by FRANK JACOBS
Facts are like people. There are so many of them that you’ll always find a few to agree with you. Take Europe’s current refugee crisis: Rather than swaying hearts and minds, the emergency seems merely to have hardened and confirmed previous prejudices and opinions, of whichever stripe.
Reactions to the crisis range from the openly hostile to the warmly hospitable. Both extremes can be fed from the same set of facts. For instance, the current distribution of Syrian refugees.
Syria’s neighbours are bearing the brunt of the refugee crisis, and have done so for a lot longer than the current crisis. Turkey alone hosts around 2 million Syrians. That’s half of the total number of Syrians who fled their country; almost 1 in 10 of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million; and more than any other country.
Lebanon is the temporary home of 1.2 million Syrian refugees, a remarkable feat considering its own citizenry numbers no more than 4.5 million. This means that Syrians now constitute almost a fifth of Lebanon’s population. The number of Syrians in Jordan, a country of 8 million, officially stands at 630,000, but in reality may be much higher. There are even a quarter of a million Syrian refugees in Iraq. How bad must things be before you tell your family: “Okay, enough with all the violence. Pack your bags; we’re moving to Baghdad.”?
Shouldn’t European countries, therefore, be more generous towards Syrians requesting asylum? A counterargument from the same dataset: What are other Arab countries doing for Syria? As confirmed by Amnesty International, the number of resettlement places offered to Syrian refugees by Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and Bahrain is zero. How about they step up?
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