Refugiados (Continuación)

The only thing heard nowadays about the majority of the Palestinian people – those made refugees in the Nakba of 1948 – is that they must consider themselves and their fate entirely forfeited. Surrendering their right to return to the place they were expelled from – the most basic right every refugee has under international law – is apparently a given. It is on every leader's lips, the key component of "the compromise" required in the leaked details of John Kerry's "framework" for peace; a commonplace at every western diplomatic closed-door roundtable, which includes the quiet complicity of every Arab regime.…  Seguir leyendo »

This past weekend marked the third anniversary of the Syrian uprising against President Bashar al-Assad — and the outlook is increasingly grim.

Peace talks last month in Geneva have left future negotiations uncertain. Syria has failed to meet benchmarks for eliminating chemical weapons and will likely miss a June 30 deadline to destroy its entire arsenal. Violence is intensifying between the regime and the rebels.

Through all this, Washington has been intensely focused on Syria’s internal fault lines. But with hundreds of thousands of refugees flooding into Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq, the crisis has swelled far beyond Syria’s borders. It is imperative, then, to start tackling the Syrian spillover now before the situation becomes even worse — and Jordan is the best place to start.…  Seguir leyendo »

Cuando se acerca el tercer aniversario de la guerra civil en Siria, hay una carrera contra el reloj para ejecutar un innovador proyecto educativo en pro de las víctimas más afectadas por el conflicto: centenares de miles de niños refugiados.

Resulta escandaloso que tres millones de niños sirios estén ahora desplazados. Más de un millón de ellos han huido de Siria y están empantanados en campamentos de los países vecinos, en particular el Líbano, Jordania y Turquía. Esos niños están sufriendo ahora un tercer invierno lejos de sus hogares, escuelas y amigos. Muchos de ellos están separados de sus familias y otros millares engrosan todos los días las filas de las personas desplazadas en lo que está llegando a ser la mayor catástrofe en materia de asuntos humanitarios de nuestro tiempo.…  Seguir leyendo »

Six years ago, I fled to Israel from my native Eritrea, fearing for my life at home. Two weeks ago, after waiting for six years for Israel to review my application for refugee status — something it has repeatedly refused to do — I joined thousands of other Africans in a strike to force the government to recognize our basic human rights.

I am not in Israel on a whim. I had no choice but to leave Eritrea, where arrest, forced labor and indefinite military conscription are facts of daily life. In 2008, after four years in the military — which often contracted me out to private companies as an unpaid construction worker — I asked when I would be discharged.…  Seguir leyendo »

Todos los elementos parecen haberse conjurado contra los refugiados sirios. Oriente Próximo está viviendo el invierno más riguroso que se recuerda desde hace más de un siglo con un temporal que ha azotado Siria y los países vecinos con especial crudeza. Las bajas temperaturas están causando estragos en los precarios campamentos donde se hacinan 2.350.000 personas.

El agravamiento de la guerra civil siria ha intensificado la catástrofe humanitaria. Durante el pasado año, una media de 141.000 sirios abandonaron su país cada mes. En total suman 1,7 millones: un 340% más que en 2012. Cada uno arrastra su propia tragedia: bombardeos, extorsiones, torturas, violaciones, desolación y muerte.…  Seguir leyendo »

The world has devoted a great deal of diplomatic energy to securing Syria's chemical weapons. It has yet to do the same for securing Syria's children.

Their future is as important for international security and stability, even if the consequences of inaction will take far longer to be seen and felt.

The war in Syria between the government of Bashar al-Assad and forces opposed to him has ground on for more than two years and claims new victims each day. More than 100,000 have been killed. Starvation has become a gruesome reality, with a religious leader now saying it is OK to eat cats and dogs given the lack of much of anything else.…  Seguir leyendo »

Después de pasar tan sólo tres días con refugiados y trabajadores encargados de prestar la ayuda humanitaria en el Líbano y Turquía, el carácter apocalíptico de la crisis de Siria resulta más que evidente: más de 100.000 muertes, nueve millones de personas desplazadas, dos millones de niños sin poder ir a la escuela, enfermedades como las poliomielitis que reaparecen y los países vecinos que se esfuerzan para afrontar las oleadas de refugiados.

Infinidad de historias desgarradoras de maridos, esposas, hermanos e hijos perdidos, por no hablar de los hogares y los medios de vida destruidos, aportan una prueba angustiosa de cómo ha llegado la guerra civil de Siria a ser un conflicto regional (como lo indica el bombardeo de la embajada del Irán en Beirut).…  Seguir leyendo »

I was in Tripoli to draw, documenting the Syrian refugee crisis; that was what I was doing when I met Samar. She was queuing for food vouchers, along with fellow Syrian refugees, at the office of a local Sunni leader. Her young son, Hamad Noor, played at her feet. Like most refugee children, he wasn’t going to school.

“If they gave me a weapon, I’d fight in Syria,” Samar told me through an interpreter. She went on to describe how she came to be in this bullet-scarred street in Tripoli.

Samar’s husband worked at a state-owned rice corporation in Aleppo, Syria.…  Seguir leyendo »

El impacto de las muertes de inmigrantes en el Mediterráneo —una vez más—, se suma al también masivo crecimiento de refugiados en los países de la región seguramente más convulsa del planeta. Uno de esos países es Jordania, que soporta una carga migratoria que está a años luz de distancia de aquella de la que se quejan los Estados del sur de Europa. Allí, en Jordania, está Zaatari.

Zaatari es un campo de refugiados cerca de la frontera con Siria. Tuvo que ser abierto por el Gobierno jordano en mayo del año pasado ante la avalancha de decenas de miles de personas que huían de una guerra que ya se ha llevado por delante 100.000 seres humanos.…  Seguir leyendo »

The lull in the chemical weapons crisis offers a chance to divert attention to the huge flow of refugees leaving Syria and rethink some misguided assumptions about their future.

About one-tenth of Syria’s 22 million residents have fled across an international border, mostly to neighboring Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey. Unable to cope, their governments are restricting entry, prompting international concern about the Syrians’ plight. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Antonio Guterres, suggests that his agency (as the Guardian paraphrases him) “look to resettle tens of thousands of Syrian refugees in countries better able to afford to host them,” recalling the post-2003 Iraqi-resettlement program when 100,000 Iraqis resettled in the West.…  Seguir leyendo »

Refugees need mattresses more than missiles

While the nation’s attention is focused on the debate over whether to lob cruise missiles into Syria, millions of Syrians have abandoned their homes with little but the clothes on their back, fleeing the violence and chaos engulfing their communities.

They set out on a dangerous trek to reach neighboring countries but sometimes are stuck inside Syria because borders are closed to them. Thousands are trapped in appalling conditions, living in tents or under tarps, lacking food, medical supplies and sanitation. Little aid reaches them.

Instead of wasting hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of dollars raining missiles and misery on the Syrian people, America should put its resources into helping these desperate souls.…  Seguir leyendo »

Syria reached a grim milestone this week when the UN announced that 2 million people have fled the country to escape the fighting. That's more than the combined population of Manchester and Birmingham. This harrowing statistic has got to serve as a wake-up call to those who haven't yet understood the scale of this crisis and the speed at which it's developing. This is the worst humanitarian catastrophe of the 21st century – and the number of refugees will only mount as long as Bashar al-Assad continues to preside over this man-made disaster.

Inside Syria it is civilians who are bearing the brunt of the conflict that has now raged for over two years.…  Seguir leyendo »

Pictures of dead children, laid out in lines, on the floor have shocked the world.

Almost simultaneously, the news came that the number of children fleeing the country had reached one million in what has become the worse refugee crisis in two decades.

I recently met some of those children in the border between Lebanon and Syria. Many arrive by foot carrying only a bundle of clothes after being forced to flee in the cover of darkness to avoid sniper fire and shelling. They are hungry, exhausted and have harrowing stories to tell.

