From Chapter Seven: @kontar81

After the airplane landed back at KLIA2, I did exactly as I had done at Phnom Penh, followed the man who was holding my passport and who allowed no questions. The problem I was facing was so huge I couldn’t comprehend it. My mind switched off and I followed the official, terrified. Was he taking me straight to jail? What did I have to do to get people to leave me alone? How could I prove to this world that I am not a bad person? What could I say to make them understand that it was not my fault that my country was at war? I thought of my father. I had let him down, but he was in a peaceful place where he could rest. I could use some peace and rest right now, I thought.

“I hope your jail is better than the one in the Emirates,” I said to the man with my passport as I followed him through gates and glass doors. He didn’t respond. Once again everyone was heading one way toward their departure gates and their planes, and I was moving in the opposite direction.

It took about three minutes to reach what looked like a customer service desk. Three employees, two women and a man, sat behind a glass window that separated them from the passengers. In front of the office were some chairs, filled with waiting people. The man handed my passport to one of the women. She flipped through its pages and said, “You have been deported from Cambodia.”

I had no idea what to do, was afraid I was going to end up in jail, and this was not the moment for sarcasm or jokes.

“Deported! How can I be deported from a country I never even entered in the first place?”

She smiled at me and said, “Still, you are considered as being deported.”

“What should I do now?”

“Well, you have a five-year travel ban, so you can’t enter Malaysia. Even if you didn’t have one, we can’t let you in as you are a deportee from another country.”

“So what should I do?” I asked her again. I knew what she was going to say so I decided to preempt her before she could answer. “I am from Syria. I can’t go there. It’s a war zone.” It was a long shot, and I said it in hope rather than expectation.

“Not my problem,” she said. “Bring me a ticket to Syria. In the meantime, we will hold your passport.”

“It will take me some time to get one,” I said, stalling. “There is no direct flight to Syria. You have to travel via Lebanon, and I need a visa to enter that country. But I will try.”

“Fine,” she said. “You can sit on one of those seats and start working on it.” Clearly, she was used to this kind of situation and this is how she handled it.

I sat down on one of the chairs and met two Egyptian guys who had been deported from South Korea and had been at KLIA2 for five days. We bonded. They had no money, so I gave one of them a few dollars and he went upstairs and brought back three big cups of coffee. The other one took me to where he normally smoked, a public toilet not far from where we sat, and together we smoked our cigarettes and drank our coffees. I was ridiculously happy at not spending the night in jail, and their presence made me feel better. They cracked jokes with their best Egyptian sense of humour, gave me a blanket—one of those thin red ones you get on an airplane that doesn’t keep you warm—and showed me where I could sleep on the floor. There were armrests between each chair in the row, designed to make sleeping there a challenge. I decided not to call my family—they’d had enough grief from me, and I was going to solve this myself. How, I didn’t know.

At about 2:00 a.m., two police officers came to question me for the first time.

“What are you doing here? What is your plan?”

“I am working on getting another ticket.” They didn’t ask where to.

“How long will it take?”

The Egyptians had been there for five days, so I said, “It will be a week, possibly.” That seemed a reasonable amount of time.

When I closed my eyes that night, feeling the cold floor under me through the blanket and with a rolled-up newspaper as a pillow, I wondered what tomorrow was going to bring. Not for a moment did I imagine this place would be my home for the next seven months. I only slept for an hour or so before waking up and exploring. Two long corridors, with bathrooms at each end, ran out from either side of the central area housing the customer service office. Along each corridor were large glass windows through which you could see the runway and the planes arriving and departing; spaced along the length were seating sections and potted plants. Moving walkways ran through them. Some escalators and elevators led to the floor above, where there was the security/immigration gate that you had to pass through to enter the levels with duty-free shops and cafés.

During the day, the immigration officers and customer service staff demanded to know about my progress in getting a ticket to Damascus. I told them I was working on getting the visa to transit through Lebanon and trying to arrange the flight to Syria, but I was just trying to buy myself some time. The officials were aggressive and suspicious, and I’d known from the first morning that there was no way to get them on my side. I argued with them about the situation in Syria and international law and how I couldn’t go back there. After three days, they finally agreed to the idea of deporting me to a third country, on one condition—I get a valid visa. It was clear they only agreed because they thought that, as a Syrian stuck at their airport, it would be impossible for me to do so.

At night they would come in pairs, usually between midnight and 2:00 a.m. when there were no passengers around. If I was sleeping they’d wake me up and make me sit on one of the chairs. The IDs that hung from their necks showed they were from different departments—police, immigration, airport security, intelligence, customer services—and they all asked the same questions. They were not decision-makers, just low-ranking employees who were required to report daily on those who remained at the airport and why they were still there.

I sent emails to NGOs around the world, to all the international embassies in Malaysia, to governments and presidents and kings and public figures. I sent emails to everyone I could think of in the Arab world: parliament members, ministers, sheikhs. They all ignored me. I even applied to the Malaysian authorities, despite the five-year ban imposed on me. The Ecuador Embassy in Kuala Lumpur replied to my request for an email from them confirming that Syrians could enter their country on an arrival visa for three months. They refused—“We are not going to deal with a man stuck at the airport just because he once bought a ticket to Ecuador. This conversation is over. Contact us no more.”—but at least they responded, which was enough to encourage me to keep on fighting. It was proof that I still existed as a person. Most western embassies replied with “sorry” and the suggestion that I contact the UNHCR.

I emailed the UNHCR twice but received no reply. I kept calling them, but only got a recorded message. Finally, on another try, a woman picked up. “Sorry. We can’t do anything. We advise you to turn yourself in to the airport authorities.”

But we all knew what the Malaysian authorities would do—force me to buy a ticket to Damascus and deport me back to Syria, or lock me up in prison.

“Sorry? We are the reason your organization exists! We are the ones you should be helping!”

“Sorry. We have no authority, and we don’t have access to you at the airport.”

Researching on the internet, I read about an island in the Caribbean called Montserrat, a British overseas territory. Its government had an online visa application form, which I completed. I knew it wouldn’t be successful, but it helped with the Malaysian immigration people, as I could show them proof that I’d applied and was just waiting for the visa to be approved so I could book a ticket and get out of there.

In my heart, I knew none of this was going to work, but I couldn’t give up hope, as that would mean the end. Things could be worse, I told myself. I could be in jail now, at least here I have my cellphone and the internet—surely, someone I’m reaching out to will help.