SECONDARY school students from Nicosia are being given a taste of what it feels like to be an asylum seeker as part of a new awareness campaign, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees (UNHCR) said yesterday.
The first-ever such workshop for raising awareness for the issues of refugees and migration took place on Wednesday at the Acropolis Lyceum, and involved role-playing, with a group of students pretending to be a boatload of asylum seekers facing another group playing immigration officials.
The UNHCR and Education Ministry’s aims in carrying out this workshop were to bring high school students in contact with the notion of the term “refugee” and the rights that the definition entails.
Around 60 students participated in the workshop, which consisted of a brainstorming followed by a UNHCR produced video showing real stories of refugees around the world.
Students were encouraged to divide their thoughts on migration into two segments: reasons why people flee their countries voluntarily, and reasons why individuals may have to flee their countries against their own will.
This enabled the students to brainstorm and come up with their own understanding of involuntary migration in the face of persecution such as in the case of refugees, as opposed to economic migration or migration “for a better life”.
“This is important especially as there appears to be a general confusion regarding the distinction between economic migrants and refugees in the general public,” the UNHCR said in a statement.
The workshop ended in a role play activity where students were divided into two groups, one representing a group of people attempting to enter Cyprus in a boat at night time with the other group of students representing the immigration officers at the port authority.
“Many students enthusiastically came up with arguments for and against their positions, by trying to convince the policemen to allow them to enter Cyprus,” said the UNHCR.
“This simulation activity highlighted the plight of the individuals who had to leave everything behind out of necessity and encouraged empathy. It further explained that under international conventions, as well as under the EU acquis and national refugee law, every individual has the right to seek asylum from persecution in another country and the right to be granted asylum if the individual is indeed in fear of persecution.”
The UNHCR said the workshop had proved to be a useful tool in raising awareness for issues such as refugees and asylum, even though the issues may not directly be part of the class curriculum, they are pertinent to Cyprus.
Two more such workshops, which are being held under the auspices of the Education Ministry, are planned for before Christmas or early in the New Year, according to Emilia Strovolidou, Public Information officer for the UNHCR in Cyprus.
“The workshop clarified for them a lot of the issues surrounding refugees and asylum but not all of them,” Strovolidou said. “The empathy of the teachers was especially noted. They felt that workshops like that would trigger debate in the classrooms.”
