From the window of the airplane, the Alps looked like a cooling cake dusted with icing sugar, more beautiful than I dreamed, but also more distant. I had waited for this moment for over five years, carrying within me the ache of a person who never accepted that their dream of flight was impossible. I had always feared heights, but suspended between the frozen vastness and the bitter exterior, my heart remained calm. The true terror came later, when I walked up to the passport control booth. There, the microscopic humiliation of statelessness became enormous and concrete: a human being with no passport, no state, no safety net, only a paper that identifies him as legally invisible. This is what it means to be born stateless. You travel through life without the fundamental human right to belong. You are a legal ghost. And the state, with its files and seals, seems to have a passionate belief that you should not exist. When I received the invitation to speak at the Global Refugee Forum in Geneva, a tiny flame of hope sparked: I would go. I would stand and represent a movement. But the dream quickly became a series of emotional walls, built of ignorance, carelessness and red tape. It was not just an ordinary travel process; it was an examination, a humiliating performance in which my identity would be tested at every checkpoint. I would learn that needing to prove that I belong to humanity is not a matter of courage, but a matter of pure privilege.
The first concrete wall I hit was misinformation. I was at the beginning of my planning, full of naïve enthusiasm. I went online to research whether I could apply for a visa through the Swiss embassy. The website seemed full of kindness: there was a box for stateless persons, a whole section designed for people whose hunts are overwhelmingly complicated. I filled out the forms carefully, with the pulse of someone preparing for a major exam. But the embassy appointment was a waiting room for my disappointment—hours of waiting, being shifted from one official to another, until I was told, simply, that my travel document was not accepted. My travel document, the very piece of paper that supposedly grants me the right to travel, was not good enough to even submit a visa application. This is the contradiction created by inequality between states. The greater the privilege, the fewer obstacles; the more marginal the identity, the more paper is needed. I finally, I won a visa after the intervention of others, after letters, sponsorship, and the fact that the invitation was official. But that limited territorial visa was not a gift of happiness. It came with the stinging memory of what I always tried to ignore: I exist only because someone took a pen and spoke on my behalf. The joy was mixed with a deep bitterness. I was not receiving a normal service that everyone had the right to; I was receiving a rare exception, a favor. Friends and colleagues reminded me, with all good intentions, that I had almost not made it. But I didn’t want to be reminded. I know exactly how fragile my world is. I am tired of being treated as a privilege instead of a human right.
The second wall was ignorance. After securing the visa, I went to almost as difficult task: booking a flight. For most travelers, this is an automatic action. They click, pay, and expect a seat. But as a stateless person, my life is a long chain of warnings. The airline’s website had no category for people like me. I called “special assistance” in the pretense of asking if I needed a wheelchair or a caretaker; no one understood why a person without a nationality would need special help. Their customer service kept repeating a prewritten line: “The passenger has to obtain the right to enter the country of destination.” That was a positive thing, but I needed something more, a human acknowledgment that the system saw me and recognized my documents. There was nothing. No one at the airline could tell me whether I was actually allowed to fly, whether I would be forced back, or whether I would be stranded in a transit zone and arrested. I felt like I was playing a weird lottery with my future. I decided to send an email to the embassy of my transit country, hoping a simple official sentence would calm me down. My answer was a masterpiece of vagueness: “If you remain in the international transit area, you should be fine, but we cannot predict what immigration will decide at the border.” What kind of solution is that? How can a traveler get to adventures with advisor advice that is berated with hope and fear? I felt I was not a customer, not a citizen, not even a concern. I was a problem that they wanted to push away, to push out of timers. The only thing missing was a wall, but the wall was clear: if the embassy and the airline don’t know who is the responsible for us, I am not alone in a useless attempt.
