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At the 2016 Olympics in Rio, 10 athletes, united not by nation but by refugee status, competed together as the first-ever Refugee Olympic Team. They inspired the world with their resilience and raised awareness about the plight of refugees after the height of the European migrant crisis, which saw thousands tragically lose their lives at sea. As the team returns to compete in Tokyo, the team brings a renewed sense of hope with aspirations for not only gold but to send an empowering message on a global scale.

Six of the original teams athletes swimmer Yusra Mardini, judoka Popole Misenga and runners Anjelina Nadai Lohalith, James Nyang Chiengjiek, Paulo Amotun Lokoro and Rose Nathike Likonyen will return for the Tokyo Games alongside 23 new athletes representing the Refugee Olympic Team. The athletes will now compete across 12 sports.

The team of 29 was selected from a pool of 56 athletes participating in the Olympic Scholarships for Refugee Athletes program, which was established by the International Olympic Committee to provide funding following the success of the 2016 team. A statement issued by the IOC revealed sporting performance, refugee status and personal background were prioritized in the selection process to ensure balanced representativity in terms of sport, gender and regions.

Although no athletes from the 2016 team were able to make it onto the Olympic podium, this years team brings new medal aspirations. The teams most promising chance comes from 23-year-old Kimia Alizadeh Zenozi, who in 2016 became the first woman to win an Olympic medal for Iran when she took home the bronze in the taekwondo 57 kg weight class.

Though this historic feat was celebrated, Alizadeh Zenozi fled her native Iran in January 2020 and was granted refugee status in Germany. In Tokyo, she will aim high and look to improve on her third-place finish to bring home a gold medal for the Refugee Olympic Team.

However, the success of the Refugee Olympic Team is measured by something far greater than medal count. Coming from 11 different countries of origin and 13 different host countries, the athletes serve as a symbol of peace and togetherness, defying national borders. The team serves as a beacon of hope and symbol of solidarity for the 82.4 million people including 35 million children who have been forcibly displaced from their homes around the world.

In a statement congratulating the athletes on their selection to the team, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi highlighted the athletes strength of character and emphasized that they serve as an example of what refugees around the world are capable of when given the chance to succeed.

Surviving war, persecution and the anxiety of exile already makes them extraordinary people, but the fact that they now also excel as athletes on the world stage fills me with immense pride, Grandi wrote. It shows what is possible when refugees are given the opportunity to make the most of their potential.

Regardless of the final standings and medal count, the athletes on the Refugee Olympic Team are the strongest embodiment of the three values of Olympism: excellence, friendship and respect. Each athlete has shown an extraordinary and inspiring amount of determination, grit and resilience to compete at such a high level in spite of the unimaginable disruption to their life. In doing so, they raise awareness about the unique challenges displaced people face and advocate for inclusion, acceptance and tolerance both in sports and in society as a whole.

Carrie McDonald is a rising sophomore in the College. Tokyo Talks appears online every other week.

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MCDONALD | Refugee Olympic Team Sends Powerful Message of Inclusion in Return to Tokyo - Georgetown University The Hoya

Hand-wringing about the plight of migrants crossing the Channel and Mediterranean by boat -and angry words about their treatment - will only go so far. What would liberal progressives actually like to see done?

Much of the world is on fire: Syria remains in the throes of a years-long civil war, Ethiopia is close to embarking on one, just months after its prime minister was awarded a Nobel prize, Afghanistan faces a new Taliban era, and famine, persecution and civil strife force millions of people across the globe to seek sanctuary elsewhere.

Many of those people entirely understandably look to the relative peace and stability of Europe and the UK for refuge. And despite the huge obstacles in their way the safe routes here have all been blocked are prepared to make the dangerous journey to our shores.

In both the UK and Europe, a fixation with the daily arrival of boats, across the Channel and the Med, excites the anger of many and the compassion of others. Neither response seems to be proving particularly helpful in finding a solution.

The reaction of many European countries has been to turn to populists and to try to further close their borders. That is the response of home secretary Priti Patel and the Conservative government of which she is part, too.

Despite us being on the western fringe of the European continent and getting just a trickle of asylum seekers relative to other countries, our government has been keen to use some of the worlds most vulnerable as an easy source of political credit, vowing to make it even harder to seek respite in the UK, despite asylum being a fundamental right recognised in international law.

