Most students at Colorado College have heard of the Syrian refugee crisis but have no idea what it really is. This article hopes to explain just that and why it matters to each of us.
The population of displaced Syrians today is about 10.5 million. Approximately four million of these Syrians are scattered outside of Syria, qualifying them as refugees. The conflict in Syria started in spring 2011, when Sunni Arabs, the largest demographic in Syria, were instigated to revolt against the ruling Assads, who are Shia Alawites. The frustration of the Sunni Arabs was fueled by the fact that they were being treated as second-rate citizens under this regime. The Assad regime took violent measures in an attempt to quell civilian uprisings, opening fire on peaceful protestors in the city of Deraa on the March 12, 2011. These violent attacks by the government grew in scale to a point at which children were being murdered and chemical weapons were probably being used.
Understandably, Syrian citizens were forced to take arms in self-defense. This led to a full-scale civil war by the start of 2012. Assad was determined to end this uprising by brute force. Instead of a rebellion against a dictator, Assad turned the uprising into a Sunni-Shia war by targeting the majority Sunni population, both rebels and civilians. These tactics proved successful as the civil war turned between the Sunnis, backed by Middle Eastern Sunni nations such as Saudi Arabia and Qatar, and the Shias, backed by Syria’s Shia population and Iran.
By 2014, this civil war came to involve not only the Sunnis and Shias, but also ISIS, a Sunni extremist group, and the Kurds, a minority that has aimed to gain independence from Syria for a long time. This situation is in a terrible stalemate today. Over 250,000 Syrians have been killed and half the country’s population has been displaced.
Jordan and Lebanon together have taken in close to two million refugees. Consequently, one in five people in Lebanon, and one in eleven people in Jordan are Syrian refugees. At the same time, however, wealthy Persian Gulf countries such as Qatar, UAE, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman and Bahrain have offered zero resettlements to these refugees. In fact, the actions of these nations has even been publicly criticized by Amnesty International as they called the nations’ inability to deal with this situation ‘shameful’. Even more appalling is that some of these nations openly back the Sunni forces in the civil war.
Some of these refugees have also fled to European nations such as Greece and Hungary, and some even to the United States. However, this is not enough. The U.S. government announced that it will accept up to 85,000 Syrian refugees in the upcoming fiscal year, a small number compared to the amount of people in dire need of refuge. On the other hand, Germany has opened its borders to Syrian refugees, understanding that this issue is an exceptional crisis.
However, there is still a stigma. Nations in the West fear that the influx of Syrians will make their Muslim populations much more dominant, and in turn, much more extremist. However, even if the entire Syrian refugee population of four million was to immigrate to EU nations, and this entire population was Muslim, the Muslim population of EU nations would only rise from 4 percent to 5 percent. Also, refugee immigrants are noted to be significantly more law abiding than the average citizen of the nation in which they take abode.
In Western Nations, there is a stigma associated with immigrants and refugees, arguably a stigma that is not justified. An irrational fear of change from refugees is resulting in this huge humanitarian issue. It is truly tragic that we need to destigmatize immigration and asylum for refugees in a nation whose population is primarily composed of generations of immigrants. We must try and empathize with the refugees who are severely struggling to support their families in this time of crisis, and aid them in any way possible, rather than selfishly being uninformed and fearing the idea of change, which will not even occur.