The Modern Trail of Tears
The Syrian refugee crisis all started in 2011 when a group of peaceful protesters in the city of Deraa were attacked by government forces on the street, killing several of them. Quickly after this, more and more citizens followed suit and by July of 2011 hundreds of thousands of Syrians were calling for the resignation of President Assad. This quickly led to a devastating Civil War in the following years, where “by June 2013, the UN said 90,000 people had been killed in the conflict. By August 2015, that figure had climbed to 250,000, according to activists and the UN” (Asare, et al. 6). This civil war led to the creation of the “Islamic State”, a group of terrorists who claimed land in parts of Syria and Iraq. The introduction of the Islamic State led to further foreign involvement in the war, with all the major players around the war forced to pick sides between the Syrian government, the rebel fighters, and the Islamic State. The main backers for the Syrian government have been Iran and Russia, whereas countries like the United States and the UK support the rebels. The introduction of foreign power has increased the amount of artillery and weapons used in the war, and has further displaced over 11 million Syrians through the use of war tools like Air Strikes and chemical weapons.
Out of the 11 million Syrians displaced by this war, “More than 4.5 million people have fled Syria since the start of the conflict, most of them women and children” (Asare, et al. 15). This has led to a humanitarian crisis never before seen on this scale, as countries scramble to find places to accept migrants from Syria, as well as support the over 13.5 million people that have remained in Syria but lack access to basic human needs such as food and water. There have been major rifts caused among governments, as each one is playing a game of “Hot Potato” trying to avoid accepting immigrants into their countries as they continue to fear monger and scare their populations into thinking that all migrants are bad. However, these Syrians are just trying to escape the war torn and dangerous country they once called home, and are trying to find a better life for themselves and their families.
To understand why Syrians are fleeing in the millions from modern day Syria, we have to explore the conditions that they have on a day to day basis in modern day Syria. While Syria once was a prospering Middle Eastern nation, as soon as the war started this all shifted to the negative. In current day Syria, the people are escaping a country where buildings "collapsed under a barrage of shelling, bombs had peeled away the facades, exposing the rooms within as if they were life-size dollhouses” (qtd. in Gibbs). Modern day Syria is a country rifled with war and fighting, where everyday life is torn up by fighting among the government, rebels, and the Islamic State. In the Frontline episode “Inside Assad's Syria”, reporter Martin Smith takes us inside the Eastern part of Syria, which is still controlled by Assad and his government. In the capital of Damascus, we see people from all parts of Syria who had experienced the war on all fronts. While some still believe that the government is in the right, and Assad is the only one that can save the, many of the other residents of Modern Syria paint the picture that life since the war has been brutal. In the film, he gives us a look at how fragmented the life in Syria can be. While he is there, he witnesses a bombing in the capital of Damascus, and instead of being given answers, he is instead given tickets to the Syrian Opera, where people go and continue life like there is not fighting underway on the other side of the wall.
While Syrians are escaping from their home country, they are both escaping danger and walking into it, as the journey they take is rifled with hardship and death. Out of the over 450,000 refugees that fled Libya and Syria in 2015, “close to 3,000 have died on their dangerous journeys, most when the boats they were in sank” (Desperate Journeys 2). The Syrian refugees face two major paths while fleeing their country, the first of which is going to camps in neighboring Middle Eastern countries, or take the risk of crossing the Mediterranean and heading into Europe. The conditions they face in both situations are horrendous, which makes the journey they take all the more dangerous, but it is the only way some of these families believe they can ever see a normal life again.
Before these refugees can even think about other countries to escape to, they must first escape Syria itself, which is just as dangerous as the journey they take to other countries. This is in a large part due to the fact many of the surrounding countries have closed of their borders to Syria, and do not want new migrants, as well as the fact the Syrian government is still actively trying to stop its population from fleeing the country. One reporter follows the story of Ahmad, a Syrian refugee who managed to escape and make it to the Netherlands. He recounts that on his journey through Syria, he “passed by the remains of a minibus that was ‘transporting passengers just like us. Most of them died when a mortar shell hit it’” (Alwani 20). The dangers of traveling through a war torn country are shown vividly through this, as they must travel through military checkpoints, past snipers, and other military operations that were designed to keep the refugees in the country. The journey reaches its peak when the refugees are forced to take a “nine-hour walk before reaching the Turkish border, interrupted by bullets every now and then” (qtd. in Alwani). This is a walk through a mountain, in the roughest of conditions with very few supplies. And once they manage to reach the border, they are still only halfway to their destinations.
The most common escape for the Syrian refugees is in their neighboring middle eastern countries, where they are sent to camps and attempt to make new lives and wait out the civil war that has destroyed their country. They have created tented settlements across the Middle East, where they are forced to deal with “high temperatures during the day and extreme cold at night” as well as a “lack of sanitation and medical care in the camps” (Bajekal 5). While they may be escaping a war torn country, these refugees have ended up in a place where they must live in the worst conditions possible, with many families being forced to spend many years without truly being able to call any place home.