Patel might be offering nothing in the way of insight or in compassion but all too often the liberal response to the issue of refugees is no better, warmer words aside.

It is easy to say we dont want asylum seekers drowning off our shores, or living in squalid and unsafe conditions in detention centres, and certainly that people should not be shipped to Australian-style prison islands.

But when it comes to saying what we actually want to happen, those of us of a socially democratic persuasion often have less to say and thats because the issue itself is often quite a difficult one. What is it we actually think we should do for the worlds refugees?

One thing we should stop doing is pretending that every refugee crisis in the world is the direct fault of the UK it is neither a true argument nor a politically winning one.

The UK clearly holds some responsibility for the rise of ISIS across Iraq and Syria, and should recognise that. Similarly, we have a broader colonial legacy that has done a lot of harm across much of the world. But equating that with the UK being the cause of the worlds miseries itself removes the agency from the people of the affected countries: when Bashar al-Assad murders his own civilians, he is the person who should be held accountable for that. We should not act as if those of us in liberal democracies are the only people on the planet with agency.

Leaving that point aside, we are left to the practicalities: in a world where millions of people are displaced by persecution, war, natural disasters or famines, what do we do? One step is to make sure we join up our thinking on different border crossings the UK does not exist in isolation versus the rest of the world.

Countries on the eastern and southern borders of the EU have closed many of the relatively safe (land-based) border crossings used by those who would seek asylum. The result is desperate people trying to cross the Mediterranean landing them in the same countries battling to keep them out.

Part of those border countries antagonism to refugees is the unwillingness of the EU to fully commit to fairly sharing the burden of hosting refugees. In theory. people accepted as legitimate asylum seekers should be distributed across EU nations, and there is financial support available to arrival countries from those further away.

In practice, such measures always come a day late and a dollar short, meaning that anti-asylum politicians all too often are propelled to political power in the affected countries. The result is a vicious cycle: the inflow of refugees becomes visible because people have to highlight the death and danger it involves.That keeps the issue high up the news agenda, which leads to calls for political action, and so on and so forth. Even if the current tactics cut the number of asylum seekers by 80%, their increased visibility produces a toxic political mix.

This Mediterranean crisis fuels, in turn, the crossings of the Channel with few options in Europe and hostile political environments in so many countries, the UK becomes an incredibly attractive option for those with the resources to reach it, not least because many more people speak English than other European languages, and want that head start towards integration.

As we, like the EU, have closed off most safe and legitimate routes to claiming asylum, boats become the option of last resort. And once again, the harsh approach fails on its own terms keeping the crossings in the headlines, with all the divisiveness that entails, while helping almost no-one.

The current approach fails on its own terms. Going harsher would do the same it would simply incentivise media coverage of the issue, both from right wing papers highlighting that even these new draconian measures got missed and people slipped through, and from activists trying to expose what would, from experience, surely be grim and dangerous conditions, if asylum seekers were kept offshore somewhere, for instance.

Some of us might think the right thing to do is to just drop restrictions or quotas altogether, and say that anyone found to be a genuine refugee always a tricky thing to define, but lets park that for today would be welcome to seek asylum in the UK. This would certainly feel morally admirable, but it may not prove either politically or practically sustainable.

The main problem is that the world is so chaotic and dangerous now that there are huge number of people seeking asylum almost all of them living in poorer countries. UN statistics suggest there are more than 25 million refugees around the world, alongside a further 50 million people displaced within their own country.

More than 80% of those people are in developing world countries richer nations do far, far less than their fair share here. Turkey alone, for example, has more than 3.6 million refugees despite having a population only slightly higher than the UKs.

A wave of several hundred thousand skilled immigrants from eastern Europe in the 2000s prompted a political backlash that created the Brexit movement. An influx of millions of refugees would risk political consequences even more dire assuming it ever got approved as a proposal in the first place. And that's not even to consider the damage it could do to countries suddenly denuded of much of their populations.

A sincere effort to do more as a good global citizen while also making asylum a smaller political issue would have to be a compromise. People do not spend thousands of pounds often all the money they have in the world and risk the lives of their children for fun or out of spite. They do it because they have no other choices. Giving people safer and better choices is the way to end the Mediterranean and Channel boat crises.

