Syria’s neighbors highlight impasse in refugee response

NEW YORK

The world needs a better strategy to deal with irregular migration, Turkey’s Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu told the UN’s refugee and migrants summit Monday.

Describing Turkey as a country “at the crossroads of irregular migration”, the minister said the international community must try harder on three fronts for any real chance of success.

“First, we need to address the root causes of refugee movements. This is not an option. This is an obligation,” Cavusoglu said.

“We must find a political solution to the Syrian conflict. Otherwise, it will continue to be major source of irregular migration in our part of the world,” he said. “If we do not overcome structural problems of the least developed countries, people will continue to search for a better future abroad,” he added.

Cavusoglu pointed to supporting transit countries, “especially neighboring countries to the conflict regions are disproportionately affected by the flow of immigrants.

“Financial assistance and resettlement are key instruments in this regard. Unfortunately, our own experience shows that it is almost impossible to talk about burden sharing,” he said.

Ankara has spent $12 billion on Syrian refugees, while the world offered only $500 million, he said.

Rounding out his pleas was negative rhetoric, including xenophobia and Islamophobia, that must be stopped. “Politicians, especially in Western Europe, must be more cautious than ever,” Cavusoglu added.

Turkey is one of Syria’s neighbors facing a severe refuge response crisis, hosting nearly 3 million of the 5 million refugees who fled the war-torn country.

Addressing the summit, Lebanon presented to the international community what sounded like a desperate plea for help as the Middle East country of 4 million deals with an “existential challenge” – “trying to support the nearly 1.5 million Syrians within its borders.

“Since the beginning of the crisis in 2011, over one hundred thousand Syrian babies were born in Lebanon and over fifty percent of them were born in the last 18 months,” Lebanese Prime Minister Tammam Salam told the UN refugee summit on the first day of the General Assembly.

“More Syrians are born in Lebanon today than are being resettled in other countries, feeding a perilously destabilizing trend of internal growth in numbers,” he said.

“It is unthinkable that Lebanon could, alone, cope with an existential challenge of such proportion. This cannot continue!” Salam said.

“When, I ask Mr. Secretary-General, when is the world going to do something for Lebanon?”

Queen Rania of Jordan, which hosts nearly 700,000 registered refugees, said her country was working with the international community to “transition from aid and relief toward development and investment”.

She said Syrian refugees were allowed to join the workforce in Jordan through private economic zones, helping support their families while contributing to the Jordanian economic welfare.

The queen also touched on the suffering endured by refugees experiencing violence around the globe, referencing a video of a father who lost three children.

“Most of us can only imagine the pain of a father losing our children,” she said. “But as a global community, we have lost these children too.

“Let us remember that when displaced people ask, where do we go from here, they are asking on behalf of us all.”

Also addressing the summit, Rami Hamdallah, prime minister of the state of Palestine, said his people “reaffirm our empathy and solidarity with refugees and migrants around the world”.

Palestinians constitute nearly a quarter of the world’s refugee population due to the ongoing Israeli occupation on their lands, which has proved one of the most intractable conflicts in contemporary history.