While a large part of refugees do choose to stay in the tented settlements in the Middle East, another portion has decided to take the journey to Europe where they can hopefully apply for asylum and get to live out the life they truly want, instead of sitting around in tents not knowing what the future holds. For many, this journey picks up inside Turkey where many refugees have taken to paying smugglers to take them in boats across the Mediterranean and into countries like Greece and Italy. This has quickly become the most dangerous migration journey, as “more deaths have been documented on this route than any other migration route in the world” (Dehghan 4). These migrants have come to the conclusion that even with the death rate being as high as it is, they have no hope for a better life and future if they do not attempt to make it to Europe. They get on boats that are horribly overcrowded and out of date, with one that sunk in April of 2015 being “20 metres long and carrying more than 900 people” (O.M. 4). This situation where refugees are feeling the need to take a journey with such a high risk of death comes from the fact Europe has closed itself off from refugees seeking asylum, and this is the only way they have a chance of getting a life that is better for them and their children.
However, once they reach Europe they are not in the clear, as many countries are now full of prejudice and turn away refugees as they see them as the root of the problems Europeans are facing. What started as European compassion for the refugees quickly turned to fear and skepticism as more and more Syrians fled from Syria into the European countries. In the month of October 2015 alone, “the U.N. recorded more than 200,000 migrants crossing from Turkey to Greece — all of them bound for Western Europe” (Kakissis 15). This constant stream of refugees into Europe made politicians and people alike warn any more refugees that they would not be welcome in their countries, and that they would spend billions in order to keep them out and deport them back to Turkey and Syria. These refugees that land on Greece are then sent into refugee camps on the Greek islands themselves, where the conditions are just as bad as the tent settlements they aimed to escape in the Middle East, with no prospect for jobs or a better life anywhere on the horizon. A former director of the Greek Asylum Service has said that “if there were no arrivals on the islands, I would say that [asylum] proceedings could be completed in two to two-and-a-half months” (qtd. in Kakissis). These asylum seekers spend months on months in these camps, with a very low chance for their dreams of Europe to even come true. Out of the 58, 661 asylum requests in 2017, only 10,364 were awarded with asylum status and allowed to entire the European Union.
Even once these refugees make it past the asylum centers in the Greek islands, they are faced with problems in the locations they are relocated to inside the European Union. In a small German town named Altena, a particular group of Syrian refugees were met with hatred and violence as “young man hurled a firebomb into a Syrian family's home, sending them to the hospital for smoke inhalation and damaging the dwelling” (Schmidt, et. all 18). Even though this man was rightfully sent to prison, these refugees are having to deal with more and more prejudice as right-leaning politicians call the refugee problem a crisis that is plaguing the European Union. In a Pew Research Study that polled residents of multiple European countries, many of the countries are shown to believe that an increase in refugees to the country would also mean an increase in terrorism and crime that took place there. Also in some particular countries, like Greece and Italy, many of the people who were asked about the crisis told that an increase in diversity would make their country a worse place to live.
However, all is not bad for the Syrian refugees in certain parts of Europe. In the city of Altena, a city that was once on the brink of “an economic downturn after its ironworks closed” (Schmidt, et. all 8), the refugees that have come from Syria have revitalized the town, with 400 refugees coming here alone. These refugees are now able to live out the life that they wanted and dreamed of as they escaped from Syria, and are able to have some of the normalcy that they had before the war started. Further, a large majority of the children now have access to things they did not while on the move, including access to school and a place they can call home. While some of these European countries may not be optimal for refugees escaping the conflict, they have found the ways to make the best of it, as well as providing a benefit for the people around them as well.
A large part of how refugees are dealt with in Europe comes from a policy standpoint among the European Union as a whole, as well as the individual responses of the member nations. As a whole, the European Union is trying to deal with the refugees in the most humanitarian way possible, providing aid in the millions to countries like Greece where many of the refugees end up. In April of 2016 itself, “the European Commission announced an initial €83 million worth of humanitarian funding for emergency support projects to assist refugees in Greece” (europa.eu). This money is used to help fund the over 30 sites of refugees in the Greek islands, where over fifty thousand refugees are housed in conditions with little shelter, food, and other basic human needs. The European Commission itself is “a leading donor of humanitarian aid in all the major countries and regions, from where refugees currently arriving to the EU originate” (europa.eu), and instead of turning away the refugees themselves, are leaving it up to the European host countries to either sponsor more refugees, or send them to to Turkey and other Middle Eastern countries. As they say themselves, “EU humanitarian aid does not address the root causes of displacement and migration, such as conflict, human rights abuses, economic poverty or climate change” (europa.eu). They have created a place where refugees can seek shelter, and they are there to help the people in need with assistance in the form of humanitarian aid, but aside from that the European Union fails to take any stance on whether or not refugees deserve to be a part of the European Union.
