Another chapter in Syrian suffering
THE only puzzle about the Turkish invasion into Syria is that it took so long to happen. Pressure cooker conditions have been increasing ever since the calamitous Syrian civil war began more than eight years ago.
Like all wars the cost in terms of human suffering has been truly staggering. Well over five million people have been forced to flee the country and more than that are internally displaced. That’s out of a total prewar population of about 23 million.
We’ve offered to take just 4,000 of those Syrian refugees and already over 2,500 of those have arrived in Ireland. The Jesuit Refugee Service of Ireland says we should increase that figure by an additional 3,000 people up to 2022. In March, Simon Coveney committed another €25m in humanitarian assistance for Syrian relief programmes, bringing Ireland’s total financial contribution since 2012 to over €140m. Trouble is, such aid is just a drop in the ocean compared to what’s required. Turkey has borne the brunt of the Syrian refugee crisis. It has struggled to provide sanctuary to well over 3.6 million refugees – that’s almost three-quarters of our entire population.
Meanwhile, the EU has, in effect, bought off Turkey’s hardman president Recep Tayyip Erdogan with a €3bn bribe on condition he stops the flow of unwanted refugees into Europe via Greece.
This week President Erdogan must be feeling that his efforts haven’t been entirely appreciated. All the major European arms exporters such as France and Britain have cut off supplies to his army who have paused their do-or-die land grab in northern Syria. Best of all, US president Donald Trump – in a letter that’ll go down in history for it’s extraordinary disregard for diplomatic norms – branded him the devil incarnate if he didn’t behave himself.