My flight had to make an emergency landing last week. The experience was dreadful, especially for those who were not American, says Azad Essa.
Last week I was travelling on a Qatar Airways flight from Washington DC to Doha when severe turbulence forced the pilot to make an emergency landing in the Portuguese islands of Azores, in the middle of the North Atlantic Ocean.
When I say “severe turbulence”, I mean the plane swaying, then losing altitude - some hundred feet suddenly - flinging men, women, children and stewards to the ceiling, over seats and into the aisles.
One Lebanese child flew across the aisle into the arms of an Indian passenger in the seat behind me. The kid survived. When the ordeal was over, the captain of QA708 told us that due to injuries to passengers, we would be making an emergency landing.
Apparently, one passenger had suffered cardiac arrest as a result of turbulence.
But there were about a dozen others who were either bleeding or suffering sprains or inflammations as a result of the dramatic events on the flight.
An hour or so after we arrived, we were told that we would have to disembark and move into a hotel until a new flight could be arranged. We were packed into a lounge with plastic chairs between the runway and immigration. And then, the real trauma began.
Airport authorities announced that American citizens would be allowed to move through immigration.
They were sent to an area one floor down. They didn’t need visas.Similar calls were made for those with Schengen visas and Australian passports.
It was a logistical mess.
There were mothers whose toddlers held American passports while they themselves still were on their Pakistani or Lebanese passport.
They were told, without irony, “the child can go through”. There were others married to Americans who were told the partner could travel through, while the paperwork for their inferior passport would have to be arranged. Of course they stayed put.
No doubt the small airport staff were trying to make sense of an emergency situation, and process passengers as quickly as they could.
But in so doing, they turned to nationality - prioritising Americans, Europeans and Australians - over the humanitarian needs of the elders and those who had been hurt, but had the “misfortune” of being citizens from those other, lesser nations.
Soon, the Africans, South Asians and Arab passengers began demanding the whereabouts of Qatar Airways staff.
Why they were not around to assist the process? Unbeknown to the undesirables at the time, the staff had been whisked away through immigration to their hotel.
Such is the parallel universes that we live in, that American citizens gave the aircraft staff a round of applause as they walked through immigration for their stellar work on the plane.
American citizens had known they had been prioritised over the elderly and the injured and everyone else; they had walked past them en route to immigration.
But it didn’t stop them from heading over the island and grabbing a quick dip in the Atlantic and moaning over Facetime about the inconvenience. Most passengers got out of the holding hall at least 10 hours after arriving. Toddlers needed nappies, baby formula, mothers needed to breast-feed.
Instead, everyone was given a ham and cheese sandwich and a 350ml bottle of water.
It is not fair to blame those with superior passports for walking out; it is hard enough to give up privilege in easier times. We all walk past grieving, injured and desperate people every day, in one form or another.
But understanding how the Qatar Airways staff could walk past those lying on the floor is inconceivable.
It has been a week and still we are unaware of the specific details of QA 708.
We were told it was a medical emergency that prompted the landing, but why then was the plane changed? Passengers are entitled to know if their aircraft - that had dropped out of the skies had been damaged, surely. Crucially, why did QA staff abandon their passengers at the airport, in such a mess, without any information? Why were there no systems to take injured passengers to a hospital immediately, considering the ordeal?
Why was the experience of families who called QA from various parts of the world to find out what had happened to the plane, so extraordinarily different? For instance, if you were from Bangladesh, you were spoken to with condescension.
If you were from Canada, you were tolerated. No one received proper answers, but some, again, based on nationality, received some courtesy.
In which moral universe is any of this acceptable?
The flight was dreadful. If you were old and frail, it was horrific. But more than anything else, it was yet another illumination of how disfigured the international system remains. It too, needs to be decolonised. We no longer need to tolerate it.
* Azad Essa is a journalist at Al Jazeera. He is also co-founder of The Daily Vox.
** The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.