Refugee crisis is a direct result of dictators’ rule

What the Arabic-language media is saying about the refugee crisis, featuring Asharq Al Awsat and Al Hayat.

A migrant carries a child through rows of Hungarian police. Marko Djurica / Reuters

Europe’s refugee crisis is dominating the media, raising the question of what to do with people who fled their homelands with hopes of a better tomorrow for themselves and their families.

In the pan-Arab daily Asharq Al Awsat, Fayez Sarah said that most conversations, analyses and news were about the wave of Syrian migrants. News reports focused on tragedies, such as the deaths of Syrians in the Mediterranean and the hardships suffered by illegal migrants, but they also covered illegal immigrants in Turkey, Libya and other countries falling into the nets of human trafficking and smugglers who defraud them of their hard-earned money.

“Some have sold all their belongings at the lowest prices, while others borrowed money from relatives and friends and others had saved penny after penny – amounts that could go to waste, along with their souls,” he wrote.

“All this happened under the nose of the world, and no one moved a finger, a matter that encouraged the Assad regime to persevere with its policy and push Syrians to leave their country. It perfected this policy and strengthened it by adding to their hardships in areas under his control and in those outside his control.

“As radical practices and extremist groups rose, the Assad regime increased the killings and destruction, pushing Syrians to leave their country, whereas the extremism practised by those groups is similar to the practices carried out by the regime: persecuting Syrians, destroying their property and driving them to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.”

He said these developments in Syria have been met by silence and a lack of concern from the international community, with many regional and international bodies attempting in vain to find a solution to the seemingly endless conflict. These combined effects have caused the exodus of Syrians.

In the pan-Arab daily Al Hayat, Hazem Saghieh said famine and death caused by a bloodthirsty dictator, an unmerciful civil war, intolerance calls to expel certain people from their countries have prompted hundreds of thousands of Syrians, Iraqis, Libyans, Tunisians, Ethiopians, Eritreans, Somalis and Afghans to seek “the European El Dorado”.

While he said a no-fly zone in Syria could have prevented the exodus, the tragedy is affecting many other countries.

“The French demographer Alfred Sauvy had invented the expression ‘Third World’ in 1952, to mimic the ‘Third Estate’ that suffered in France from the rule of the nobility and the clergy – a driving force of the 1789 Revolution. Similarly, ‘Third World’ was coined to play a similar role in the United States, leader of the ‘First World’, and Russia, leader of the ‘Second World’”.

In the 1980s, the third world concept was replaced with the concept of “south” to describe countries with low GDPs and low per capita incomes, rising demographics, lower status of women, malnutrition, illiteracy, lower spending on health, poor availability of potable water and a lack of services and housing in mega-cities, he explained.

“Before all these standards, it is essential to build a citizenship that respects citizens while establishing viable countries,” he said.

“This is where achievements of ‘liberation’ led us, followed by the slump of oil prices and the persistence of civil strife, expelling people from their own countries as though they were bones thrown to the hounds.”

Translated by Carla Mirza