‘Compassion’ is the last thing this refugee crisis needs
Some Turkish friends were driving along the Turquoise Coast a few days ago when they noticed a commotion on the beach below. A group of 10 Syrians, including three small children, had been trying to get across the 2km strait between the south coast of Turkey and the Greek island of Kastellorizo. The European Union is tantalisingly close, so the Syrians had decided to take their chances. To the disbelief of my friends and other rescuers, they had used
to make the short but perilous crossing. It was only thanks to the action of alert fishermen that the family are still alive.
“How can they risk their children like that?” asked one friend angrily. “They didn’t even have life-jackets.”
Such scenes are being played out across the Mediterranean and they are undeniably heart-wrenching, but, as my friends pointed out, those people were perfectly safe in Turkey, a country which, quite magnificently and with barely any credit, is providing food and shelter for 1.9 million refugees. Lebanon and Jordan both have close to a million apiece, while Egypt and Iraq have far fewer. Shamefully, much wealthier Middle Eastern countries have failed to take in any of their four and a half million displaced and traumatised brethren. Curiously, you never hear this fact mentioned by TV news reporters who hector Europe, and the UK in particular, for their indifference to suffering.
My friends’ story recalls the awful death of three-year-old Aylan Kurdi, his five-year-old brother Galip and their mother while trying to reach the island of Kos. The photograph of Aylan, washed up like detritus on the beach, his sturdy little shoes a piercing reminder that a living boy had been running around in them just hours earlier, has prodded a dormant international conscience, and rightly so. Yet the situation is far more complex than you would know from this week’s display of Competitive Compassion.
Personally, I am haunted by the thought of Aylan’s mother, Rehanna. Frightened of water, she did not want to take her children on some inadequate boat, although the poor woman seemed resigned to the fact that she had to do as her husband said. The family had been living in Turkey for three years and, unusually, the father, Abdullah Kurdi, had a job. It was only because Abdullah’s sister in Canada gave them £2,500 to pay to people traffickers that they were able to make the dangerous voyage at all.
By now, it should be apparent that the most desperate refugees are not the ones with the funds or wherewithal to travel to Europe, but the wretches in the overflowing refugee camps. That is why the Government is spot on in its decision to take 20,000 Syrians from those dire places, giving priority to children and orphans. While sanctimonious politicians play the ugly game of More Caring Than Thou, the UN’s World Food Programme is in crisis. The food budget for each person in the refugee camps has been cut to a meagre $13 a month. The programme’s director says she urgently needs £221 million just to stop people from starving and admits that, between August and September, they turned away 130,000 needy individuals. I shudder to think how bad it will get as winter tightens its iron grip.
Instead of Yvette Cooper offering her spare bedroom ( good luck to the Syrians who move in with Ed Balls!) and an opportunistic Alex Salmond lecturing David Cameron on “shaming humanity”, perhaps a concrete plan to put food into hungry mouths asap would be in order?
Our country has given £900 million in aid to Syria, more than every other EU nation combined, which should be a source of pride. And let’s not pretend that Germany’s open-arms policy is selfless. In June, its birth rate slumped to the lowest in the world, so it will find it a lot easier to accommodate 800,000 refugees than the UK, whose population is at a record high, with 582,600 migrants arriving between mid-2013 and mid-2014 alone. If we were not obliged by the crazy Free Movement Directive to take in any EU citizen that fancies coming, with all the associated strain on public services, then we too would be in a better position to offer refuge to genuine asylum seekers who desperately need our help. I know which option I’d prefer.
I don’t pretend to have an answer to the unholy tangle of rival monsters that is Syria today, but I do think that the very least we can do is help to create and enforce the safe zone on the Syrian border that Turkey has long called for. With the help of the United States and France, we enforced a no-fly zone in Iraq to protect the Kurds and Shiite Muslims. We can do it again.
Parliament voted two years ago against military action in Syria. Seeing the almost Biblical exodus on the news, I have no doubt that today the British people would overwhelmingly support humanitarian intervention by our Armed Forces. Most Syrians want to stay in their country or close by. Instead of the siren calls luring them across the sea to an uncertain fate, or even early death, they need our practical help on the ground to give them food, shelter and the strength, one day, to take their homeland back. That’s what I call compassion.