that her toes were bleeding.

When we reached the top of the hill and slipped down the other side towards the Turkish border, I caught sight of the girl at a distance, sliding down the slope in a seated position. Then she disappeared and I never saw her again because I had to keep my head down for fear of bullets.

I didn’t know that girl’s name either, but I could readily call her Amal, like the girl travelling through Europe and crossing borders as a symbol of all the children who have had to flee Syria and take refuge in neighbouring countries – in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan or European countries, children who have travelled by sea or in planes, who have crossed land borders or who have lost their homes and taken refuge elsewhere inside Syria, and those who have drowned at sea.

As she crosses European borders, visits cities and meets politicians and children, does anyone ask Little Amal why she is there? Why her face bears such marks of sorrow and pain. Or why she has to be so gigantic. Is she like that so that others will look at her and notice her pain, and then say: “Yes, she’s a Syrian refugee.” She brings you a story of a tragedy taking place in the world. Can you look away and ignore the pains of others?

I met Little Amal at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris and held her hand. She was surrounded by children who gave her messages, and showed solidarity. She then played hide-and-seek with them, and the French media said that the purpose of the Little Amal project was to publicise the tragedy of Syrian child refugees, but wait a moment: why is Amal here? Why is she crossing borders and making such a vast journey? Do I have to go through the same thing again and again – with another Syrian girl crossing borders?

Why do we, and Little Amal too, have to turn the Syrian tragedy into a piece of theatre that is permanently on tour, simply to make the world understand the horrors we have seen? Will the world one day look into the eyes of the children who are victims and say: “We apologise.” I don’t think so. But I do think it’s important to talk and that while Little Amal is making her journeys we also tell them why Amal and thousands of other Syrian children are in exile, why there are more than two and a half million Syrian children who have had no education, and why a child such as Hamza Al Khatib was killed in 2011.

Hamza was born in 1997 in the town of Deraa, arrested and tortured to death by the Bashar Al Assad regime on April 29, 2011. He was 13.

When his family received his body, they found his penis had been cut off, that his neck had been broken and he had been shot in several places.

There are also the children that ISIS recruited when it held parts of Syria. ISIS gave them a choice between fighting and dying. Can we say why this happened to children? Little Amal is a refugee in Europe for political reasons and not because of a natural disaster.

Little Amal travels around with her sad face because a popular movement arose in her country to demand legal and constitutional reforms, such as the repeal of emergency law and the release of political prisoners. Young Amal is fed up with being seen as something strange! She wants to explain to the world that in Syria she was deprived of the most basic rights of children – shelter, housing, food and drink.

I won’t even mention education because someone who has nothing to eat or drink and who doesn’t have a house does not have the luxury of talking about education. In my book A Woman in the Crossfire I wrote about two children who were alone in a demonstration in Marjeh Square in Damascus in March 2011.

The authorities had detained their father, who had been demonstrating to demand the release of their mother.

Later I wrote about children in the countryside around Idlib in northern Syria. Then I decided not to talk about children. I felt I was taking advantage of their suffering and it was too painful. I decided to leave children out of my project documenting the uprising and the war. It would be a feminist project narrated by women, I told myself. I preferred to speak to adults because they understood that they were giving testimony.

After that it was difficult to go back and talk about Little Amal and other girls like her. My greatest fear is that our portrayal of the victims’ pain might be voyeuristic. I don’t want that to happen to Little Amal now.

I don’t want her to be a transitory, ephemeral moment – a moment that trivialises the humanitarian urge. This happens when we sympathise with children but forget the source of their suffering.

Maybe many people will respond to Amal by donating to the camps or writing posts on social media. The news agencies and big newspapers might cover the Little Amal story, but what Amal may want, and here I am saying what I believe as a Syrian like her, is that the world should know why she was forced to leave her country.

So maybe I should now tell you in a few words a small chapter of her story: Little Amal wasn’t born when the popular unrest began in Syria. When she was born the war had already begun. Amal didn’t know what was happening around her. She didn’t know that the regime had suppressed peaceful demonstrations or that foreign powers had started to intervene.

She doesn’t know anything about the children gassed in Ghouta in 2013. When she came into this world she saw it with eyes full of joy, but fear and suffering soon left their marks on her face. She may have stayed in camps, she may have crossed the border with her mother like that girl who lost her shoe in the woods, she may have come to Europe by sea, hopefully without ending up dead on the beach like young Alan Kurdi.

She may have seen her house bombed or shelled, or she may have left home with her family because of poverty and hunger in the areas controlled by the Assad government.

Amal may have lived through many misfortunes without telling the world about them, but she travels the world and asks it to look into her eyes, thinking that the world will understand her sadness and will see what has befallen her people. Little Amal does not know that images of victims do not tell us much, or that ignoring the tragedy the world has inflicted on her and on other children has gone hand in hand with the process of plundering her country’s resources and dividing them up between various states.

Little Amal does not know whether justice will be served one day or whether those who have committed war crimes will ever be held to account. She would like to enjoy a little peace and save what can be saved of the lives of the many children who are like her. She does not want to make speeches. She does not want to explain herself in books or research papers or send political messages to the United Nations. She no longer believes and doesn’t want to take part in all this pain. She just walks and her face tells the story, a story that humanity has known since humanity began, the story of war, the story of children who are waiting for us to see their future as part of a new humane future, a future that is mysterious and fraught with dangers.

Will anyone look into Amal’s face and strive for justice for her and other children?

_{The Long Walk with Little Amal: The Official Companion Book by The Walk Productions, Handspring Puppet Company and Good Chance Theatre is published by Mountain Leopard Press, £20 ($27), and is available fromBookshop.org, Waterstones.com, Amazon.co.uk}

Interview Layla Maghribi
Editors Jacqueline Fuller and Juman Jarallah
Picture Editor Jake Badger
Sub Editors Declan McVeigh and Paul Stafford
Design Nick Donaldson and Steven Castelluccia
Map illustration Emily Faccini

_{With special thanks to Mountain Leopard Press.}