Emma Batha
Ask scientist Nowras Rahhal about his cutting-edge work on a COVID-19 vaccine and he is eager to explain the complexities, but ask him where he comes from and he struggles for words.
Rahhal, who moved to Germany two years ago from Syria’s war-shattered capital Damascus, is stateless — meaning no country recognises him as a citizen.
“When you are stateless, the simple question ‘Where are you from?’ becomes very loaded’’, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
“Most people are happy to say where they belong, but I don’t know what to answer. I’d love to have a place to call home.”
Rahhal, 27, has just finished working with a team at one of the Max Planck institutes on developing a system allowing a COVID-19 vaccine to be applied to the skin, rather than injected into muscle.
He said the technique — targeting specialist immune cells in the skin that can trigger an immune reaction in the body — would require a far smaller dose per person, a big advantage when inoculating large populations.
Before arriving in Germany, Rahhal spent years studying to the sound of bombings and artillery fire, using his phone torch to read when the electricity cut out at his Damascus home.
But Rahhal’s academic achievements are remarkable for another reason — stateless people often struggle to access education.
Rahhal’s grandfather was among tens of thousands of Palestinians who fled the Mediterranean city of Haifa during conflict in 1948.
Today there are half a million Palestinians in Syria, but they are not allowed to naturalise even though most were born in the country.
Although Rahhal’s mother is Syrian, laws in many Arab countries ban women passing their nationality to their children, so Rahhal, his two brothers and sister were born stateless like their father.
There are an estimated 10 million stateless people in the world with large populations in Myanmar, Ivory Coast, Thailand and Dominican Republic. Deprived of basic rights, they often live on the margins of society. — Reuters
Oman Observer is now on the WhatsApp channel. Click here
