National Post View: We have been too willing to think refugees as a Middle East crisis: It is a global crisis
National Post View | September 4, 2015 | Last Updated: Sep 4 6:15 AM ET
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Tima Kurdi, the aunt of two Syrian boys who drowned off Turkey, speaks to the media at her home in Coquitlam, B.C., Thursday, Sept. 3, 2015. Alan, Ghalib, and their mother Rehanna died as they tried to reach Europe from Syria.
You can’t unsee the now famous photo of Alan Kurdi, a three-year-old boy from Syria. His family, driven from their homes by the civil war in that country, first took shelter in Turkey, then fled to Greece on a boat arranged by a human smuggler. The boat capsized, drowning Alan, his five-year-old brother and their mother. The heartbreaking photograph of him, face down on a Turkish beach, quickly went global.
Alan is not the first refugee to die in the Mediterranean this year; an estimated 2,500 others have already been lost. He’s certainly not the first victim of Syria’s civil war — the death toll in that four-year-old conflict is nearing a quarter-million. But his death is arguably the first to register in Canada, first with the worldwide impact of the photo, and then, more explosively, on Thursday, after the news broke that his family had applied for refugee status in Canada, but had been rejected.
That, as it emerged, wasn’t true — the application, as both the boy’s aunt and Citizenship and Immigration later confirmed, had been filed on behalf another, closely related family — but it set off a firestorm, especially online, where Alexander was accused, in effect, of having personally killed the child. Opposition response was more divided: while Liberal Leader Justin Trudeau slammed Alexander for only finding compassion halfway through an election, NDP Leader Thomas Mulcair opined, correctly, that it was too soon to fix blame.
Even so, the narrative for Thursday was set. The opposition parties jostled to be the loudest to denounce the government for its inaction, while boasting of how much more each would do to help Syrian refugees. Trudeau repeated a Liberal pledge to accept 25,000 over the next three years. Mulcair committed the NDP to an additional 10,000 this year, with more to come later, and said the NDP would remove limits on how many could be sponsored privately. Conservative Leader Stephen Harper noted that Canada is already in the process of accepting 20,000 over the next four years.
We have all been too willing, these last four years, to think of this as essentially a Middle East crisis; then, as the number of refugees crossing the Mediterranean swelled, as a European crisis. It is not — it is a global crisis.
You’d never know, in the welter of these competing plans and pledges, that all of the parties were promising more or less the same thing: some may do a little more, a little faster, but no one is doing “nothing,” nor is any party proposing to admit vastly more refugees than at present. That does not absolve the government of criticism, however, on its handling of the gravest humanitarian disaster of our time. While its future pledges are admirable, it has been too slow to act until now: as of July, just over 1,000 Syrian refugees had been admitted. We can and should do more.
We have all been too willing, these last four years, to think of this as essentially a Middle East crisis; then, as the number of refugees crossing the Mediterranean swelled, as a European crisis. It is not — it is a global crisis. The scale of the refugee emergency, not only in Syria but across North Africa and the Middle East, is such as to implicate the whole world: every nation has an obligation to do its part. We’ll leave the exact numbers to the experts, but we should commit to admitting as many refugees as can be reliably screened for security concerns and resettled.
But that, alas, is only part of the solution. To accept refugees, in whatever number, is merely to treat the symptom. The sickness is the violence and warfare tearing the Middle East apart. If we are truly to come to the aid of the millions of refugees forced to flee their homes and native lands, we must stop the people who made them refugees in the first place: the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), on the one hand, and the Syrian dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, on the other.
We can’t bomb our way out of this mess, but Harper was right to say there is no moral response to the crisis that does not involve protecting vulnerable populations from the sorts of barbarous attacks of which both Assad and ISIL have shown themselves capable. And there is no long-term resolution of the region’s woes that does not involve first containing, and ultimately defeating, ISIL. On both fronts, that requires a military response, of the kind in which Canada is currently engaged.
The opposition demands that we accept more refugees, while denying the necessity of military action (or at least, of Canadian involvement in it). The government emphasizes the latter over the former. But if we are truly to do our part to confront this crisis, we are surely obliged to do both.
National Post
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But that, alas, is only part of the solution. To accept refugees, in whatever number, is merely to treat the symptom. The sickness is the violence and warfare tearing the Middle East apart. If we are truly to come to the aid of the millions of refugees forced to flee their homes and native lands, we must stop the people who made them refugees in the first place: the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), on the one hand, and the Syrian dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, on the other.
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