The government repeatedly says it wants people to take legitimate routes to seek asylum in the UK essentially asking people in camps in Turkey or elsewhere to apply for UK entry from there. This would be a safer and fairer option, if only it were a real one: an unfairness of entry by boat is that it is an option only open to relatively rich, middle-class asylum seekers. Poorer families cant even afford it.

The issue with the legitimate channels is people know their odds of success are astronomically low, because we take so few people from them. Instead of a trickle of a few thousand people, we should take hundreds of thousands. If we manage to make the terms fair, and let people work as they come, that could be increased over time if there was a lack of political backlash.

We pride ourselves often undeservedly on being a nation that believes in fair play, and yet as it stands we have set up a game for refugees where it is impossible to win without cheating, and then we condemn the cheaters who actually get here. Un-rigging the rules of the game might just be able to please everyone.

Finally, we have to remember to stand for what we believe, and to have and try to win the argument. If we have politicians that believe in the moral and ethical case for asylum, they should make that case, rather than dodging the issue or trying to deflect it.

Part of why we have ended up with a hostile environment is that almost no politicians challenged it. If we want to be a global Britain, and a good global citizen, we should help our neighbours when they are in need. We can hope otherwise, but one day we might need that help in turn, too we dont want to be forced to hope that other people are kinder than we managed to be.

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What is the liberal response to the migrant crisis? - The New European

Omar El Akkads new book, What Strange Paradise, is informed by his work as a journalist.

Nathan Howard/The Globe and Mail

Fiction has enormous power to impart truth. You can read fact after fact about current events, but a made-up story might be the thing that carries those events under your skin and into your soul. Omar El Akkads new novel, What Strange Paradise, does this kind of work.

Anyone who has read news articles about the migrant crisis will have absorbed many facts. They will know about the terrible conditions on the boats, the huge risks of a clandestine crossing in such a vessel, the deep desperation that leads people to take that life-and-death gamble. The many, many deaths.

El Akkads novel, like his first, American War, offers a different kind of perspective to even a well-informed reader. At the same time, it is very much informed by his work as a journalist at this newspaper, for the most part.

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I think probably for the rest of my life the residual experiences and memories from my decade in journalism are going to worm their way into my fiction, says El Akkad, 39, from Portland, Ore., where he now lives.

Those 10 years at The Globe and Mail were my education. I had a front row seat to so much of history. Which is not to say that I got it right or that I have any right to continue writing fiction based on the things that I used to write non-fiction about, he says. But those experiences constituted a kind of writing education that otherwise I dont think I would have ever gotten. And Ill take that over any MFA in the world any day.

The novel tells of the shipwreck of a rickety boat, its passengers from Africa and the Middle East on a desperate, dangerous trip to the Greek Island of Kos and it tells of freedom.

The story is presented in alternating chapters marked Before and After. Before describes nine-year-old Amirs life as a Syrian refugee the family settles in Alexandria, Egypt and what happens on the doomed boat. After is set on the Greek island where the bodies of those on the boat wash up. Amir, apparently the only survivor, is helped by a local 15-year-old girl whose own grandparents, presumably Scandinavian, performed a different sort of migration to the island buying a property there in their retirement.

The opening paragraphs will bring something else to mind for many readers: the photograph of the body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, whose Syrian refugee family had also been heading for Kos, ultimately hoping for a better life in Canada.

The child lies on the shore, the novel begins. He is facedown, with his arms outstretched. From a distance it looks like he could be playing at flight.

The photo of Kurdi was seared in El Akkads mind as he wrote this book, he says, along with another photograph, of Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his not-quite-two-year-old daughter, Valeria, who drowned together in the Rio Grande trying to cross from Mexico into the United States in 2019.

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It wasnt simply the images that motivated El Akkad, but what happened or didnt afterward.

They provoked immense outrage for what felt like a very short amount of time. And eventually people moved on to whatever it is they were going to be outraged about next. And more than almost anything, that sense and that privilege of temporary outrage and instantaneous forgetting is the thing that I was writing against, El Akkad says over the phone this week.

But that sense of how much of a privilege it is to be temporarily outraged by injustice and then immediately move on is the thing that drove the writing of this book.

