By Jeff Crisp Humanitarian organizations have an unfortunate addiction to the word 'unprecedented'. Whenever a new crisis ...
By Jeff Crisp
Humanitarian organizations have an unfortunate
addiction to the word 'unprecedented'. Whenever a new crisis erupts and large
numbers of people are forced to abandon their country, the major aid agencies
will inevitably launch fund-raising appeals, saying “please help us to respond
to this unprecedented emergency.”
While the word ‘unprecedented’ has become overused
and thereby devalued, we should have little hesitation in using it in relation
to the Syrian refugee crisis, which is unprecedented – or at least unusual – in
a number of ways.
SCALE, SPEED AND SCOPE
First, the scale of Syrian displacement is exceptional.
More than seven million people have been uprooted within the country, while
some four million have fled to neighbouring and nearby states. Syrians now
constitute the second largest refugee population in the world, after the
Palestinians.
Second, the speed of the Syrian exodus has been
astonishing. In the first year of the armed conflict in Syria, 2011-12, the
movement of people out of the country was very modest in size. But that trickle
became a mass exodus as the civil war intensified, and as civilian populations
found themselves in the line of fire. In one 12-month period, the number of
Syrian refugees in Lebanon rocketed from just 130,000 to over one million.
Third, the Syrian refugee emergency is characterized
by its wide geographic scope. During the past three years, Syrians have been
fleeing in all directions, with the majority of them going to nearby countries
such as Lebanon, Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt. But that movement has now
spread to North Africa and the Mediterranean, to the Balkans, southern Europe
and Scandinavia.
Fourth, the emergency is unusual in terms of the
settlement pattern of the exiled Syrians. There is still a tendency to
associate the word ‘refugee’ with sprawling tented camps, where basic needs
such as shelter, food, are provided by an array of aid agencies. But that is
not the case for the vast majority of Syrians. In Egypt and Lebanon, no refugee
camps have been established, although the latter country has witnessed the
emergence of ‘informal settlements’, ramshackle concentrations of refugees
which have all of the disadvantages of organized camps and none of the
advantages. In Jordan, over 80 per cent of the refugees are living outside of
camps in urban and rural locations.
A fifth important characteristic of the Syrian
refugee emergency has been the scale of the response to it. The latest UN
appeal for Syrian refugees amounts to over $4 billion, the largest in
humanitarian history. Well over 100 different agencies are involved in the
operation. Governments in the region, especially Turkey, have spent billions of
additional dollars in their response to the emergency.
Sixth, the Syrian refugee crisis is unusual in terms
of the number of other major emergencies that have erupted at the same time,
including those in Iraq, South Sudan, the Central African Republic, Ukraine,
Yemen, the typhoon in Philippines, the Ebola crisis in West Africa and the
earthquake in Nepal. At the same time, longstanding refugee situations such as
those involving Afghans, Somalis and Sudanese have persisted. As many aid
agencies have pointed out, the whole humanitarian system is now under very serious
– perhaps even unprecedented – pressure.
IMPACT ON HOST COMMUNITIES
A final characteristic of the Syrian refugee
situation concerns the impact of the refugee influx on host countries and
communities. This is not a new issue. For decades, countries such as Kenya,
Pakistan and Bangladesh have drawn attention to the heavy costs they incur in
hosting significant numbers of refugees, not only financially, but also in
terms of the refugee impact on their economy, environment, infrastructure and
security.
Such issues are of particular concern in relation to
the Syrian refugee emergency, especially in Lebanon, where refugees now
constitute 25 per cent of the population. According to the World Bank, the
Syrian refugee influx and armed conflict are progressively reducing the
country’s Gross Domestic Product. Government revenue collection has slumped
while state expenditure has increased, due to the massive new surge in demand
for services. Schools and health facilities are overcrowded. The quality of
water, sanitation and waste disposal services has deteriorated. Unemployment
and consumer prices have both risen.
To makes the situation worse, the Syrian refugee
emergency show no sign of coming to an end. During a visit to the region in
2012, many refugees said they could survive for a while by supplementing their
assistance they by making use of their savings and borrowing money, pending the
time when they could return to their homes.
On more recent visits, it has become clear that the
majority of refugees have depleted whatever resources they had, have gone
heavily into debt, that they have to resort to negative coping mechanisms and
see no early prospect of going back to Syria. Hence the decision of growing
numbers of Syrians to make their way to Europe.
PROTECTION PROBLEMS IN PERSPECTIVE
Confronted with this scenario, many analysts have
reached some very gloomy conclusions about the Syrian refugee situation.
According to an independent review recently published by UNHCR, “after three
years of humanitarian response to the refugee crisis, the situation has reached
a critical phase. Refugee vulnerability is increasing. Humanitarian assistance
is not sustainable at the current level. There are serious and growing
protection concerns.”
There is a wealth of evidence to support that last
remark. States in the region are periodically imposing border closures and
other forms of control that make it more difficult for Syrians to seek and find
asylum in other states. The frequency with which Syrians are detained and
deported appears to be on the rise. Women and girls are at growing risk of
gender based violence.
