A refugee is someone who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted… is outside the country of his/her nationality, and is unable to, or owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country.” — 1951 UN Convention on Refugees.
Joe Bruns
By Joe Bruns — On October 12, Columbus Day in the new world, at least 26 refugees, mostly women and children were lost in the Mediterranean Sea when their boat teeming with several hundred people capsized and sank near Lampedusa, Italy in Maltese waters.
This particular tragedy might have gone unnoticed, except that it occurred during a particularly gruesome two-week period in which more than 390 people perished in similar fashion, leading Malta’s Prime Minister to condemn European inaction on the wave of seafaring refugees as turning the Mediterranean into a “cemetery.”
In the first nine months of 2013, more than 30,000 refugees arrived in just Malta and Italy. Most of these come from Senegal, Somalia, and now, particularly from Syria.
Those who make it to Europe are the relatively lucky ones. More often, refugees andinternally displaced persons (IDP) find themselves in camps with minimal services and scant security. Life for women and children is especially hard. A participatory assessment of the lives of refugee and IDP children in sub-Saharan Africa conducted by the United Nations in 2007 found the following:
- Displaced children are frequently subject to violence both within and outside refugee camps
- Refugee children often experience discrimination by local residents
- Gender-based violence directed at girls, including harassment and rape is widespread
- Forced marriages, often resulting from rape and pregnancy, are common in several camps
Simple chores assigned to women and children, such as gathering firewood or drawing water, can be life threatening.
The United Nations High Commission on Refugees
The international body with primary responsibility for refugees and displaced persons is the UNHCR. Established in 1950, the UNHCR was given a three-year mandate to deal with the problem of displaced Europeans in the wake of World War II. It has, by necessity, extended far beyond its sunset date.
Today there are 40 million refugees, displaced and stateless people world wide, almost half of them children. InSub-Sahara Africa alone there are some 10.4 million IDPs, mostly in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where they live a particularly hellish life in North Kivu around the embattled cities ofGoma and Kamango, as government forces battle the latest rebel group knows as M23.
Worldwide, more than half the refugee/IDPs have come from Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Columbia, Somalia and Uganda. But the conflict creating the greatest volume of new refugees is Syria.
More people have been displaced from Syria than from genocide in Rwanda or ethnic cleansing in the Balkans.” William J. Burns, State Department
Syria – A Human Tragedy
While politicians and international bureaucrats debate the merits of military intervention in Syria the human costs of the civil war mount. Some two million people have fled Syria for Iraq, Lebanon, Turkey and Jordan, The exodus has been compared to previous crises related to Rwanda and the breakup of Yugoslavia. As superbly reported by New York Times reporter Anne Barnard, an additional five million Syrians are internally displaced, forced to seek shelter with relatives, in mosques and vacant buildings, often experiencing food and fuel shortages and still subject to the war itself. As the war continues, the social and economic infrastructure is collapsing in major regions of the country, creating the conditions for yet another failed state.
The combined seven million refugees and IDPs represent fully one-third of the Syrian population.
Much of the American political debate regarding Syria has focused on providing military assistance to the rebels trying to overthrow the Assad regime. The US has been providing humanitarian assistance to Syria and the affected countries– some $1.3 billion over the past two years according to USAID. The need though is enormous and will continue to grow. Also growing is pressure for the Obama administration to leverage its humanitarian aid by channeling it through opposition forces. This would likely be both ineffective and would simply add to the general cynicism in which US aid often held.
Also affected are neighboring countries receiving refugees. Lebanon, a country of only 4.1 million, has 750,000 registered refugees from Syria, and several hundred thousand more who have drifted across the border without registration. In Lebanon, such a large influx has the potential to further upset the delicate ethnic and religious balance, potentially leading to another conflict among Shiite Hezbollah, Sunni and Christians.
The situation in Turkey is also becoming tense. As reported in Al Monitor in July, Turkey was host to about half a million Syrian refugees, about equally split between camps and among the general population, and this number has been growing rapidly.
Not only are the numbers of refugees difficult to deal with, the Syrian refugees are mostly Sunni now living in a region of Turkey that has substantial numbers of Alevis, traditionally allied with the Alawites and supportive of Bashir Assad. Jordan and Iraqare also heavily impacted by the human wave of refugees from Syria.
Syria may be the greatest immediate challenge, but refugees to Indonesia, and fromSomalia and Nigeria all face gruesome challenges. Refugees and IDPs from theDemocratic Republic of Congo are particularly falling victim to rape by both sides of the war.
And even those lucky enough to make their way to Europe often find themselves classified as ineligible for asylum, leaving them to live a life of evasion from the authorities, sleeping in empty cargo containers, and resorting to odd jobs, begging or petty crimes for survival.
For more on the fallout in Europe see the three-part article Hamburg Unrest, from Der Spiegel
Photo credits: AFP/Getty and the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR)
– Joe Bruns (cajunjoe) is a Trail Mix Contributor
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