El Akkad began writing the book in the early days of Donald Trumps presidency, and it is inspired as much by the refugee crisis at the southern U.S. border as it is about the migrant crisis in the Mediterranean.

It is also, as El Akkad describes it, a repurposed fable: Peter Pan reinterpreted as a contemporary child refugee.

Born in Cairo, El Akkad grew up in Qatar and moved to Canada with his family when he was 16, settling in Montreal. Ive been a guest on someone elses land since I was five years old, he says. And Ive always found that fiction, where you can alter the contours of your invented world to fit whatever reality is like, always felt more like home to me than any real place.

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Theres something else about fiction. While El Akkad is aware of the power of journalism you change the world for the better simply by telling the truth; thats an incredible mission statement he believes that fiction also has the power to effect change.

Its one of the few things that I carried with me from my journalistic career into my fiction-writing career: this iron-clad belief that there must be a chance that the work youre doing is going to cause some kind of positive change in the world. I dont think its possible to do the work we do otherwise. You have to believe a fundamentally irrational thing: a kind of alchemy where by stepping away from reality and by altering reality you can somehow cause a change in that reality. At its core, its a fundamentally irrational thing to believe. But at times its the only load-bearing beam holding up a very flimsy house.

El Akkad, 39, says joining The Globe was the second-best decision he ever made. The best decision, he says, was knowing it was time to leave, to focus on being a novelist.

His first published novel, American War written on weekends and in the middle of the night while he was still a full-time journalist is a terrifying work of speculative fiction. Amid the brutal effects of climate change, a second American civil war breaks out in 2074. American War won awards, was an international bestseller and has been translated into 13 languages.

The manuscript was acquired by legendary Alfred A. Knopf publisher Sonny Mehta, to whom What Strange Paradise is dedicated. In an appreciation El Akkad wrote for The Globe after Mehtas death in late 2019, the novelist recalled his first conversation with Mehta about American War; within five minutes on the phone, El Akkad knew that Mehta understood exactly what he was trying to do. You think youre reading one thing, but youre really reading another, Mehta told El Akkad.

This sentence also applies to What Strange Paradise in a number of ways. It is so gripping a page-turner that its brutal message feels organic and never lecture-ish. Through wisdom imparted by various characters, the reader receives new perspectives; the privileged Western reader in particular is confronted with him- or herself in an uncomfortable way.

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The hotel guests on the Greek Island who grumble that they cant use the beach because of the shipwreck. The disdain with which tourists in Alexandria treat a young boy hocking t-shirts. The canister of powdered milk in Amirs home: he could tell how high-quality the product was by how Western the people on the packaging looked. The explanation Amirs father gives him for the hellish situation in Syria: it did not start with bombs or bullets or revolutionary graffiti. It started with a drought. Dont call this a conflict, he tells his son. Theres no such thing as conflict. Theres only scarcity, theres only need.

The novel, published this week, is already receiving raves. The New York Times said it deserves to be an instant classic. The reviewer said she hadnt loved a book this much in a long time.

El Akkad jokes that its unclear what else the reviewer has been reading; perhaps a string of bad books. Theres more to this than El Akkads genuine-seeming humility. He feels uncomfortable celebrating anything to do with this book its launch, the rave.

I am by disposition drawn to writing about the things that make me angry in this world. And whether thats a good or bad thing or whether I have any right to write about the topics that I choose, I find the entire process difficult and it makes it difficult to talk about the resulting work in any kind of celebratory way, he says, before modestly referencing what he called a fairly decent New York Times review.

I cant celebrate these books. Its not how I think about them. I want to exist in a world where I didnt feel compelled to write about what I write about. So its a difficult place to inhabit as a writer and I dont know how long I can keep doing it, or if me doing it is valuable enough or is doing anything to change the things Im concerned about. Those are all open questions for me.

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Omar El Akkads new novel What Strange Paradise is driven by outrage over the refugee crisis - The Globe and Mail

According to preliminary data of the State Border Guard Service of Lithuania, over the last day, the border guards have detained 171 migrants who illegally crossed the border from Belarus.

The total number of migrants illegally crossing the Belarusian-Lithuanian border in 2021 has exceeded 3 thousand, which is 35 times more than in the whole year of 2020.

