Exile. Even the word itself sounds intimidating. Some people describe it as a living hell while others who have lived it, or still are, find it as the only solution to survive. However, one thing is for sure: Modern day examples of people banished from their own country are all around us.

We know what’s the first name you are thinking: Edward Snowden. The brave IT guy who revealed to the masses that the NSA had access to any information they needed. And you are right, Snowden is one of those people that have been exiled in the modern times but he is not the only one. In fact, he is not the only person to be exiled and definitely not the most important nor the most famous one!

Names like Ernest Hemmingway, Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde, Victor Hugo, Sigmund Freud and Dante are some of them. In fact, Hemmingway wrote “The Sun Also Rises” while staying in Paris on self-imposed exile, Einstein gave the idea of the atomic bomb to the US government who had agreed to offer him hospitality, while Hugo picked up “Les Miserables,” a novel he had abandoned, in Guernsey.

Like it or not, exile is still a fact and it can only be described as a harsh reality that we have to accept in order to fight it. Here are 15 examples of modern cases of people banished from their country. Some names on this list might ring you a bunch of bells while others will just shock you with their background story.

15. The Tiananmen Square Tank Man

His image has inspired millions. The Tank Man, as history has named him, is, in fact, Zhou Fengsuo. On June 4, 1989, when Fengsuo was still a student and a protester, he watched the Chinese military tanks moving into Tiananmen Square. With all hell breaking loose, Fengsuo just stood there in front of the tanks. He was captured, and after four years, the Chinese government just kicked him into exile. Twenty years later, he returned.

Even though two decades had passed, Zhou Fengsuo was still a wanted man. After a visit in Tiananmen Square, he was imprisoned again. After 18 hours of interrogation, he was sent back to the US. This was the last time he would ever visit home.

14. Child Exiles of Afghanistan

There’s no wonder that Afghanistan is one of the cruelest places to live today. All these wars, the internal conflicts, the hunger, the depression. As the situation was getting more and more intense, people chose to leave their homes behind and move to Pakistan for a better future. And this was the exact place where a special category of children was born: the exile children born in Pakistan but feel Afghanistan as their home. Moreover, the Pakistani government wants to deport them while Afghanistan does not want to take them back.

As a result, more and more children under the age of ten find themselves lost in the middle of nowhere, living on the streets, begging for a slice of bread. The cases of children reuniting with their families are pretty rare compared to those who actually end up homeless forever.

13. The Gay Exiles from Gambia

If you happen to be gay and live in Gambia at the same time, please accept our deepest condolences. Gambia, this small nation in Africa, is a living hell for gay people who are beaten, punished and even tortured to death. It comes as no surprise, actually, that Gambian President, Yahua Jammeh has promised to slit the throat of gay Westerner tourists who would visit the country. This is why many gay natives choose to flee.

However, when they cross the border, gay Gambians do not land in a safe zone. They usually end up in Senegal, a country where homosexuality is illegal. Other countries they have to cross include Kenya and Uganda, both dangerous and unwelcome for LGBTQI people. Gambia’s gay exiles are just leaving their country for other places which do not accept them.

12. Son Jung-hun: The Defector of North Korea

In North Korea, just one accusation of stealing $10,000 is enough to get you into a prison camp. Son Jung-hun was too scared to risk and wait to see whether authorities would find him guilty or not, so he drove across the border into China to flee into South Korea. He was officially exiled for life from Kim Jong-un’s land.

Now, Son Jung-hun wants to return even though the tortures defectors go under in North Korea can even lead to death. The reason why Son wants to return, though, is because his life in South Korea was “unliveable,” as he said in an interview. So, given the fact that Kim Jong-un’s dictatorship pays defectors $45,000 if they come back to be used as propaganda tools, Son Jung-un is highly tempted. However, what he officially says is that the reason he wants to go back is that he has to protest against South Korea’s treatment of his fellow refugees.

11. Celebrity Tax Exiles

Okay, not all cases of banishing from a country are about human rights and power abuse since a number of celebrities have decided to move offshore to avoid tax and save thousands.

Phil Collins, for example, claims that the only reason he left Britain was that Labor won the 1997 election but rumour has it he did so to take advantage of Switzerland’s lower tax regime. Lewis Hamilton too. However, this would not be a complete list of British celebrity tax exiles if we did not include some Sirs too. Sir Sean Connery, Michael Caine, and Mick Jagger all banished themselves to save a penny or two. In fact, Rolling Stones’ “Exile on Main St.” is a reference to this move.

10. The 14th Dalai Lama

Born as Tensin Gyatso in Taskter, China, in 1940, he was designated the 14th Dalai Lama. As a political leader of Tibet, in 1951, Dalai Lama was the traditional ruler of the “national autonomous region” that the agreement between China and Tibet stated. However, in reality, China punished religious people of Tibet. Dalai Lama was their number one priority. After he disguised himself as a soldier, he was forced to flee and began a permanent exile in India.

Trying to fight for his home even though he was miles away from it, Dalai Lama established a democratically based shadow Tibetan government. In 1989, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace because he chose to use nonviolence to fight the Chinese domination of Tibet.

9. Syria’s Exiled Academics

Many people do not know that, before the mess that is currently going on in the country, Syria used to be a really developed and high-educated place. In fact, Syria was proudly among the countries with a strong and accessible higher education system prior to the war. Today, however, things are nothing like they used to be. Institutions are now obliged to hire academics who have completed their military service and constant bombings do not help at keeping a schedule.

