BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON | SEP 1
Eleven-year-old-Bushra says she is forgetting how to read.
Bushra is in a refugee camp in Al-Minya, Lebanon, with her father, mother and sister, light years away from her school and life as a pre-teen. She told a reporter she struggled with the words in a pamphlet she found. She and her family are among roughly 4 million others, 750,000 of them children, who have fled Syria’s civil war for something better.
In this case a collection of make-shift shacks, smelly garbage, little food and no foreseeable future in a Lebanese refugee settlement, where the Lebanese government will not allow construction of better dwellings.
Children like young Bushra live a nightmare of neglect every day in camps across the Mideast and Eastern and Western Europe, waiting to be rescued, waiting for relief from their tragic existence.
They are just a few of the victims of Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad 4-year-old war on his own people. When the war began, the Syrian population, according to the Washington Post, was 22 million. Since then, “half the population has been killed, was displaced or fled the country.” It is estimated that 250,000 have died.
Syria’s homeless are not alone. Refugees are also flooding Mediterranean countries from Afghanistan, Iraq, Albania, Somalia, Eritrea, Sudan, and the Congo.
The numbers have faces, those of a young girl climbing through barbed-wire fences along the Macedonian border, a father lifting his daughter from a lifeboat on the coast of the Greek island Lesbos, and people huddled under blankets along a cement wall on the island. There are the faces of more thousands, hiking across the border to Turkey, and still more roaming the streets of Jordan, which has brought in more than 600,000 Syrians and hundreds of thousands of other displaced neighbors.
Most every day news outlets display more pictures of men, women and children climbing into rickety boats for the dangerous journey across the Mediterranean to Spain, Greece and Italy, and on into central and northern Europe. Germany will take in 800,000. Hundreds more who made it all the way to Calais, France, and the entrance to the Chunnel, the underwater gateway to Britain, have been pictured in despair after being turned back to French camps. There was the heartbreaking image of an infant refugee on a train headed for Serbia with his hand on the window and fear in his eyes.
The plight of these millions is being made worse each day, not only by the poverty and destitution in which they live, but by the inability of Middle Eastern and European countries to cope with them and the growing intolerance of people being asked to care for them. Both protestors and citizens of Hungary have been in the streets in opposition to each other. A Hungarian house designated as a refuge for the immigrants was torched. Barbed wire fences are going up in countries along the Balkan route.
The European Union has scheduled an emergency meeting to deal with the crisis, but not until the 14 of September… so officials can finish their summer vacations?
They are probably not anxious to meet. There are no easy answers; the numbers are literally and figuratively overwhelming. But it’s more than the numbers. It is the complexity of the system for seeking asylum, different in different countries. It is the preponderance of Muslim populations seeking relocation in primarily Christian countries and the specter of terrorism and Islamist extremism lurking in the shadows of immigration, infiltrating countries and populations already fearful and watchful. It is the delicacy of the economies in the host countries and the real fear that those economies will collapse under the weight, a real possibility in Greece, Italy and Spain, already reeling from recession. A worse fate may await Middle Eastern countries like Jordan who have generously opened their borders.
Yet, a global response is essential. We are witness to the worst humanitarian crises since the end of World War II. We are witness to some of the most despicable human behavior in decades, maybe centuries. It is unconscionable, subhuman behavior committed by ISIS and its brethren extremists in Asia and Africa. Murder, assassinations, rape, pillaging, bombed out cities, scorched country-sides, torture and terrorism, and the resultant death, homelessness, starvation and disease. We may be witnessing as well, the destruction of whole cultures, and certainly great monuments to our past.
The United Nations High Commission for Refugees reports that the total number of displaced human beings across the globe, those running from inhuman atrocities, scattering around the world, has reached 60 million, one out of every 122 citizens of the earth.
The UN refugee commissioner says that $5.5 billion is needed this year, just to meet basic humanitarian needs of the homeless. As of June, the UN had less than half of that. Public and private contributions are waning.
Imagine the amounts needed for longer-term needs such as food, shelter, health care, jobs and safety. Then there is the even longer-term question of what may be the permanent relocation of millions requiring social, religious, political and economic integration in countries already being ripped apart by immigrant strife.
And, there isn’t much time. The anti-refugee protests have already turned violent in some countries, breeding distrust and alienation. It will soon turn to desperation and fear and they are the breeding ground of instability, which breeds insurrection, which ultimately breeds violence. Desperation and fear are the opium of extremism.
So, this is not only a humanitarian tragedy; it is a political and economic powder keg of global proportions.
Where, may you ask, is the United States?
Where is this country, many of whose citizens like to look upon their nation as exceptional?
American exceptionalism has several faces. One definition is international leadership reinforced by military might, the US as a world power, yet one that is instinctively not imperialist, unlike other the great world powers of history, the Romans, Chinese and Russians, from Attila the Hun to Vladimr Putin.
Another is American leadership expressed in our generosity and willingness to respond to crisis, either man-made or natural. We are exceptional because we give of ourselves to improve the human condition and expect little in return.
American exceptionalism may be best defined by our unique and highly successful experiment in self-governance, what we have taught the world about the endless and enduring possibilities of legitimate democratic rule, based on freedom, equality and opportunity.
How we respond to this new global humanitarian crisis, both its causes and its effects, may be the truest test of our exceptionalism in the modern era.
That, of course, assumes that we do respond far more so than we have to date.
Maybe the United States will demonstrate its exceptionalism after the Europeans meet. But, that will be very close to the end of the fiscal year when we have to decide whether we will shut the government down for a few days while we bicker over Federal funding of Planned Parenthood, or decide the rightful name of a mountain in Alaska, or deliberate over another extension of the debt limit.
So little time, so much to consider, while hundreds of thousands are dying.
Editor’s Note: Mike Johnson is a former journalist, who worked on the Ford White House staff and served as press secretary and chief of staff to House Republican Leader Bob Michel, prior to entering the private sector. He is co-author of a book, Surviving Congress, a guide for congressional staff. He is currently a principal with the OB-C Group.