There Are Olympians Without Countries -- And Millions 
of Regular People, Too
by Jamilah King 
ColorLines
August 1 2012
http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/08/explaining_stateless_olympians.html		

If you watched the opening ceremony for the Olympic
games in London, it was hard to miss the self-described
"independent Olympians." There were four of them: Guor
Marial, Philipine van Aanholt, Reginald de Windt, and
Lee-Marvin Bonevacia. In a celebration of international
competition, their presence stood out because they were,
in effect, stateless.

A stateless person is broadly defined as someone without
a nationality. Though the UN's Declaration of Human
Rights states that everyone has a right to a
nationality, there are an estimated 12 million people
worldwide who are stateless; some estimates say that the
number is closer to 20 million. That number would be
substantially higher if the United Nations also counted
Palestinians, according to Sebastian Kohn, a program
officer at the Open Society Institute.

"We believe this is a serious issue in particular
because of the link to other human rights violations,"
says Kohn. "A big challenge in this field is that there
are still relatively few actors working on this. We need
to see a lot more action from governments, the UN, and
civil society to try to address this problem."

So just how did this year's independent Olympians arrive
at their statelessnes? As Deadspin pointed out shortly
after the ceremony, the reasons were both political and
logistic: Guor Marial, a marathoner, was born into civil
war in what is now South Sudan. The bloodshed claimed
two million lives, including eight of Marial's siblings
and 25 family members in total. The violence led him to
flee the country at 8 years old, first to Kenya, then to
Egypt, before finally settling in Arizona. South Sudan,
the world's newest nation, has yet to form a national
committee that's required for countries to participate
in the games, and even though Sudan extended Marial an
invitation to represent that country in the games, he
refused.

"Some things are more important than Olympic glory," he
said recently. "If I ran for Sudan, I would be betraying
my people. I would be dishonoring the two million people
who died for our freedom. I want to bring honor to my
country. People who just want glory, the spotlight of
the Olympics, they don't care about other people. I'm
fighting for independent status because I do care. When
I run, I want people to see me and say, `He is from
South Sudan.' "

Still without a passport, Marial wasn't able to travel
to London in time for the opening ceremony. So he
watched like most of the rest of us did-while eating
pizza with friends in Flagstaff, Ariz.

Reginald de Windt, a judoka, Lee-Marvin Bonevacia, a
distance runner, and Philipine van Aanholt, a sailor,
are all from Curaco, a former country that was part of
the Netherlands Antilles. The Netherlands Antilles
dissolved itself as an independent nation back in 2010,
and the International Olympic Committee (IOC) no longer
recognized it. Instead of competing under the Dutch
flag, for which they held no real allegiance, the three
athletes petitioned the committee to compete
independently.

While these athletes aren't the first to compete
independently at the Olympics, their stories mirror
those of other stateless residents. Kohn, of the Open
Society Institute, notes that the two main drivers of
statelessness are discrimination and state secession,
particularly in countries with often violent tensions
between ethnic groups. In countries like Kuwait and
Saudi Arabia, women are not allowed to pass on
nationality to their offspring.

The impact of statelessness can be devastating.

Many live in poverty, are forced into underground
economies, and some are at higher risk of human
trafficking, according to human rights advocates. Kohn
describes a vicious cycle in which stateless people are
often held in detention because they are not legally
allowed to be in their country of residence, but can't
be deported because another country won't claim them.

Abraham Paulos knows this cycle well. As executive
director of Families for Freedom, a New York City-based
non-profit that works with people in the U.S. who are in
deportation proceedings, Paulos says that he works with
stateless residents "about once a month," and that many
times people don't know they're stateless until they try
to travel abroad and realize that they can't apply for a
passport.

He can also speak from first-hand experience. Paulos was
born in Sudan to Eritrean parents during that country's
long war for independence against Ethiopia. His family
later relocated to Chicago as an Ethiopian refugee,
where he spent his childhood and obtained a green card.
When Eritrea finally seceded from Ethiopia, the country
no longer recognized Paulos as a citizen. Yet neither
did Eritrea, because he was born in Sudan. The same went
for Sudan.

"What we're really talking about is the law of the blood
and the law of the soil," Paulos told me. "It's unlike
some western states, like America, where if you're born
on the land you have automatic citizenship. That's not
the case for the majority of the countries. For the
majority [of the world] it's the law of the blood."

For Paulos, the issue shows just how capricious man-made
borders can be.

"We feel that if capital can move across borders, then
so can people," he says. "There's no physical borders,
just documents. It's more or less how we document a
person and how that documentation reflects certain
rights that person can have."

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate