LOOK around your home. Just imagine if, very probably at catastrophically short notice, you had to abandon it, gather up a few treasured belongings, whatever cash you had around, together with your precious identity documents and hurry away with all your family, locking the door behind you and wondering when, if ever, you would see your home again.
Imagine that either on foot, or in a vehicle, you say goodbye to your familiar neighborhood, and perhaps join your neighbors in a mass evacuation of your town. Imagine the worry about having enough gas for the long automobile journey, enough food for the kids. Imagine indeed every sort of worry that would face you and your family, as you embark upon an entirely unplanned journey, and a journey moreover, of which you have no idea where it will end.
And the reason you will be leaving your secure and happy life behind you, will be fear. Fear indeed bordering on terror, because closing in on your town, on your home and your family, is a malign and vengeful enemy, who may, like the Bosnian Serbs at Srebrenica, promise you that everything will be alright, there is no need to worry, no need at all. But you will know better. You will have heard the rumors of massacres. Even though you want to believe such assurances, you are not prepared to risk your own life and that of your family. So you run. You flee. You will be hoping against hope that you will escape the danger and find a safe refuge, somewhere, perhaps far away, where you can hole up and wait until the troubles blow over, wait until you can return home, in the hope that you still have a home to go back to.
This is the story that, according to a report just published by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, worldwide, could have been told no less than 7.6 million times by that astonishing number of refugees during last year alone. UNHCR boss Antonio Guterres defined the tragedy vividly when he explained that throughout 2012, every 4.7 seconds, roughly the time between human blinks, another person became displaced.
Put this terrible statistic together with how you imagined you yourself would cope with having your entire life uprooted, as you fled with your family from imminent danger, and suddenly the figure of 7.6 million refugees in a single year, begins to fall into perspective.
And behind this tragic tidal wave of frightened people lurk other horrors — how refugees are robbed of their possessions, held to ransom, cheated, abused, enslaved before, if they are lucky, they find refuge in an overcrowded tented UN refugee camp, where boredom, frustration and sheer humiliation impose terrible extra burden on those who have abandon their homelands in order to survive.
The UNHCR report also points out that 55 percent of the refugees last year came from just five states, Afghanistan, Somalia, Iraq, Sudan and Syria. These are all Muslim countries. And for one tortured land, the figures have only gotten a whole lot worse in the first six months of this year. The UN reckons that an additional one million people have already fled Syria in 2013 and if the trend continues, by the year end a further two million will have escaped the conflict, bringing the total of refugees outside of Syria’s borders to perhaps four million, with a further two million, fled from their homes in search of shelter inside its borders.
The figures are truly daunting and underline the criminality of the Assad regime and its supporters in Moscow and Tehran, as well as the Hezbollah fighters from southern Lebanon, who are now openly engaged in the bloody but forlorn attempt to keep the dictatorship in power.
There have been huge efforts throughout the Arab world, not least here in the Kingdom, to sustain and support the refugees in their exile and despair. The understandable temptation to focus on a rapid resolution of the Syrian savagery must not however be allowed to distract our hearts and minds from the fate of the luckless people who have fled the fighting. Their needs and their desperation are very real. They need help, not only at this moment while they shelter from the conflict, but also when the fighting is over and they return to rebuild their shattered lives.
Those who stayed and fought and suffered will of course have first claim on the world’s attention, but rebuilding Syria must include everyone, including those who upped and left. These people were not cowards. They did what they thought was best for their families. If we found ourselves facing their terrors, how many of us would behave any differently?
Editorial: The plight of being a refugee
