Waheed Arian: Migration in the Western world
The Interview
BBC
4.3 • 537 Ratings
🗓️ 9 January 2023
⏱️ 24 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
War and extreme poverty drive millions of people from their homes every year. Some of them try to reach the rich Western world, where such inward migration routinely prompts fear and draconian counter-measures. Stephen Sackur interviews Waheed Arian, who fled war in Afghanistan as a child, made it to the UK and is now a doctor running his own medical charity. Do perceptions change when the story of migration is personalised?
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Hard Talk on the BBC World Service with me, Stephen Saka. |
| 0:04.9 | My guest today, Wahid Aryan, was a war child, born in Afghanistan in 1983, and raised during the brutal Soviet occupation. |
| 0:15.7 | As the dangers mounted in Kabul, his family fled across the mountains to Pakistan. |
| 0:25.6 | What followed were years of periodic displacement, poverty and fear, which eventually prompted his parents to send 15-year-old Wahid to London with a fake passport. |
| 0:32.6 | After brief incarceration as an illegal migrant, he was granted asylum and with extraordinary determination |
| 0:39.7 | he funded his way through night school and convinced Cambridge University to give him a place |
| 0:45.2 | studying medicine. He is now a distinguished radiologist and emergency specialist. He set up a platform |
| 0:52.5 | he calls Teleheel, through which doctors in the West can offer |
| 0:56.5 | help and support to colleagues in countries lacking healthcare infrastructure via their smartphones. |
| 1:02.5 | His is an extraordinary story which he's written about in a memoir, In The Wars. It personalises |
| 1:08.8 | the migration story, which in the West is so often characterized as |
| 1:13.0 | a problem to be feared. But can such stories make a real difference? Well, Mojid, Arian, |
| 1:20.5 | joins me now. Welcome to Hard Talk. Thank you very much, Stephen. |
| 1:24.9 | It's a real pleasure to have you on the show. I just wonder how much distance do you feel today as a distinguished doctor in the United Kingdom? |
| 1:33.4 | How much distance do you feel from your childhood and from your homeland, Afghanistan? |
| 1:41.6 | My family is still in Afghanistan. |
| 1:44.1 | My father, my sisters, five, six sisters are in Afghanistan. |
| 1:50.0 | One sister is newly displaced to Sweden and two brothers are displaced as refugees to the United States. |
| 1:57.3 | So I am all over the world when it comes to my heart, when it comes to my story. It's not finished |
| 2:03.0 | that I'm here in the UK. I'm very proud to be an Afghan British citizen, both, and I've got |
| 2:09.7 | my cultural heritage from Afghanistan, and I'm very proud of that as well. But on the other hand, |
| 2:14.6 | it really saddens me to see how people are suffering, including my |
... |
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