Children more generally – and in Jordan and Lebanon
they constitute just over half of the refugee population – are being taken out
of school so that they can work and contribute to the family income. Even so,
the refugees are struggling to survive. Assistance levels are declining because
of a shortage of funds, with the result that two out of every three Syrians in
Jordan are now living below the official poverty line.
These are all serious protection problems, but they
have to be considered in a broader historical and geographical perspective. Let
us recall what has happened in some other refugee emergencies during the past
25 years.
In 1991, Turkey deployed its armed forces along its
mountainous border with Iraq, in order to prevent an influx of Kurdish
refugees. Hundreds died as a result. In 1996, the Tanzanian military rounded up
half a million Rwandan refugees and forced them to go back to their country of
origin.
In 2008 and again this year, a spate of violent
attacks took place in South Africa killing, injuring and displacing refugees
who had made a home in that country. During the past 18 months, the Kenyan
authorities have tried to force refugees out of the capital city of Nairobi,
insisting that they be confined to camps in the remote north-east of the
country. At the same time, the residents of those camps have come under growing
pressure to return to Somalia, despite the continuing armed conflict and
drought in that country.
Protection crises of this type have not occurred in
the countries neighbouring Syria. Borders have never been completely closed.
Large-scale refugee expulsions have not occurred. Syrians have generally been
allowed to choose their place of residence. And despite many predictions to the
contrary, large-scale violence between the refugees and their local hosts has
not erupted.
EXPLAINING AND MAINTAINING REGIONAL GENEROSITY
This scenario raises two questions. First, why has
the region’s response to the Syrian refugee emergency been so generous? And
second, what can be done to ensure that such generosity is sustained in the
months and years to come?
With respect to the first of those questions, it is
difficult to ascribe the willingness of Syria’s neighbours to host such large
numbers of refugees in terms of their legal obligations, as they are not
signatories to the 1951 Refugee Convention. Indeed, as many commentators have suggested,
the region’s difficult experience with the Palestinians might have led them to
exclude another large and potentially long-term refugee population.
Other variables would seem to be at play. The
absorption of such a large refugee population is evidently linked to the fact
that Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq are middle-income countries, with a
greater capacity to host refugees than many states in Africa and Asia. It is
connected with the strong cultural, linguistic and ethnic affinities that the
refugees share with their hosts. And it is because the western powers, alarmed
by the evolving geopolitics of the region, have been prepared to make enormous
amounts of humanitarian assistance available to the refugees, and to a lesser
extent the local population.
With respect to the question of sustaining the
region’s generosity towards the Syrian refugees, there are three principle ways
forward.
First and most obviously, there is a need for the
international community, to make a far more robust effort to bring the Syrian
conflict to an end. This might seem to be a forlorn hope, given the failure of
Special Envoys such as Kofi Annan and Lakhdar Brahimi to make any progress in
the establishment of a peace process. But perhaps the situation is changing.
As Richard Gowan has pointed out, “the world is
finally waking up to the fact that the international humanitarian system is
falling apart.” “UN officials,” he continues, “privately admit that the gap
between aid requirements and available funds may now be too big to bridge.”
But money, he says, is not the real problem. “The
chaos in the humanitarian system is just a symptom of a far bigger political
crisis affecting the multilateral system: the decline of the post-Cold War
emphasis on conflict-prevention and conflict-resolution as common international
concerns.”
With growing numbers of Syrians now making their way
to Europe, adding to a Mediterranean refugee and migration crisis that has
completely confounded the continent, could it be that the EU and its allies
will finally recognize the need for more determined conflict resolution
efforts?
Second, it has become increasingly clear that even a
fully funded emergency operation would not meet the longer-term needs of the
refugees and their hosts. While continued humanitarian assistance is essential,
steps must also be taken to provide Syria’s neighbours with economic support
and developmental aid.
More specifically, the international community must
help to create new job and livelihoods opportunities throughout the region,
thereby allowing the refugees to support themselves and live in harmony with
local communities. So far, the world’s financial institutions, banks,
development actors, donor states and private sector companies have not pursued
these objectives with sufficient vigour.
Finally, if the region’s generosity is to be
maintained, then more prosperous parts of the world must set a far better
example with respect to the way that they respond to the refugee issue.
At a time when countries in the Middle East have
given refuge to four million Syrians, it is very disappointing to see that
countries such as the UK and USA have failed to share a small proportion of
that burden by establishing refugee resettlement programmes. Australia has set
an even worse example by subjecting refugees to long-term detention, by
transferring its unwanted refugees to developing countries and by paying human
smugglers to turn back their boats.
Unless the Syrian refugee emergency is treated as a
truly global responsibility, we cannot expect hard-pressed countries in the
region to maintain the generosity they have demonstrated since the crisis
erupted.
This article was originally
published on OpenDemocracy under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial
4.0 International licence.
About the author:
Jeff Crisp,
Research Associate and Honorary Advisor at the Refugee Studies Centre, Policy
Advisor to Refugees International and former head of policy at UNHCR
