Asylum Speakers
“Mez is the center of it all. Mez changed our lives,” says Nils O’Hara. Nils is a guest on his sister Jaz O’Hara’s podcast. The two founded the human rights organization The Worldwide Tribe together and in one of the 45 episodes so far they reflect on how they got to where they are today – and what the young Eritrean Mez has to do with it. In 2015, when many European media were reporting about “refugee waves” or “refugee swarms”, Mez came to Great Britain. The O’Hara family took the then 14-year-old into their home. It was at this point that Jaz, who was two years her senior, also began to be interested in the stories of those people who were turned into anonymous crushes in the headlines, for their escape, the suffering and pain they had to endure. Without further ado, she traveled to the “jungle” of Calais and documented her impressions on social media. In the 45-minute episodes of her podcast, founded in 2019, Jaz not only speaks to refugees from different countries, but also to the people who help them – to make it clear that it is not a diffuse mass, but in each individual case of an individual destiny. Julia Brader
The hunter
At some point in the film, a hero comes along to fight injustice. In real life, Meron Estefanos comes. In 2011, the Swedish-Eritrean radio journalist’s phone rang. A man tells her that he is being held and tortured in the Sinai Peninsula and that the kidnappers want to extort ransom money from his family. Estefanos answers the call and becomes the contact person for countless kidnapped refugees, who are often mistreated by the very smugglers who actually paid them to cross the Mediterranean Sea: first with the promise of passage to the rich north and then with violence the criminals, trying to extract as much money as possible from Africans who dream of a better life. Estefanos uncovers a whole network of these human traffickers that stretches as far as Germany and Sweden. The four-part feature series uses original sounds and new interviews to tell about her research, the dangers Estefanos has put herself in and her attempts to bring those responsible and those behind them to justice. A report from a hell that is reality for many refugees and whose existence one would not believe possible in Europe. Nicola’s friend
Memo Moria
Refugees who have made it to the borders of Europe are a decisive step further. But here, too, their situation is coming to a head again, here, too, their lives can be in danger and they are at the mercy of arbitrariness – now that of Europeans. Using the example of the Turkish-Greek border, journalist Sham Jaff and reporter Franziska Grillmeier describe how people who have fled their homeland, mostly from Afghanistan, Syria or East Africa, have been doing since 2015 when attempting to cross the border river Evros or the Aegean Sea to get to the EU. Even if they land on Lesbos, for example, they are far from safe. How the political will of many in Europe means that the rule of law is suspended in order to be able to keep refugees away from EU territory as far as possible. Sham Jaff began her research after the major fire in the completely overcrowded Moria refugee camp in September 2020. Her podcast is pleasantly low-threshold, it also explains, for example, how legislative procedures work in the EU or asylum procedures for a better understanding. Stephen Fisher
Melting Pod
That in the obligatory either-or section of this podcast the question of “Quali or Quanti?” is made clear: This is about science, about qualitative and quantitative methods. Melting Pod is a podcast by young researchers at the University of Duisburg-Essen. Each episode deals with the topic of migration from a different scientific perspective. In one episode, a psychologist explains how post-traumatic stress disorder and flashbacks occur. She tells of a woman who had the feeling that her brain was still in Iraq and her body was already in Germany. In another episode, a social scientist talks about racism in German daycare centers, which often starts with skin-colored crayons. The podcast started two years ago, and since then there has been a new episode almost every month. Melting Pod is not an elaborately produced storytelling podcast, but handmade. Sometimes the recording rattles, sometimes the one or other embarrassing break lasts a little too long. Still, it’s worth listening to. In the best moments, the individual episodes are reminiscent of a really good introductory seminar, in which you don’t have to take notes, but you can think along. Kathrin Müller-Lance