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Syrian Refugess c2fad 

On March 11, 2011 a powerful earthquake shook Eastern Japan. It caused a massive tsunami. The sea water pulled back and rolled forward into towns and villages along the North East coast, wiping out buildings and killing about 20,000 and making about 300,000 homeless.    

It changed the landscape, which can be seen in satellite images of before and after.

Syrians, thousands of kilometers away, were reeling in their own tsunami.  The death and destruction beginning in Deraa, Syria was a man-made tidal wave. The local Syrian TV channels, as well as the international satellite channels such as: CNN, BBC and Al Jazeera, were all reporting on violence in Southern Syria.  Deraa, a small and insignificant agricultural city on the Jordanian border, was the epicenter of the man –made earthquake and tsunami which was to shake all of Syria to its very core.

The Syrian disaster has left about 400,000 dead, and about 4 million homeless, with many millions of Syrians out of the country.

While Syrians were crying about their own disaster just beginning in March 2011, they were also crying for the destruction in Fukushima.   Along with the other satellite channels, they watched NHK, the state broadcaster of Japan.  Soon they watched as the Daiichi Nuclear plant melted down, in the aftermath of the earthquake and tsunami.  A chain reaction of death and destruction, and people being made homeless refugees: even in their own country.

Scenes of explosions at Fukushima, and the razed landscape and homeless evacuees, reminded them of shared trauma.

Syrians could feel the pain and anguish of the Japanese.

When you are experiencing a terrible disaster, you feel your load is somewhat lightened, when you find others who are sharing the same magnitude of crisis.

Syrian citizens wondered: could Japan’s disaster be even worse than ours? 

After 5 years, the people of Fukushima are still in temporary housing.  Not exactly tents, but not that much better. Flimsy metal containers: which are small and not warm enough in winter. They were told those shelters were designed for 2 years of use.

Families in Fukushima have been torn apart, as the children are housed in one area, and older parents and grandparents may be a distance away.   The original combined multi-generational family units have been broken.   Houses were abandoned due to radiation contamination.  People left the area either dead, or with the clothes on their backs.  The waves swept away the foundations of family, culture and community.

The Japanese government still struggles with a slow recovery process, and still there is no plan or timetable for return to Fukushima.  The radiation issues have yet to be resolved.

Syrians took refuge in tents and rental housing in safe areas along the coast, places like Latakia and Tartus.  Some Syrian went to UN camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.  Some Syrians took migrant boats to Greece, from Turkey.  No one went for free, the trip cost is thousands of Euros.  The really poor refugees could never dream of a boat ride to Europe.  They remained in Syria or in the various camps.  The migrants going to Europe either had money to finance their new life, or were not fleeing any violence, but were economic migrants, paying their way to a new life in Europe.

The Syrian government still struggles with violence, but a new UN brokered cease fire seems to be holding.  An upcoming UN peace meeting in Geneva holds promise of the beginning of the end of the war in Syria.  Recently, Syrian farmers and their families began streaming back to their homes and lands in the rural countryside of Aleppo.  Cars and trucks came in a seemingly never ending caravan, which went through the daylight hours, and didn’t let up as darkness fell. 

The Syrian farmlands are not contaminated and farmers are anxious to plant their fields now in spring, after 2-3 years absence.  They all had the same stories to tell: terrorists had come to their areas, and they left their homes and lands because it was not safe to remain.  Now those terrorists have been driven out, and they can once again return to plant and start home repairs.

The Japanese farmers of Fukushima cannot return and plant for spring, because the radiation levels are too high.  The government is digging up the top soil, and then incinerating it, and the remaining ash is stored in black plastic bags in a storage facility.     There is an ongoing and unresolved issue of how to deal with the radioactive waste left unrecovered at Daiichi Nuclear Power plant.

The Fukushima earthquake and tsunami was a natural disaster, beyond the control of humans.

The Syrian disaster was a man-made plan, funded and supported by foreign countries.   NATO forces were successful in a regime change plan in Libya.  Those mercenaries and their weapons came to Deraa, Syria in March 2011.   They set up their headquarters at Al Omri Mosque, and hid behind a disguise of “Arab Spring”.  The waves of money and Radical Islamic ideology pumped in from abroad swept across Syria, leaving buildings, homes, and lives ruined.   Syria became a swamp of Jihadists, as the foreigners flooded across the borders of Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan.  USA, UK, France, Germany, Turkey, Qatar and Saudi Arabia all supported the waves of death and destruction for 5 years in Syria.  It is only very recently they have begun to throw out a lifeline to the drowning Syrians.

 Fukushima and Syria are both marking 5 years since a wave of death and destruction hit their lands and changed their lives and history forever.  


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