A Syrian refugee child sleeps on his father’s arms while waiting at a resting point to board a bus, after arriving on a dinghy from the Turkish coast to the northeastern Greek island of Lesbos
Nearly 60 percent of refugees are living in cities today and there are currently more Syrian refugees in Istanbul than in all the rest of Europe, the head of the International Rescue Committee said Monday.
David Miliband told The Associated Press in an interview Monday that “the iconic image” of a refugee being someone in a camp has changed.
First, he said so many people are fleeing conflict and chaos that there’s no room for them in camps. Equally important, he said, is that most people don’t want to be in refugee camps and when they’re displaced for a long time want to earn a living — even if that means working in the black market.
Miliband gave the example of Istanbul, without citing any figures. The International Rescue Committee said there are currently more Syrian refugees in Istanbul than the 366,000 Syrian refugees it estimates are in the rest of Europe.
Currently, there are 20 million refugees in the world — including 2 million in Turkey — and 40 million people uprooted and displaced in their own countries, which Miliband called “a grisly world record.”
The former British foreign minister said that as president of a leading humanitarian organization helping refugees it’s important to ask whether these numbers are “a trend or a blip.”
“Everything says to me it’s a trend, not least because the global situation is of more people on the move,” Miliband said, pointing to the additional 200 million people seeking “an economic better life as migrants or immigrants.”
Looking at the roots of what he calls the current “refugee and migration crisis,” Miliband first cited “the tumultuous convulsions inside significant parts of the Islamic world.”
He also pointed to the 30 to 40 nations that can’t meet the basic needs of their citizens and contain ethnic, political and religious differences among their people, and “an international political system weaker and more divided than at any time since the end of the Cold War — and arguably weaker than during the Cold War itself.”
Francois Crepeau, the U.N. special investigator on migrant rights, said last Friday that two million refugees from the Middle East should be resettled in Europe over five years, which means 400,000 per year, divided by either the 28 European countries or the 32 countries in the global north.
Miliband said there’s no question that a continent with 500 million people can cope with 400,000 refugees a year, “but it has to be done in a competent way.”
The IRC recently interviewed more than 800 families in and around Izmir, Turkey, 80 percent of them from the war-torn countries of Syria and Iraq, and others fleeing conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It said most were refugees, not economic migrants, hoping to go to Europe. Edith M. Lederer, New York, AP
Slovenia mulls erecting border fence
Slovenia has warned it will tighten border entry for migrants if an EU plan to stem their flow across the Balkans fails. Foreign Minister Karl Erjavec said late Monday that the new measures would include the closure of a number of border check points with Croatia if it keeps on sending large number of migrants to the frontier. EU and Balkan leaders agreed at a weekend summit to stem the massive migrant flow by introducing tighter border controls. Since Oct. 16, when the refugee flow was rerouted to Slovenia after Hungary sealed off its border with Croatia, around 84,000 people have crossed into Slovenia. The small Alpine nation has been struggling to cope with the influx. It is also mulling erecting a border fence.
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