Today, after 5 years of struggle, more than half of Syria's population is displaced. The Syrian refugee catastrophe is not the result of a natural disaster, but rather the outcome of systematic policies aimed at suppressing a popular uprising, the inaction of world powers and inability of the international community to respond to the largest humanitarian catastrophe of our generation.
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"has become the biggest humanitarian
emergency of our era, yet the world is
failing to meet the needs of refugees
and the countries hosting them.”
- António Guterres, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees
August 2014 http://www.unhcr.org/53ff76c99.html
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This is not a natural disaster.
This catastrophe is
manmade.
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45+years ofAssad
family rule
• absolute power
• sectarian, regional &
business networks
• police state
• utter brutality, exemplified by
Hama ’82 massacre
• no independent civil society
• hand-off from father to son
in 2000
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"… accepting 25,000 Syrian refugees
does right by both the safety of
Canadians and by the values that define
us as a nation."
http://bit.ly/1ZV3kdj
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Syrian refugees
admitted to the US
since 2011
3,054
military aged males who
are unattached to
families
2%
Source: U.S. State Department Refugee Processing Center Custom Report: http://bit.ly/1LoVa3p http://bzfd.it/1ZV15qv
However, in the US…
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Last September, due to public pressure Obama
increased the quota to 10k Syrians in 2016 (out of 85k)
Photo: sarabiany.com
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“Ten thousand is not even close to
being commensurate with the massive
scale of the Syrian refugee crisis, nor in
line with this country’s historic global
leadership in refugee resettlement"
David Miliband, president and CEO
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One of the goals of the ISIS Paris
attacks was to provide cover for a
bigoted response in Europe & the
US towards vulnerable
populations fleeing both the
regime & ISIS.
A fake Syrian passport was found
lying nearby, left by the attackers.
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Bush suggested a religious test for Syrian
refugees to ensure that Muslims are kept out
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Even when arriving in the US, life is difficult.
resettlement support
assimilation
language
commuting
schools
work
daily supplies
social network
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Where are we today?
"We will not allow our
assistance to be
instrumentalized for a mass
expulsion operation, and we
refuse to be part of a system
that has no regard for the
humanitarian or protection
needs of asylum seekers and
migrants”
MSF on EU Plan
Photo by Alexander Koerner/Getty Images
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Where are we today?
The US is lagging well behind the goal to
accept 10,000 Syrian refugees by end of
fiscal year October, and has only
accepted ~1,200 in the past 6 months
Photo by Kevin Lamarque/Reutershttp://bit.ly/1SvAef5
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“a whole generation is growing up in the
camps of exile – these children who’ve lost a
father to shelling, a friend’s brother to bullets,
a sister’s husband to torture. When they grow
up and realize that life is more than a
refugee camp, that it isn’t natural to lose
everything to tyranny … this generation will
bear a culture of revenge and anger, and a
permanent sense of injustice.”
- Activist Aziz Asaad, Guardian
