CALLING Motaz Amer a high achiever would be quite the understatement.
The 19-year-old refugee moved to Scotland only last year with his parents and two siblings and is about to start a degree in engineering, robotics and artificial intelligence at Glasgow University.
He is already the university lead for the Young European Movement – a pro-EU campaigning group.
Amer is also a member of the Refugee Council’s youth advocacy and campaigns group, a young ambassador for the Prince's Trust and Amnesty International UK’s country coordinator for Yemen – the country of his birth, which he was forced to flee at the start of the civil war in 2014.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, he has won multiple awards and is now the youngest of the Scottish Government New Scots Advisors – playing a vital role in supporting the delivery of Scotland’s new refugee integration strategy.
“We meet with different stakeholders,” Amer told The National.
“From the Scottish Government, the local councils, COSLA – different organisations and institutions and ask: “How can we make sure that the integration strategy works as it should? How can we make sure that integration is a two-way process rather than a one-way process?”
He added: “It's not imagining people will come and be just like us, but imagine that we learn from them and they learn from us and how we can build a multicultural community which is something that Scotland has been treasuring for ages and been leading on, not just on the UK level, but globally as well.”
Amer went on: “I think it's something that we need to treasure but we need to work on it more, and we need to make sure that we're not leaving people behind.
“Whether you’re a new Scot, a middle Scot, an old Scot – it doesn't really matter. We're all here to build the best Scotland for all of us.”
Amer is leveraging his own unique experience as a refugee for the roles. He can still remember the the day he and his family were forced to flee Taizz – Yemen’s third most populous city.
It was the start of 2015, months after the start of the Yemeni civil war – which has since escalated into one of the world's worst humanitarian crises, with millions displaced.
The Houthi movement has seized control of the capital, Sana'a and taken advantage of the weakness of the transitional government established after the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings.
“We were living in a really central area in Taizz and it was getting worse,” he explained.
“There was a lot of tension. We’d hear gunfire. Bullets fired through the living room.”
“I still remember the image of our living room having 4 bullets in the wall, and those ones weren't even intentional.”
Early in the morning on a day soon after, Amer’s family left Yemen.
“We left with nothing, just our passports – a couple of documents that we had – and the clothes that we were wearing at the time,” he said.
“It was dark. It was cold, really early. At the time, I was 9 (below).”
They fled to Saudi Arabia and – soon after – heard that their house had been burned down after a neighbouring building was blown up by an RPG (rocket-propelled grenade).
“We were really shocked. If we didn't leave at that point, we could have been caught in the fire and we could have been dead.”
After stints in Egypt and Greece, Motaz and his family eventually settled in Belfast and then Scotland.
He still thinks of his extended family – his grandparents, for example, who he hasn’t seen for over 10 years.
But he is hopeful for the future. Already with a whole host of accolades to his name – trust me, there are more – he is looking ahead.
“I am really excited to start university, it was always a dream of mine and my parents and to finally get here feels unreal. It definitely wasn’t easy but I am grateful for everyone who has helped me along the way especially the people of Northern Ireland and Scotland who welcomed us with open arms and hearts. This is not the end of a story but the start and I’m really looking forward to what comes next,” he said.
Asked what the future may hold, Amer said that he wants to remain active with his campaigning work and “give back to the community and to try to find solutions for the problems that we are facing every day”.
He added: “One of the current projects which I'm working on is called the power of words – which looks into the rhetoric that has been used in the media and politics and how it does and did impact the integration and sense of belonging for refugees and people seeking asylum.”
“So, that is a big research piece going out hopefully next year. I've been working on that for a year. It's a big campaign that we're looking to launch – especially with the current political climate.”
While Amer does find the rhetoric we’re seeing in much of the media as well as recent far-right riots and protests outside asylum seekers very worrying, he added: “Whenever I go in the streets, I find it quite the opposite. I find that people are welcome, people are open and inclusive – so, it doesn’t represent the real picture.
“I definitely agree there are a lot of problems in the UK. Migration could be a factor in it, but I'm saying – let's point the fingers at the right people, the people that have the responsibility and the right power to change it – rather than blaming each other because, at the end of the day, we're in the same boat.”