Among the refugees there are 1,500 to 2,000 professors who are now looking to establish a new career in one of the neighbour countries, not being able to neither go back home nor offer free, unbiased education.

8. Thaksin Shinawatra

Former Prime Minister of Thailand, a telecom billionaire and an exile. This is a brief description for Thaksin Shinawatra, the powerful businessman who was elected in 2001 and 2005. However, a military coup a year after his reelection led to his deposition. The coup, in addition to charges of power abuse, made him flee the country to escape to Dubai.

In 2011, Shinawatra’s sister, Yingluck, came to power and was elected prime minister. However, some years later, it looked like Thaksin Shinawatra was trying to give himself a pardon through his sister’s government. On May 7, 2014, the constitutional court ousted Yingluck. Thirteen days later, the army declared martial law and came to power.

7. Benazir Bhutto

In 1971, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, leader of Pakistan People’s Party, was elected prime minister. In 1977, a military coup overthrew his government and he was hanged. His daughter, Benazir Bhutto, who inherited PPP’s leadership, moved to England in 1984 and became the leader in self-imposed exile of the PPP.

Bhutto won an election in 1993 and she was convicted in 1999 of corruption and sentenced to three years in prison. On October 18, 2007, she returned from exile. Her homecoming rally was hit by a suicide attack which killed 136 people. On December 27, 2007, Benazir Bhutto was assassinated. Pakistan’s Interior Ministry stated that they had evidence that al Qaeda was responsible for her death.

6. Hamid Ismailov: The Nameless Writer of Uzbekistan

In case you didn’t know, Uzbekistan has been dealing with a number of problems over the last thirty years or so. In 1992, Hamid Ismailov decided it was time for him to leave his country until it was a safe place again. It was a controversial collaboration with BBC that had disgruntled the authorities and things had to cool down. Twenty-five years later and Ismailov still lives in exile.

Islam Karimov, former dictator of Uzbekistan, who died just last year, was a man who knew how to abuse power. In 1992, his first priority was to erase Ismailov from history and the Uzbek culture. Today, all his written work is still banned and if someone dares to mention his name in the press can only expect imprisonment and torture. The new generations of Uzbekistan have not even heard his name.

5. The Exiled Catholic Priest

In Switzerland there is a priest named Abba Mussie Zerai who was originally born in Eritrea and has only one mission: give hope to refugees. In the 1990s, Zerai was exiled from Eritrea when it imploded. Eventually, the Vatican accepted him as a priest.

Today, the Eritrean priest receives calls from migrants who find his number written on boats and on the wall of cells. In fact, by working with telecoms companies, Zerai tracks down all those people calling him for help and alerts the authorities. Zerai is not just a man living in exile but a man who offers hope to millions of migrants fleeing wars and repression.

4. Imelda Marcos

Almost everybody is familiar with the story of the former ex-First Lady of the Philippines. Imelda Marcos married her husband, Ferdinand, and was by his side when he came to power in 1965 and turned his country into a dictatorship, abused human rights and, allegedly, laundered money. One of the reasons she became famous for? Her shopping addiction.

After taking billions from the country’s coffers, the family began to lose their hold over the Filipino people. The People Power movement forced Imelda and Ferdinand from office and the couple left the country to settle in Hawaii. In 1991, Marcos returned to the Philippines and was arrested because she was believed to hold lost funds. She was released on bail. Today, Imelda is fighting to reclaim her confiscated jewelry proving that stripes on a tiger are hard to change.

3. The European Humanities University

Yes, the whole university.

In Belarus, things are different. So different, that the national government admits that their “democracy” is quite different from the western concept. Moreover, so different that, in 2003, President Lukashenko’s government exiled an entire university.

The European Humanities University, operating for twenty-five years, has one vision: teach and leave propaganda behind. Critical thinking, though, is not what the Belarusian state wanted from their students. After a failed attempt by the Education Minister of Belarus to remove Anatoly Mikhailov, the founder of EHU, the university shut down. Mikhailov chose to relocate the whole Institute to Vilnius.

However, although the students can study without any worry, they will face a bunch of problems if they ever go back, like some of their schoolmates who were arrested the moment they stepped foot in Belarus.

2. William Bruce Taylor

It was the year 1994. William Bruce Taylor broke into the apartment of his ex-wife, Maxine Clinton, to assault her with a lighter and rape her. In 1995, after being convicted of sexual assault, a native sentencing circle decided to banish him to a remote island on Wapawekka Lake. The plan was for him to chop wood, live in solitude, cook for himself, and think over his crimes.

However, as it turned out, the island where Taylor was banished to was a party island. Taylor was moved to a different island on a lake far more isolated. However, this is not the last case of a regular man being banished from his region. Because there is another story that inspired us to write this piece.

This one:

1. Gordie Bishop

Gordie Bishop, 33, is the most recent case of modern day exiles. With a 27-page-long criminal record (including two counts of assault on police officers), authorities were really familiar with his…unorthodox way of living. When he was informed that his crimes warranted a custodial sentence of more than a couple of years, he decided he wanted banishment.

Immediately, Bishop was moved away from his province and he is now living a life of solitude, refusing to give any interviews, and avoiding exposure. However, police authorities expressed their concerns regarding the ruling. Tom Stamatakis, Canadian Police Association, said: “Making a long-term offender someone else’s problem is not an effective long-term solution.” Is he right? Is he wrong? Only history will show.