Dr. Angie Moe set to launch research on Syrian refugees

Olga Bonfiglio

College of Arts and Sciences staff writer

Yogi Berra once said: “If you don't know where you're going, you'll end up someplace else.” For Dr.  Angie Moe, who has a long history of scholarship in Middle Eastern music, culture and dance, Yogi’s observation could not be more apropos—or timely.

Last spring, the Haenicke Institute for Global Education of Western Michigan University invited the sociology professor to participate in a faculty development seminar on social problems in the Middle East. She ended up learning about the Syrian refugees.

“I wanted to study another area around the Mediterranean,” said Moe, who had already done research in Egypt and Istanbul.

The seminar, comprised of eight other American academics, focused for five-and-a-half days each on Amman, Jordan, and Istanbul, Turkey, where Moe met Syrian refugees as well as members of agencies and government organizations who were helping them.

“I was like a sponge in that I got a whole new experience of the Middle East. It was all so new to me,” said Moe. “I’m still figuring out the angle I want to approach for my research, but over the last six months I have been building a basic knowledge of the issue.”

Moe has also joined a working group of people in the Kalamazoo area who are looking into ways they might help support Syrian refugees here. Already she has joined with Pastor Mark Couch of Solid Grounds Student Ministry and Caleb Foerg, a sophomore in political science, who have formed a student organization called Advocates for Refugees in Crisis. ARC is part of WMU Student Activities and Leadership Programs. Its purpose is to promote the cause of aid for global refugees and to provide assistance to those who have been resettled in the southwestern Michigan area.

“This initial group continues to snowball, and I’m not sure what will come of it all or how I will make a contribution,” said Moe.

The first thing it must do, however, is to assess the area’s capacity to host Syrian refugee families. So far, they are partnering with Bethany Christian Services in Grand Rapids, which has been doing refugee resettlement since October of 1998. Bethany was approved to do reception and placement as a Michigan resettlement affiliate of the Church World Service Immigration and Refugee Program (CWS-IRP) that also works with the U.S. State Department to resettle refugees in the United States.

ARC and Solid Grounds Student Ministry would like to co-host a refugee resettlement program by next summer that would provide such supports as housing, education, health care, transportation, English translation, and language learning.

“It’s quite a commitment,” said Moe. “It even entails meeting the family at the airport when they arrive in Kalamazoo, finding toys for the kids, putting homey touches to their apartment and making them feel like someone cares about them.”

Members of the Islamic Center in Kalamazoo have also shown an interest in the resettlement project, especially since Syrian refugees are mostly Muslim.

Spending 11 days in Jordan and Istanbul has definitely had an impact on Moe.

“It’s changed me. It was such an intense education and a dramatic human experience,” said Moe. “I have traveled to other parts of the world and seen many difficult situations, but the magnitude of the suffering I saw is really difficult to put into words. You know intellectually that there is ‘this thing out there’ that is terrible, but when you see people living it, you are affected.”

Moe relates the story of visiting a Bedouin village in Jordan, two kilometers from the Syrian border. There she met a Syrian grandmother who had had a stroke while her family was in flight. The woman was bedridden, frail, and non-verbal.

“I immediately went to her bedside and asked her adult daughters, through our translator, if I could sit near her and hold her hand,” said Moe. “I massaged her hands and cheeks but she just looked through me blankly. When I turned away to pay attention to her son who was relating the family’s story, she suddenly squeezed my hand and tried to pull me back. I turned back around to look at her and she was crying. That’s when I knew there was no turning back.”

“There is something about the human experience here that so easily turns hearts and minds,” Moe continued. “I hope, that even in that brief time, I gave her some comfort.” 

In this same village, Moe experienced quite a different scenario that is telling in terms of the life Syrian refugees have become accustomed. She heard gunfire while meeting with the village’s tribal sheik. He had taken in several hundred Syrian refugee families in order to set an example for others of the humanitarian effort that he thought should occur.

“No one ran for cover from the gunfire and instead just carried on business as usual. So I did nothing,” said Moe. “It turns out that the arid climate and direction of the wind makes sound travel differently and in a way that I couldn’t tell where the gunfire was coming from. Hearing it was definitely new to me and very unsettling. However, the people there hear it all the time.”

Moe finds the civil war in Syria to have morphed into a complicated mess with many actors and scenarios. For example, it is looking more and more like a proxy war between the United States and Russia. There is also controversy over the oil fields in Syria that Daesh (a.k.a. Islamic State) currently controls. Religious animosity between the major sects of Islam (Sunni and Shia) are also at play. Meanwhile, President Bashar al-Assad seems relentless in the war, while Daesh is using the conflict as an opportunity to exploit the country and its citizens.

The opposition powers are more complex than they were originally and have been infiltrated by radicals, said Moe. Moreover, the Kurds continue the struggle toward autonomy as they fight Daesh over northeastern Syria. The United States, as is often the case, is quite in the middle. During and since her travels, Moe has heard from various sources (many with Syrian background or connection) that it is largely believed the U.S. could end the war. At the same time, people in this region of the world are ambivalent about outside interests getting involved.

Some Syrians have said that if they would not have participated in the Arab Spring had they foreseen the upset it would cause, according to Moe. They do not like Assad, but recognize that he provided some stability in the country prior to the war. Overall, the people find the strains of war not worth the attempt to overthrow Assad. And, they fear that if he were deposed, Daesh—or some other radicalized terrorist group—will likely jump in to replace him.

“The country needs some stability,” said Moe. “What happens after that is unclear.”

Moe recently spoke on "Invisible Victims: Violence Against Women and Children and The Syrian Refugee Crisis" at the Lyceum Lecture series sponsored by Lee Honors College.

The Fall 2015 Lyceum Lecture series is a companion to the continuing Raise Your Voice series. WMU faculty and community experts address gendered violence in college life, at work, in the family, on the street and in other institutions, and how we can achieve a world without gender-based violence.