World refugee day: With millions displaced, now is the time for solidarity

United Nations agencies marked World Refugee Day on Sunday in Syria, a country from which millions have fled a five-year civil war. Some refugees from other countries have decided to stay in Syria despite the devastating conflict.

“Syria has been a host to refugees for many, many decades,” said Sajjad Malik, the UN refugee agency’s chief in Damascus.

“If you look at Syria’s history it has always been open borders where refugees come and stay inside Syria,” he told AFP. “It’s unfortunate that the civil war, the conflict here, has resulted in Syrians who have left and become refugees in a number of countries around the world.”

The UN is organising activities in the country involving Syrians and refugees to “raise awareness” and emphasise the message that refugees are normal people who have been forced to flee. One of the activities was a football match on Sunday afternoon between refugees living locally and UN staff living in Syria, most of them working for the refugee agency, UNHCR.

The match ended as a 5-5 draw, and the UN team declared the refugees the winners. Hudhaifa, a 23-year-old from Sudan’s Darfur region who studies economics at the University of Damascus and has lived with his family in Syria since 1998, said “my family decided to seek refuge in Syria because of how easy the asylum process was.”

“I can’t go back to my country, which has been at war for years, and despite the war in Syria my situation here is better than it would be there.”

Hamzah Sheikh Mohammad, 22, who is Somali but grew up in Syria, doesn’t see a future outside the country. “Syria has become my country and I can’t possibly leave it.

“Everyone has their own circumstances that push them to leave, but my presence here is a guarantee of my future,” he said.

Syria faces the worst humanitarian crisis in the world since World War II, forcing 5.6 million to flee to other areas within the country and a further 4.8 million to seek asylum outside.

The war-ravaged country still hosts 31,400 refugees from other countries, mostly Iraq, according to UNHCR figures.

Climate of ‘Xenophobia’ in Europe

The UN’s refugee chief recently spoke of a worrying “climate of xenophobia” that has taken hold in Europe as the continent struggles with the biggest influx of migrants since World War II.

UN High Commissioner for Refugees Filippo Grandi said European leaders needed to do more to coordinate migration policies and to combat negative stereotypes about refugees.

“Refugees… don’t bring danger to us, they flee from dangerous places,” said Grandi, who took office in January.

National leaders need to better explain that immigration “in fact contributes to the development of societies,” he said.

“Those who do the opposite, who stir up public opinion against refugees and migrants, have a responsibility in creating a climate of xenophobia that is very worrying in today’s Europe,” he said.

“It provides a negative example to countries further away.”

Protracted conflicts — in particular Syria’s five-year civil war — have prompted an unprecedented wave of migration to the continent, with a record 1.25 million Syrian, Iraqi, Afghan and other migrants entering Europe since January 2015.

The influx has sparked a backlash in some countries, including in Austria where the anti-immigration Freedom Party nearly won the presidency last month and in Hungary where authorities have sealed the border with Serbia with razor wire and made illegal border crossing a criminal offence punishable by jail.

Grandi said it was unfortunate that decisions taken last year by the European Union to better handle the influx “were not implemented”.

It was, he said, “a missed opportunity” because “each country made decisions separately. Borders closed.”

He called for “a more collective collegial system of managing refugee flows based on solidarity and burden-sharing between the states, as opposed to trying to do it by themselves with the result that only some countries receive a large number of refugees and others close the borders.”

Focus on Afghanistan

Grandi also called for greater efforts to help those displaced by conflict within their own countries.

“Two-thirds of the world’s displaced are displaced internally,” he said. “We have millions of them in Afghanistan, in Syria, in Iraq, in Yemen… they are the most difficult to reach because they are usually in the midst of wars therefore it’s dangerous to bring assistance.”

Grandi, an Italian diplomat long active in UN humanitarian work, was due in Afghanistan on Monday to mark World Refugee Day. He said he wanted to use his first year in office to highlight the plight of that country’s refugees.

“The Afghan refugee crisis has been unfortunately forgotten repeatedly in its history,” he said. It “only gets remembered when something big happens like September 11 and now the arrival of Afghans in Europe among hundred of thousands others.”

The root cause is instability in Afghanistan, he said, adding: “That’s why my first message here is let’s make peace in Afghanistan.”

After meeting with Iranian officials including Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif, Grandi praised Tehran’s efforts to assist Afghan refugees. Iran hosts more than three million immigrants from neighbouring Afghanistan, a million of them legally.

“The space given to the refugees for assistance, to give them opportunities and protection, is considerable” he said, He pointed to a decree from Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei last year allowing all Afghan children to be allowed into schools in the Islamic republic.

“There are things that have been done here in Iran that are truly examples for other countries, like giving access for children to the school system,” Grandi said. It was “one of the most important gestures that any country has expressed for refugees anywhere in the world in the past few years.”

with inputs from agencies