By Cait Felt
By now, most people have seen the horrifying images of a toddler’s body washed ashore in southern Turkey. Many have read little Aylan’s story—a Kurdish Syrian refugee, his parents forced to make the difficult decision to take an illegal and treacherous boat ride for the few miles between Greece and Turkey, the wreck that drowned all aboard the ship, and the stone-faced police officer who carried his tiny body away from shore hours later. Aylan Kurdi’s father may have been working with smugglers, but his story remains fundamentally unchanged—families are fleeing their homes every day, and face many dangers along the way to freedom from fear.
Little Aylan’s story is tragic, but it is one of thousands just this month. People are being forcibly displaced and fleeing from their homelands in the Middle East and Northern Africa, but no country has suffered more from the recent emigration than Syria. In fact, there has been an estimated 144 percent increase in Syrians fleeing their country this year, which says a lot when 2013’s numbers totaled almost 50,000 people. The major reason for this crisis is ISIL, but battles are being fought on almost every stage in many areas across Syria. Once the refugees have been displaced (either by force or by choice), the real international logistics problem begins. Refugees have been pouring into the European Union by the thousands for months now, and there is a rising tension among European citizens about what to do.
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Turkey has taken in by far the largest amount of refugees from the Syrian conflict, clocking in at over 1.9 million from Syria alone. Turkey was the first responder to take in refugees at the advent of ISIL, having already been a recipient of refugees at the hands of Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad. Turkey’s active participation in humanitarian efforts, along with its constitutionally secular government, has prompted many threats from ISIL spokespeople, and Turkey’s southern military bases were mobilized earlier this year.
Many Middle Eastern citizens of countries such as Turkey, Lebanon, and Egypt cite the lack of help from other majority-Muslim and (in the case of Lebanon and Egypt) Arab countries as a cause of dismay between states. Many Turkish citizens have taken to twitter, for example, to indict countries such as Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE, and Bahrain for being “rich Islamic countries… [with] zero refugee intake.”
Many Europeans have portrayed the sudden influx of refugees as nothing less than a crisis. The latest outrage over immigration has come from Budapest, Hungary, where the trains have all been stopped in order to prevent more Syrian refugees from entering Europe. Refugees in transit via train are refusing to get off, and are in some cases even barricading the train doors in hopes that their travel will be resumed and that they can make it to a country where asylum is possible. Hungary’s Prime Minister issued a statement saying “Please don’t come” to Syrians, illustrating a growing European fear of losing European Christian culture. Many other Europeans cite a lack of financial resources or physical room for the sudden influx of refugees. Since Budapest is currently the largest transit station for refugees coming from the Middle East into the European Union, refugees continue to pour in, while the standstill continues. In Serbia and, more recently, Hungary, refugees are refusing to go to the makeshift refugee camps due to the widespread fear that registering or moving there will prevent any further movement farther into a friendlier European country or possibly even North America.
Germany has, so far, been seen as the most welcoming to the influx of refugees coming to the European Union, based on the sheer number of intake as well as welfare services that it has so far provided. Over 60 percent of the population is in favor of continued mass amnesty, and makeshift refugee camps have been set up. Many people around Europe, and especially in Germany, have pledged to host refugees in their own homes, and some small villages have actually had to stop people from donating food when there was simply too much for the refugees who had access to it to eat. Everything in Germany is not peachy for Syrian refugees, however. Vocal minority groups have lodged protests against them, and a Neo-Nazi group in particular has initiated attacks on refugee homes and camps over the past year.
Pope Francis has recently joined the advocates of migration, urging all Catholics, and particularly European Catholics, to host refugees in their homes and parishes. He stated that his own parish in the Vatican will start by hosting two Syrian families starting Sunday September sixth. If this request is honored across Europe, it could completely change the face of the migrant crisis since this could mean temporary refuge for thousands of displaced people.
Stateside, President Obama has publicly pledged to bring 10,000 Syrian refugees to the United States and host them indefinitely. These are families chosen by the UN High Commissioner for Refugee’s registration list. Most are coming from temporary camps in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon, and many have disabilities or injuries that prevent them from further care in the overcrowded camps.
The Syrian migrant crisis is not going away anytime soon. The United Nations now says that Europe should expect about 200,000 more refugees from the war-torn state in the upcoming weeks. European Union leaders are scrambling to find the resources for refugee care and intake, while leaders in countries like Turkey and Lebanon are adding more people to the strained refugee camps by the day. This unsteady limbo has left the international political stage in complete upheaval recently, and shows no signs of slowing down. If we hope to solve the Syrian crisis, we must first solve the crisis of its people, regardless of what soil they stand on.
Photo Credit: Salon