Sharing the refugee burden

The civil war in Syria is now in its sixth year and almost five million Syrians have fled the conflict. The majority of them are to be found in Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan and Iraq with significant numbers also in Greece. Of the host countries, Jordan — where refugees make up 10 per cent of the population — is close to what has been described as “breaking point”. Lebanon has one-in-five of its population currently flagged as a refugee. Its infrastructure is weak and services far from equal to the burden. This unhappy state of affairs is highlighted by a new report from the British charity OXFAM, which says that wealthy countries have only resettled a tiny number of the five million who have fled Syria, and the raw numbers bear out the OXFAM claim.

The report urges wealthy nations to step up to the plate and “do their share” — something which appears to be the most distant of possibilities. It asks the wealthy countries to resettle 10 per cent of the total by the end of this year. The rich countries have pledged a miserly 130,000 resettlement places and thus far, and for all the rumpus about ‘floods of migrants’ being expressed in some quarters, only about 67,100 or 1.39 per cent of the total have reached their final, primarily EU, destinations since 2013. There is to be yet another conference on Syrian refugees in Geneva on March 30, this time sponsored by the UN. Governments will be urged to increase their pledges of places, but with almost a million trying to cross the Mediterranean in the last year alone — 7,500 have died trying to make the crossing since 2014 — borders are rapidly closing. It would appear that the rest of the world is suffering from a dose of compassion fatigue when it comes to the plight of the Syrians. Wealthy nations are increasingly unwilling to share the burden for a complex range of reasons. Burgeoning far-right nationalism, economic and security concerns with the security issue very high on the anxiety agenda — and thus the burden falls disproportionately on those least equipped to carry it. Expect no early change.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 31^st,  2016.

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