Recently, the International Day for Refugees was celebrated on 20 June. Though I think the motive for celebrating refugee day is to bring light to refugees’ plight, the term refugee in itself is a big blot on humanity. What bugs me as a human being is why, at any level, is there no effort to not create any refugee.
By celebrating Refugee Day, are we telling the world with certainty that there will always be refugees and that having them is a good thing?
Refugees are people who come from countries that have a crisis of humanitarian values to places where your human rights are valued and protected. The problem is when refugees are created; the numbers are very large. To be specific, a whole country sees a mass exodus of the population as refugees.
Isn’t it quite alarming and distressing that people of their native place feel unsafe? But instead of addressing this issue at the international level, if the only focus is refugees, conflicts of a new kind arise. For example, in Syria, the whole population desires to leave the country and seeks asylum in various parts of the world.
So now a conflict arises. For how many years do other countries (asylum granting) have to accept refugees? The other conflict is how do we treat refugees? The next one is how do we ensure that these refugees manage to integrate into the asylum granting countries?
The biggest problem that countries face regarding refugees is illegal immigration. Not everyone gets accepted as refugees. The reason for this the limitation of the countries that take refugees. At present, the countries that take refugees are developed European nations and countries with a level of regard to fundamental rights chartered in the United Nations.
These countries already have been taking refugees and already feel a lot of constraints on their resources. Also, the native population around the world are quite proportional to the geographical area.
Consider this situation: The whole Syrian population gets assimilated in other countries and Syria has a low population. When a country faces population growth, it is over decades at a gradual pace where the individual country can adapt and distribute resources efficiently to all the population.
Here, the sudden increase in the human population increases disparity.
When suddenly a large number of people arrive, it puts a constraint on the resources of the country taking in refugee. This constraint is eventually felt by the native population, which results in resistance against the refugees. It is also unfair that at one place, resources remain unused (here Syria) and another place has to feel the strain on resources for no fault of theirs.
Let’s take the example of India. India has the second-largest population in the country. In the next few years, there will be a huge resource crunch in terms of land, water, jobs, food and much more. Is India in a position to take refugees on a large scale when India faces poverty and hunger on a large scale? We are not even able to solve our own problems; how can we solve other peoples problems?
The same situation occurs around the world. The countries may not be second in regards to the population, but they still have a huge population according to the size of the country. Frankly, the world needs a population control strategy because now we need to limit the population globally as resources are far less than the number of people on earth.
Another challenge of refugees is that you are becoming a refugee in the present scenario because of religious issues, a typically human-made issue, and not because of some natural calamity.
In the past, you became refugees because of calamities like disease, flood, earthquake or change in the land’s fertility. In these situations, there used to be a scope of going back once the situation improved on its own. But in human-made situations, generations after generations are suffering, but there is no end to the conditions of human right violations in the countries where originally the refugees resided.
In the neighbourhood of India, Afghanistan’s internal conflict is based on religion. It is on such an epic proportion that a country like the U.S.A. has used its army resources to set up a democratic institution in Afghanistan and has failed. It is now expected that once the American army leaves Afghanistan, bloodshed and violence on a large scale will ensue.
Naturally, more refugees will be created. Moreover, now the number of years of blood bath will be never-ending.
Many countries are still edging towards internal conflict, and the number of countries that will create refugees will increase. Religion is expected to be the prime reason for these countries to face internal conflict and wars.
A few years back, countries that valued human rights more than religion were ready to share the burden of refugees. Since refugees bring their own set of problems and at times threaten the peace and security of the countries that grant access to them, many countries are now reluctant to take refugees.
You can’t blame these countries, actually. You can care for others as long as you are stable and strong. But when that is threatened, you have to choose the lesser evil.
On an international level, the United Nations is primarily responsible for the issues of refugees. For my part of the reasoning, I think the United Nations has failed spectacularly. They never deal with the source of the problem. Along with the refugees, the source problem — the countries violating human rights needs to be sorted out so that refugees have a home to go back to in the long run.
The world has been created where there is always some suffering. Unfortunately, some countries choose to create sufferings that have no meaning and makes life unbearable. Religion is always meant to make life better. Now it is a source of problems of life destruction.
The world now needs to look at the problems that make its citizens unsafe and force them into a life of uncertainty and struggle for a hope to have better economic conditions and respect for human rights and dignity. I truly hope that countries can reform their own religion to make life better for their own citizens rather than a place of unreasonable deaths.