A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea

December 12, 2016
This poignant tale of survival and loss gives immediacy to the plight of Syrian refugees. In a spare, unobtrusive style, Fleming, head of communications for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, profiles Doaa Al Zamel, who as a teenager fled her homeland of Syria. Fleming’s skillful writing brings new vividness to Al Zamel’s dramatic story, already well known from media accounts. The book provides a quick sketch of Syria’s complex civil war, which erupted in 2011, making it critical for Al Zamel’s family to escape to Egypt. There, she married another displaced Syrian, and in 2014 they sold their remaining valuables to pay smugglers to take them across the Mediterranean. “It is better to have a quick death in the sea than a slow death in Egypt,” she reasoned. Conditions on the decrepit ship became deadly when they were rammed by another boat. Floating on a plastic inflatable ring, Al Zamel survived the ordeal and saved the life of a small child, but suffered the heartbreak of seeing her husband die. This book amply demonstrates why she has since become a symbol of hope for other refugees. Fleming should be congratulated for bringing Al Zamel’s inspiring and illuminating story to the page. Agent: Mollie Glick, Creative Artists Agency.

December 15, 2016
A Syrian refugee's perilous journey to the West. The subject of an earlier TED talk by Fleming, the head of communications and chief spokesperson for the United High Commissioner for Refugees, Doaa Al Zamel was not yet 20 when she was driven from her homeland by civil war and a brutal government campaign against her rebel region. The numbers, as the author cites them, are daunting and the odds very much against Doaa: more than 5 million Syrians forced to flee abroad, many more than that made internal refugees in their own country. Doaa left with the vaguely formed idea of making her way to asylum in Europe. In the hands of smugglers, beset by rough seas and pirates, she survived a horrific shipwreck, so far among the deadliest in the annals of illegal migration from Africa to Europe, with more than 500 victims. She also saved the life of a toddler, earning awards from humanitarian agencies and calling renewed attention to the plight of refugees from Syria. Finally resettled in Sweden, Doaa's story is one of the few refugee tales so far to have anything approaching a happy ending, making Fleming's narrative an aspirational if perhaps unusual one. As for Doaa herself, who closes the book with a brief statement, she aspires "one day...to return to Syria so I can breathe again." Fleming's competently written book has modest value as an expanded record of a story already widely reported. In the hands of the right readers, it will change the minds of some Westerners about the intent and character of the foreign people who are streaming their way, though it is hard to imagine it altering the policy of, say, a Republican governor in the Midwest. More than anything else, this is a testimonial to the very definition of heroism--when, that is, an ordinary person responds in extraordinary ways to extraordinary events.

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August 1, 2016

Chief spokesperson for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Fleming tells the story of Doaa Zamel, winner of the OPEC Fund Annual Award for International Development, who survived the horrendous September 2014 Mediterranean shipwreck that claimed almost 500 lives.

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