WhatsApp has changed the refugee experience. Today, nostalgia, fear, and despair come packaged in a single post instead of being separate chapters in an uprooted life. Transcontinental messaging and phone calls tantalise and torment.
In a flat in Liverpool, Greek Melkite priest Fr George Banna holds his iPhone and follows a virtual tour of the church in Khartoum where he was parish priest. A Sudanese friend, one of the few remaining locals, murmurs from time to time in Arabic.
He points out the garden where children used to play after Mass, littered with broken furniture and rubbish. A plastered wall with a gigantic hole evident of gun fire, a room filled with the soot of an explosion.
The sacristy, looted, its safe jimmied open to scoop out donations and jewelry. The candle room, filthy, full of twisted metal chairs. The nave of the church, ruined, rubble strewn everywhere, the brilliantly-coloured icons cracked and broken on the floor, the marble altar smashed and covered with the detritus of a senseless war.
For 38 years, he said Mass in this church. He presided at baptisms, at first communions, at weddings and funerals; he heard confessions.
Who trashed Fr Banna’s life?
No one knows. Thugs in the Sudanese Armed Forces? Thugs in the Rapid Support Forces? It hardly matters. The two factions have destroyed the whole city with months of fighting.
Of the 50 million people in Sudan, 12.4 million have fled their homes according to the United Nations, 4 million of them across borders in Egypt, Chad, South Sudan, Ethiopia, and Uganda.
The 120 families in Fr Banna’s parish, Our Lady of the Annunciation, have all fled, some east to Port Sudan, some south to South Sudan, and 80 families on buses to Cairo, 1500 km away.
Like him, they left with the shirts on their backs. The volcano of violence erupted so suddenly that they took nothing when they fled. And there is nothing to return to in the devastated city.
Effectively, these Christians are stateless. It is impossible for them to live in Sudan; it is impossible for them to stay in Egypt. After more than a hundred years of peaceful prosperity in Khartoum and other Sudanese cities, the Syrian Christians of Sudan are homeless and destitute.
Relatives ring Fr Banna and his family here in Sydney daily on WhatsApp to keep them up to date. It’s heart-rending. So and so needs medicine; so and so needs a specialist; a toddler was molested…. They cannot work, go to school, or see a GP without a residency permit.
Fr Banna’s son is an IT specialist; his daughter is a dentist. Ten or 12 people share tiny flats. There are no jobs for them.
The Egyptian government has enough troubles without caring for Sudanese refugees, especially if they are Christians, he says. No residency permits are given.
Fr Banna’s son-in-law, George Abagi, the Sydney-based president of the Sudanese Syrian Christians association and Fr Banna’s son-in-law, says that donor fatigue has set in among Australians.
He cannot even set up a Go Fund Me page. The word “Sudan” triggers a terrorist alert and his appeals are always rejected.
He wants the government to give the refugees visas to stay in Australia.
“We keep lobbying for them and all we get from the bureaucracy is silence, complete silence,” Abagi says.
“We’ve written over and over again to Tony Burke, the minister for immigration. More silence. He won’t even answer.
“This is madness. These Sudanese Syrian Christians are a vulnerable minority. But they are well educated, they speak English, many of them have relatives here in Australia. Why can’t the government open its doors?”
The Catholic Weekly contacted the Minister for Home Affairs’ media contact for comment but had received no response at the time of printing.
Fr Banna and his wife Susie have their own Australian visa challenges. They fled with his parishioners to Cairo, but they managed to get a visitor visa to Australia and have applied for a displacement Australian visa. For the moment, though, they are safe here.
He is perplexed by the government’s indifference to their plight.
“Back in the early 90s hundreds of families were granted humanitarian visas to Australia when the Bashir government turned Islamist,” he tells The Catholic Weekly.
“Hundreds from our community came here. Now we are in a worse situation, and they are ignoring us Sudanese Syrian Christians.”
Susie puts their case more forcefully. “Istighatha,” she says, an Arabic word which means “help us, we’re pleading for help.”