In the end, I decided to continue, not because I was brave, but because the alternative—staying behind, letting statelessness win—was worse. I packed my bags, but inside the airport, I was prepared for a series of small interrogations. The check-in agent asked me to “show my nationality.” I forced a smile and began explaining the concept, not sure if I would get a reply or an eye roll. I’ve learned to be calm when people stare at my travel document with a mask of confusion, and when they ask questions that make no sense to important legal reality. Every little beep from the machine felt like a war broadcast. Why was I waiting for the boarding pass as if it should be marked with a warning? Why was my existence so unusual that it could not fit the normal operation of a giant airline? The route from Beirut to Europe had no direct flight, so I had to pass a transit country. I imagined the free moment, airport officials in a cold room, looking at me as a person without a state, and then with a nod, sending me back. I had flashes of fear while waiting for my luggage, while standing in front of the boarding gate, while looking at the faces of other passengers who never had to assert the right to come. And then the final moment came: passport control. It was not a lick, but a final reversal. I stood in line, gripping my visa and my heart beat in my ears. I felt like running away, but the force of the crowd pushed me forward; then I was at the booth. The officer was exhausted, perhaps from hundreds of arrivals, and asked me, almost bored: “Where do you want the stamp?” It was a moment of absurd comedy. He offered me a choice, as if the entire power of my life to be determined by a stamp position. I wanted to laugh; I wanted to cry. But it was the easiest I had had all day.
I finally stood on Swiss soil, in Geneva, in the symbolic heart of world humanitarian policy, but I did not feel triumphant. I felt shaky, stripped, emptied, like a human. I made it, but the experience had done not arrived. The first night, lying in a small hotel room, I kept rerunning the day’s humiliations: the answers, the forms, the confusion, the processing incident, the laughter of an officer who never understood the weight of my existence. I thought about the fact that statelessness is not an accident of a border line. It is a political tool. Many governments issue travel documents not to protect their stateless residents, but to control them, to track them, to watch how they move, and to remind them that they are at are not normal citizens. They assume that people born stateless will never travel, will never apply for a passport, will never dare dream of seeing the rest of the world. They treat all 15 million people in our situation as if we are invisible. The embassies and the airlines ignore us because they believe we are too few, too weak, too fragmented to fight back. They prefer to write a vague rule than to study Our identity. They prefer a profit, a profit, the status quo, rather than honoring us as human. This is the slow injustice of bureaucracy, and it is sharper than any wall you can touch because it does not contain flesh. It is a mental wall that invades my confidence and my right to be present in the world.
So, after I return, after all these details have come back to me, I feel the call to clarity. My journey was not a privilege, but a basic act: to travel to another country in order to speak about a problem that affects millions. The struggle of statelessness is not a problem that belongs only to a distant tribe; it is an issue for every human being who assumes that a passport is not absolute; for every person who hopes that the world is based on logic, not on injustice. I did not ask to be stateless. I was born into a denial of rights by my own state, or by the absence of a state. But i am not alone. The crisis affects 15 million persons across different regions, and perhaps in the future it will affect you, your neighbor, a child born from refugees, or a public the connections in a changing world. This speech is not an appeal for sympathy; it is a request for refusal. We are can with a support system that tells us to be grateful for a small mercy, and they call the mercy a favor. In return, I ask you to look at a stateless person next to you and see a ordinary human being who should be allowed to live, love, and to be separated from the global systems that close doors in our faces. We are not special; we are the most stable sign of a world that still divides humanity into those with a passport and those without. It is, 15 million people are not us; we are the warnings of a failure of states to respect human rights. Please do not wait until I or someone like me accumulates another six year waiting for a visa. Understand the crisis, make it impossible, create communities that can come together, and ask your term institutions: “Why is there no answer?” The answer will reveal what we have always known: Temit a structure that refuses to recognize that every person is equal. We can change that structure, but it must be now, because statelessness is not another marginal notes—it is a serious wound in the history of the modern world. And I am still the one living, waiting, stamping, hoping for the day when there will be a world that no longer passes through us, that simply sees us.
No, we are not a special case. We are an urgent proof that perhaps there is still no clear, beautiful road to justice. In Geneva, I was invited to speak to state representatives, but I did not actually ask if they could see “the stateless” as They, who represent us. I only ask them to be humans, to multiply their humanity, and to believe that the same driver who does not have a passport does not mean they have less right to the same sky. It is a desire not only for me, but for all those who were under assumption that they were unworthy of universal government. But for this moment, I am ending with a sense resolution: I went through, I crossed, and I was not break. But many of us do not have the same chance. In the next opportunity, do not forget the stateless. And if you are alive, if the plane is yours, if there are permanent legal markers inside a passport, remember that the struggle is not over. The Glob travel pronouncement will remain, until no child is born without a nationality and no person has to explain their worth at a border. All of us who live because of the luck of the woman, or deficits of luck, have a shared responsibility. It is time for the world to move from favor to fairness, from exception to inclusion, from my travel to our freedom. That is the plea I carry with me, from the white mountains and the clenched face of a passport control booth, into to speak, and will not be calmed.