Efat said no.
We had offered her the chance to pre-record. She was in Rome, the hour was uncivilised, the connection was a risk, and nobody would have blamed her. She wanted none of it. She wanted to be there, live, with everyone else. So at two in the morning she sat in front of a camera in Italy and spoke about the work she had done in Kabul as a sixteen-year-old, supporting child labourers and women through one of the hardest places on earth to be a girl with ambition.
In Melbourne, it was mid-morning. In Chicago, the evening before. In Afghanistan, past four am. World Beyond War’s symposium for Refugee Week ran for nearly four hours and crossed four continents to happen at all.
While it was on, the world was loud and looking elsewhere. The President of the USA was hosting a UFC fight in his front yard and that same week, the first goal scored for the Socceroos was scored by a refugee, Nestory Irankunda, born in a camp, raised in Adelaide, cheered by a whole country. Alan, who chaired the day, mentioned it early on. We treat refugees as a burden, and then a refugee scores and we rise to our feet. The people in this symposium were asking for nothing more than that chance.
There were ten of them in the end. Five in our studio in Melbourne. Five more online. The Australian president of World Beyond War. The worldwide president from Chicago. Kathy Kelly, arrested sixty times for peace, introducing the young Afghans she lived alongside in Kabul. And the people the day was really about, the ones who built things under the shadow of the Taliban and carried that work into exile.
One of them we could not see. Her name, the one we used, is Nazil. It is not her real name. She is not in a safe place, so her face was never shown. She taught herself English, then taught it to Afghan girls. She started writing poems in Farsi at eighteen and now translates her own work into English. Her father tried to reach Australia and spent years on Nauru and Manus. He is still waiting. She read two poems. Her younger sister painted the pictures we put on the screen. When her connection wavered, we played a recording of her voice, because she would not let the internet take the poem from her.
This is what these symposiums are for. Someone who cannot travel, cannot be named, cannot show her face, can still be heard. Not as a statistic. In her own words, in her own voice, with her sister’s paintings behind her. That is not a small thing when the alternative is silence.
I have spent a long time near these stories. Years as a foreign correspondent across the Middle East and Asia. I have been to Kabul. I have sat with the Rohingya in Myanmar. There are places I can no longer go back to. None of that makes me special. It just means that when World Beyond War asked us to carry this, we understood the weight.
So we built what the day needed and stayed out of the way. Isolated feeds from four continents. Five microphones, five chairs, playback ready, a safe path for a hidden voice. That was the job. Not to be seen, but to make sure they were.
It will not end the wars, the trouble or the conflict. It was never going to. But for four hours, in the small dark hours of four time zones, people who are usually spoken about got to speak. And the rest of us got to do the one thing the title asks of us.
Bear witness.