All detainees introduced themselves as Iraqi citizens or had documents of Iraqi citizens. The detained foreigners will be tested for COVID-19, writes DELFI.LT. They will be isolated until the results are known.

Most of the migrants are trying to get through Lithuania to the countries of Western Europe.

Lithuania has accused the Belarusian border guards of ignoring the trespassers. The Lithuanians claim that their Belarusian colleagues do not contribute to their work. The neighboring country has strengthened the border security and even installed barbed wire along the 5 km section, while there are plans to install more than 20 km of barbed wire.

On July 27, Lithuanian President Gitanas Nauseda said that the state of emergency due to the influx of migrants into Lithuania could be imposed only as a last resort. Now, he sees no need for it. He called Lukashenkas regime responsible for the migrant crisis on the Belarusian-Lithuanian border.

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Lithuanian border guards have detained a record number of migrants on the border with Belarus - Belsat

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Texas Gov. Greg Abbott on Saturday visited the southern border and warned that the surge in migrants and deadly drugs like fentanyl is having, or will have, a knock-on effect in other states.

Just the scale of this in terms of the stress of public resources, school, medical other things, this is going to greatly impact communities throughout Florida and I think across the country," DeSantis said at a press conference.

TEXAS GOV. ABBOTT SLAMS FEDS FOR COMPLETE ABANDONMENT OF BORDER LAWS AMID UNPRECEDENTED MIGRANT SURGE

"This is a situation where all states need to be a part of the process of stepping up," Abbott said.

The pair spoke in the Del Rio Sector as the Florida governor visited the Lone Star state to see the border crisis in person. He met with Abbott and was briefed by law enforcement officials on the crisis, and also paid visits to the border wall and areas affected by the crisis.

There were more than 188,000 migrant encounters in June alone, bringing the total number of migrant encounters in fiscal year 2021 to more than a million. Additionally drugs like fentanyl have been seized in greater quantities, with a 12% increase in June and 78% more seizures in FY 2021 than all of FY2020.

DeSantis noted that his state is having a problem with methamphetamine, and said that 95% of it came from the border.

MIGRANT ARRESTS AT SOUTHERN BORDER ROSE YET AGAIN IN JUNE TO 188,000, TOPPING 1M THIS FISCAL YEAR

"What happens at the border happens here today, but it will be happening in these other states tomorrow or next week or next month," Abbott said.

DeSantis said that he was shocked to hear from officials in Del Rio that the majority of the migrants being processed into the U.S. had Florida as their final destination.

"70 percent of the people they have interdicted said their ultimate destination is the state of Florida, so this is something, whenever theres a wave across the border, Im not saying it's 70 percent in every part of the border but here it's the majority," he said.

TRUMP-ERA DHS OFFICIALS WARN OF CATASTROPHIC RESULTS IF ADMINISTRATION ENDS TITLE 42 BORDER EXPULSIONS

Both Abbott and Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey had issued a call for help from other states, asking them to send manpower and law enforcement to help at the border. Florida was one of those states that responded, along with states like South Dakota and Iowa.

Texas has launched a number of efforts to stem the crisis, including putting down a $250 million down payment on a new wall construction project after the Biden administration abruptly ended the project in January.

Additionally, it has cleared out jails to hold more illegal immigrants and made efforts to arrest those coming in illegally. Abbott said Operation Lone Star had resulted in the apprehension of 50,000 illegal aliens, 2,000 criminal illegal immigrants, and disrupted 40 stash houses.

DeSantis said Floridian personnel have helped apprehend more than 2,800 illegal immigrants, with 100 arrests for felonies including human trafficking, drug smuggling and vehicle theft.

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The two governors, both Republicans, blame the Biden administration for the crisis -- pointing to the rollback of Trump-era policies like the border wall and the Migrant Protection Protocols (MPP), arguing that if those policies were brought back, the crisis would end.

"We appreciate you stepping up where the federal government wont," DeSantis told his Texan counterpart. "We understand how important this is to not just Texas but other states and we are absolutely going to see impacts in Florida and other states if we dont turn the tide on this."

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Govs. DeSantis and Abbott, in border visit, warn migrant crisis ripple effect on other states - Fox News