5. Compassion for refugees is being overshadowed by hate
Syria has shown empathy to be a fleeting emotion. For the country’s ever-growing refugee population, the feeling peaked in the summer of 2015 when the body of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi washed up on a Turkish beach, with his knees tucked underneath him.
Carried away in a tiny T-shirt and shorts, his death reminded parents across the world of their good fortune in having their children safely asleep in their beds.
Nearly a year later, in July 2016, the father of a young French boy killed in a terror attack in Nice recalled that his lifeless son “looked like Aylan, the little refugee”. And in that one sentence, the father recognised that in grief we are all equal.
By then it was rare to hear such an acknowledgement of shared experience with refugees. Much more common was a barrage of invective blaming refugees for all the world’s troubles. Attacks such as those in Paris and Nice were used as an excuse to close the doors to those in need.
During the abysmal summer three years ago, when hundreds of thousands of desperate people fell out of boats on the Greek islands and set off across Europe in search of safety, opportunistic politicians were quick to realise they had an easy scapegoat.
With xenophobic speech largely unchallenged by mainstream politicians, hate and suspicion has been allowed to flourish.
When I wrote a book about the refugee crisis in 2015, I hoped by telling the stories of real people forced to flee to Europe that I could break down the barrier between “us” and “them”, and show how much the new arrivals have in common with their hosts. But seven years on from the start of the Syrian conflict, empathy for its refugees is hard to find.
In the past few weeks a political alliance in Italy, which ran on a platform to deport 600,000 migrants and asylum seekers, won the largest share of the vote.
Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orban – expected to be re-elected next month – is championing a law punishing NGOs that assist refugees.
And as rockets fell on Eastern Ghouta last week, politicians from Germany’s far-right AfD party, which won its first parliament seats in recent elections, sat with regime officials in Damascus to discuss whether Syria could be declared a safe country to repatriate people.
What does all this mean for the 5.6 million Syrians forced out of their homes? More anguish and uncertainty, wherever they end up.
Most Syrian refugees are living a precarious existence in Turkey, which is hosting 3.5 million. Lebanon, a tiny country of only a few million, is home to almost 1 million Syrians, while Jordan, Iraq and Egypt also host large numbers.
But as the war grinds on, resentment in all these nations has grown, particularly as host governments spend large sums on refugees while the international community is better at platitudes than offers of help.
The portents are dire. Almost half of Syrian refugee children are not in school, UN figures show. And most refugees live below the poverty line, struggling to get the basics for survival: food, medicine and shelter.
The UN has had to cut aid across the region after their 2017 appeal was only half funded. Its officials have warned that many more refugees may try and travel to Europe if nothing changes. But no one seems to be listening.
“I don’t really think the world has forgotten about us but it feels more like no one cares any more,” says Rim Hamzeh, a 27-year-old teaching assistant whose journey from student protester in Damascus to refugee in Norway is featured in my book.
This does not mean that there is no compassion to be found. For every tub-thumping populist, there is a Facebook group with citizens rallying to help their refugee guests, a mayor with a progressive integration scheme or a crowdfunding campaign to reunite a fractured Syrian family. But such voices seem to be drowned out by hate in this debate.
The one million or so Syrians who have made it to Europe face a broken asylum system designed to keep people out. A morally dubious deal allows the EU to return asylum-seekers who arrive by boat to Turkey.
Another agreement to relocate refugees from Greece and Italy to elsewhere in the EU ended last September with only 27,000 of the promised 160,000 refugees moved from over-crowded centres in the two countries.
Hate crime is on the rise, funding for integration dwindles, and governments devise more pretexts to refuse applications. The gap between declarations and delivery has been stark.
The EU holds itself up as a beacon of human rights and tolerance for the rest of the world. But when it comes to Syria’s refugees, it sets the bar very low.