It is high time for the world to be more empathetic to the realities of a refugee’s world

Earlier this week, an on-air CBS news reporter said that the attack on Ukraine cannot be compared to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan because the Eastern European country is more “civilised”.

The reporter was assailed online and in television debates for “letting out the inherent bias” against Muslim nations. CBS went on to apologize for the gaffe, asserting that the reporter was trying to convey that Ukraine has not seen a war of this scale in a long time. Well, it certainly did not sound like that. CBS has a long history of major slip-ups like the reportage from Benghazi creating a furore in Washington DC.

Journalists and television anchors can sometimes be excused for making such errors, and they issue addendums later. While no word in a world made up of live television and 24/7 social media updates can ever be erased, the biggest issue at play here is the perception such reporting creates.

The UN agency for refugees, UNHCR, reports that there were more than 84 million refugees globally, 68% of which come from only 5 countries – Syria, Venezuela, Afghanistan, South Sudan, and Myanmar. When it comes to hosting the refugees, the 5 leading countries are Turkey, Colombia, Uganda, Pakistan, and Germany. There is a general discontent in admitting or welcoming the refugees and UN agencies run campaigns for governments to open their doors to people who have lost everything they had.

It is impossible to fathom the 35 million children who are classified as refugees, including Alan Kurdi, a 3-year-old Syrian boy, whose body washed ashore the Mediterranean Sea in September 2015. The least this world can do is to provide a haven to its children. It is time for the ‘haves’ of the planet to contribute their fair share for those who go hungry tonight, far from those they love, as the litterateur Vikram Chandra would say.

UNHCR reports that over half a million Ukrainians have now fled the country, seeking refuge in countries such as Poland, Slovakia, and Romania. Many thousands are internally displaced, creating a generation that may grow up in camps and without their fathers, who have been conscripted to fight for Ukraine. The country has one of the more powerful passports, which allows its citizens to travel to 140 countries globally without the need of a visa.

Countries like Ireland are beginning to lift the visa requirements for Ukraine citizens, though Britain’s Home Secretary, Priti Patel, has refused to lift the visa restrictions for stranded Ukrainian refugees.

So, what explains the open-door policies of Lebanon, a country of 4 million which admitted more than 2 million Syrian refugees? For comparison, India admitted 20,000 refugees in 2021 and arrested at least 400 of them, while maintaining a population of more than one billion.

Is it empathy that differentiates these outliers from the rest? Or cultural homogeneity like that between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which makes the assimilation easier to bear for the refugees? Or does it take the leadership of the likes of former German Chancellor, Angela Merkel, who admitted 1.2 million refugees into the country?

My interactions with the Syrian refugees in the Zaa’tari camp just outside of Amman showed me their resilience, the hope in their hearts and the willingness to move on. Contrary to the social media forwards which emphasize that the refugees are a drain on any country’s resources, they only knock on a country’s door when they do not have any other option.

The current situation in Ukraine, brought about by its neighbor Russia will inevitably throw millions into the poverty cycle, separate families and raise the refugee conundrum all over again. Many thousand students from India run the risk of becoming refugees if the government is not able to rescue them in time. As if on cue, countries like the United States and China evacuated all their citizens in good time. All countries with a functioning foreign policy and devoid of megalomaniacs, had the time and resources to help their citizens.

In the days following the first attacks on Kyiv, the world’s largest bureaucracy, the UN, dithered and called for a resolution in a security council meeting, just to be able to ask Russia to withdraw its troops and end the attacks. For all its hubris, this is not what the world expects of an organization which spends at least $6 billion each for agencies like the World Food Program and UNICEF and claims to be the harbinger of peace in the world.

It is not acceptable that the senior -most bureaucrats in the world were trying to pass a resolution while hundreds of thousands of citizens were turning into refugees in their own country. It is perhaps time the UN hastens its reforms and gives itself some teeth.

It’s also time for us to be more empathetic to the realities of a refugee’s world. When you sleep under the sky and have no hope for a tomorrow that might not come, the last thing you need is a troll army, or a bumbling reporter on live television who makes things even more difficult than they are.

(The author is a former Chief of Communications with UNICEF in New York, where he worked for more than a decade. Views are personal)

(This was first published in National Herald on Sunday)