A little girl told me how she saw her mother being killed in front of her.…  Seguir leyendo »

The UNHCR has announced that we have reached the one millionth Syrian child refugee mark. It is a terrifying statistic if you really digest it and don't just read it as a sanitized account of a tragic war.

I've been working with Mercy Corps responding to the Syrian refugee crisis for over a year and have met hundreds of refugees, many of them children.

Recently I was at one of our activity centers in Baalbek, Lebanon, where we work with traumatized children. Most of the kids were participating in the organized games and activities, but on the sidelines I saw a little boy sitting alone and staring at nothing.…  Seguir leyendo »

Nine-year-old Dia'a sat in the back of his father's car on the cool afternoon when a sniper fired a bullet at his heart. His brother Alaa, 15, was seated next to him. Their father sped through the streets desperate to flee shelling that was destroying their neighborhood in Dara'a, in southwest Syria.

The father saw a roadblock and decided to turn around. It was then that the sniper pulled the trigger.

The bullet pierced Dia'a's chest, missing the boy's heart by millimeters. Then it careened through his left shoulder and ricocheted into Alaa. Dia'a looked to his left and saw his brother slumped over.…  Seguir leyendo »

The Israeli government sent 14 Eritreans back to their country of origin last month after they formally abandoned their requests to remain in Israel. Many more such returns are expected. Israel is seeking to address its refugee challenges by promoting the fiction that it hosts few, if any, Africans fleeing persecution, only “infiltrators” and “illegal work migrants.” The action is a troubling departure from Israel’s proud tradition of refugee protection.

Since its founding in 1948, the state of Israel has guaranteed that Jews would never again have to flee persecution with no place to find safety. Israel championed the rights of all refugees, and Israeli officials helped draft the 1951 U.N.…  Seguir leyendo »

With every week that goes by in the Syria crisis, hundreds more lives are lost, policy options narrow and the chances of post-conflict stability grow worse. What started as a demand for internal reform has become a regional conflagration. Foreign fighters from across the Middle East and North Africa are pouring into Syria to train and fight, while refugees are flooding by the hundreds of thousands into Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq and Turkey.

The Western political debate has focused on military options — and the arguments are complex and finely balanced. But no one believes that under any scenario the war will end quickly.…  Seguir leyendo »

Before my family was expelled from Bhutan, in 1992, I lived with my parents and seven siblings in the south of the country. This region is the most fertile part of that tiny kingdom perched between Tibet and India, a tapestry of mountains, plains and alpine meadows. Our house sat in a small village, on terraced land flourishing with maize, millet and buckwheat, a cardamom garden, beehives and enough pasture for cows, oxen, sheep and buffaloes. That was the only home we had known.

After tightening its citizenship laws in the mid-1980s, Bhutan conducted a special census in the south and then proceeded to cast out nearly 100,000 people — about one-sixth of its population, nearly all of them of Nepalese origin, including my family.…  Seguir leyendo »

My eyes kept being drawn to the shoes. The tiny pink running shoes with Velcro straps, on the feet of the 2-year-old girl sitting quietly on her mother’s lap. She fidgeted only a bit — jostling occasionally with her 7-year-old twin sisters while her father told a United Nations worker what had driven his young family 20 miles from Syria to this small town in Lebanon. They did not merely leave; they fled. And not once, but three times.

They came from Zabadani, which sits in a green valley in southwest Syria, just 20 miles from Damascus. He was a house painter who made a modest living while his wife took care of their three daughters.…  Seguir leyendo »

The refugee burden that Syria’s neighbors are shouldering is heavy and should not be borne alone. But keeping people fleeing for their lives in buffer zones inside Syrian borders risks trapping rather than protecting them.

Yet this is precisely what President Michel Suleiman of Lebanon proposed on April 4, joining others such as Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu of Turkey, who made a similar call in November 2011, and Prime Minister Abdullah Ensour of Jordan, who spoke in January of securing “safe havens” inside Syrian territory, saying of potential new refugee flows, “We will stop them and keep them in their country.”…  Seguir leyendo »