In terms of the individual members of the European Union, each country has taken different stances as to how many refugees the country can accept, as well as how the refugees end up treated in the country. The brightest light in the European Union has been Germany through all of this, with Angela Merkel stating early on during the Syrian war that Germany would have an open door policy and went on to admit over three hundred thousand refugees. However, since the admittance of refugees into the country, many German citizens “are now more opposed to immigrants and want their government to focus on their own problems” (Noack 3). What once started as the pinnacle of hope for refugees fleeing Syria, Germany is now starting to turn away some refugees, as well as starting to gear up to send other refugees back to Syria and Turkey once their asylum status runs out.
Another country to look at in Europe is the United Kingdom, a place that sets the example for a lot of its neighboring countries. The United Kingdom has taken a stance similar to the European Union as a whole, with them spending money to support the refugees in the Middle East instead of admitting a large amount of refugees into the country. At the start of the Syrian crisis, the “Government's policy was to be generous with humanitarian aid to Syria's neighbors rather than to accept fleeing Syrians for resettlement in the UK” (McGuinness 2). This sentiment was one that was felt by the people of the United Kingdom, as they believed that refugees would do nothing but increase the crime and terrorism in major cities like London. In unison with the European Union, the United Kingdom also provided financial support and “committed itself to providing resettlement for up to 3,000 vulnerable children” (McGuinness 6). Eventually the United Kingdom did take in refugees, but there was still a large outcry, and these problems eventually did dissolve into the United Kingdom wanting change, and voting to exit from the European Union.
Another country that has played a huge part in how refugees are treated and seen globally is the United States. When talking about the United States and Syria, there are two major periods to talk about, the one under Obama and the one under Trump. The first one to talk about is how the United States responded to the Syrian refugee crisis under president Obama. Under Obama, he “asked the State Department to admit 10,000 Syrians in response to the humanitarian crisis consuming the country after five years of conflict” (Morello 3). The Obama administration then surpassed this number, admitting “12,500 refugees from war-ravaged Syria” (Morello 1). Under this regime, refugees were welcomed by the administration, and we were able to treat them humanely and offer them a home for them to build a better future in. Obama himself led a coalition at the United Nations that had 49 leaders around the world gathered in order to give more aid, opportunity, and jobs for Syrian refugees that have sought asylum. During Obama’s term, the United States had “provided $5.9 billion in humanitarian aid for Syrians” (Morello 7). However, during his term not everyone was unified with him, with 30 republican governors across the country stating that they would not accept any Syrian refugees in their states. This led a large majority of Syrian refugees to end up in largely democratic states, with California, Illinois, and Michigan being the largest.
However during his campaign and during his administration, President Trump declared that the United States must undergo “extreme vetting”, as well as making America the main focus for Americans. The most shocking sign of the massive shift in policy between Trump and Obama can be seen in just one quote, “America has accepted just 11 Syrian refugees so far this year” (Dalton 1). This was just in April of this year, with a third of the year passed and the United States having only accepted 11 refugees from war torn Syria, whereas under Obama they were arriving in the thousands. In his efforts to “lower national security risks” Trump tried to implement what basically boiled down to a Muslim ban and block any asylum seekers or residents of these countries from coming to the United States. This block would have effecitvely put a hard stop on any Syrian refugees coming from Syria itself, but also from its neighboring countries like Iran and Iraq.
Overall after learning about this refugee crisis and understanding what the Syrian people have gone through, and will continue to go through I realize that there may not be any one amazing solution that could bring peace to such a war torn country. I do have a few ideas that I believe could at least bring peace to some of the people that have been displaced by this war. For one, I believe that all countries should open up their borders and help facilitate safe travel to the countries that are accepting the refugees. A large majority of refugees and asylum seekers are just good people who are looking for a place to call home, fear mongering and calling them criminals and terrorists does nobody any good, and just because of the land they come from does not make them bad. While it is true some of them are criminals or terrorists, it is no more prevalent than people in their own countries committing criminal actions or acts of terror, but just because they are people who look like us we apply a double standard. By providing a place for these refugees to call home, everyone ends up with a net benefit as they often end up doing jobs people either do not want to do, or they end up bringing their culture with them from Syria, whether it be opening a restaurant, or just telling their story to the people around them.
Another way I believe we can help the refugees that are coming from Syria is by setting up humane societies near Syria itself for them to relocate to and wait out the Civil War. Currently when they go to sister countries like Jordan, they are forced into tent settlements on the sides of cities and are not given actual jobs or housing. By having the world come behind them and help them set up societies here with access to basic human needs such as clean water, health services, and food we can give the Syrian’s a “home away from home” where they will be safe from Assad and the Islamic State, and a place where they can raise their children and maybe one day make it back to their country in Syria.
However, the biggest problem that stands in the way of Syrian refugees is the war itself, and I do not know how it will end. Right now there is a basic stalemate between the three parties, and as long as they each stay divided and refuse to give up the war will continue for many years, displacing thousands more people, and killing just as many. Overall, the Syrian refugee crisis is one of the most important political issues of our time, and if we do not treat it correctly it will continue to spiral out of control, and show that humanity is not as good as we believe we are.