After five years of fighting in Syria, neighbouring countries continue to bear the brunt of the burden of offering sanctuary to millions of refugees. While Europe grapples with its own influx, Turkey alone has absorbed nearly two million. Housing them in refugee camps along the border and providing basic health insurance and identity cards has cost the Turkish government $1.5 billion (Dh5.5bn). Jordan has spent nearly $3 billion providing similar services to its big share of Syrian refugees.
With the crisis unlikely to be resolved in the near future, western powers are finally taking serious steps towards finding an interim solution to the refugee crisis. The United States will accept 10,000 refugees this year, while the European Union is talking about absorbing hundreds of thousands. But with up to 30,000 refugees crossing the border into Turkey in a single day, this is nowhere near enough to even begin to solve the problem.
In each case, European and American politicians know that taking in even these relatively modest numbers of refugees will come at a high cost – financially, but also socially and politically. This is in stark contrast to the case of far less affluent countries such as Lebanon, where the surge of refugees make up one quarter of its population, with all the costs associated with that.
It is clearly in the West’s interests to have as many refugees as possible stay in neighbouring countries, which is why a key part of German chancellor Angela Merkel’s state visit to Turkey this week is about offering financial support for that to happen. From Berlin’s perspective, this investment would be a bargain.
For his part, Turkish prime minister Ahmet Davutoglu has aggressively rejected the idea of his country hosting refugees indefinitely and vowed to keep control of illegal immigration. But the reality is that refugees who remain in the countries bordering Syria are more likely to return home when the fighting ends than if they are settled in California or Cologne. As with anything in Syria, there are no easy answers but the international community has to do more to help those countries who bear the highest cost.
