2021 Paralympic Games: a team of refugees to raise awareness of the planet
Alia Issa, member of the Tokyo Paralympic Games Refugee Team.
Joe TOTH OIS / IOC / AFP
Text by: Farid Achache Follow
4 min
As in the Olympics, a team of refugees will take part in the competition with a total of six athletes from Afghanistan, Burundi, Iran and Syria.
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From our special correspondent in Tokyo,
In Japan, the refugee team includes swimmer Ibrahim Al Hussein, who competed in the Rio Games in 2016 as an independent athlete.
“
Along with the other athletes, I want to educate 82 million refugees around the world and 12 million refugees with disabilities,
” he said.
If the task promises to be heavy, he fully intends to put all his strength into it.
Alia Issa, youth at the heart of the fight
Just like the first female Paralympic refugee athlete and youngest member of the team, Alia Issa, a Syrian refugee living in Greece, who will compete in the sledgehammer, a special event for athletes who are unable to practice the throwing. javelin, weight or discus. “
I represent all the refugees in the world and I would like to be an example for each of them,
” she hopes. Adding: “
Don't stay at home, try to play sports every day, be outside, in the world. I hope to be a first example to follow.
At four years old, Alia Issa contracted smallpox, an infection that damaged her nervous system. She uses a wheelchair and has speech difficulties.
The Perfect Burundian Hakizimana is the only athlete to make it to the Tokyo Paralympic Games directly from a refugee camp.
Hakizimana took up Taekwondo, a new sport at the Paralympic Games, at the age of 16 after losing his arm, saying it had "
saved
"
and
"
lifted
" him
the moral.
In 2010, Hakizimana obtained his black belt and opened a taekwondo club in Burundi.
After violence escalated in his home country, Burundi, he fled to Rwanda in 2015, escaping civil war.
A year later, he used his previous experience to start a taekwondo club in Mahama refugee camp in Rwanda.
Today, he trains around 150 people in the camp, including children.
Afghanistan in everyone's mind
As the Taliban have taken power in Afghanistan, the refugee team will be more than needed.
Captain of the Afghan wheelchair basketball team, Nilofar Bayat, who managed to leave his country to take refuge in Spain, begs the international community not to abandon Afghanistan and its compatriots, "
because the Taliban have not changed
”.
The “
message of hope”
that the Paralympic refugee team wants to convey is also addressed to the Afghan people, according to Ileana Rodriguez, a former refugee living in the United States and the team's head of mission.
Japan, the world's third-largest economy, accepts refugees only in small quantities: only 47 people in 2020, for example, or just over 1% of asylum seekers that year, according to official figures.
In 2016, at the time of the Rio Olympics, Japan accepted 28 refugees while Germany welcomed 263,622. Today, more and more voices are being raised both in the archipelago and in the foreigners so that Japan can contribute more actively to the protection of refugees.
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