"You have to understand that no one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land."
This line, from the poem Home by the British Somali poet Warsan Shire, encapsulates the horrific decisions that refugees face. They are decisions that every person who was ever a refugee has had to face, whether they face it today, as Syrians staring north across the Mediterranean, or they faced in during the Second World War, as French men and women heading south to the safety of Morocco.
Such difficult decisions never get easier, not for refugees and not for those offering refuge. Yet when we look back at the photographs and videos from the 1940s, when we read the stories of those who witnessed and lived through that time, it is natural to think that – of course – something unprecedented had to be done at that moment.
Nobody at the time wanted to let hundreds of thousands of their neighbours into their countries. No one looked at the mass of Europeans across their borders – hungry, injured, carrying all they owned in the world – and wanted to care for them in their already-strained countries. But they did, because it was an unprecedented situation.
That is the situation that we face today. The Syrian refugee crisis, in the Arab world and in Europe, is the single greatest test of the international order so far this century.
It is a test of how nation states handle a crisis that is beyond anything they have faced for decades. It is a test of how public opinion and political leaders handle a catastrophe on their doorsteps and in their countries. As of now, we are failing that test.
This test is particularly acute in Europe, but it is not felt there exclusively. For many reasons – not merely because Iraq is dangerous – the refugee wave from Syria has moved north and east, with the vast majority of Syria’s refugees now seeking refuge in the Levantine cities of the Arab world and Turkey. As the International Rescue Committee has pointed out, there are more Syrian refugees in Istanbul alone than there are in all the 28 countries of the European Union combined.
There is a failure of political will, for sure. But political will often reflects and is moved by public sympathy, and in that there has also been a noticeable decline.
On one level, this is puzzling. There has been, among both the Arab and European publics, an extraordinary outpouring of public sympathy.
When small, heartbreaking stories of Syrians struggling on the streets of Arab and European cities have gone viral, the result has been significant amounts of money donated. Homes have been opened up, jobs offered, food, warmth and human connection given. The kindness of strangers is, as always, greater than anyone can imagine.
But the refugee crisis is now bigger than any one group of individuals, bigger than any one country.
And that is where there has been a failure of public sympathy. The individual feelings of generosity towards struggling human beings has not been accompanied by a similar pressure on governments to act to solve, or at least ameliorate, the crisis.
This is not a question about the contributions of individual countries or the number of refugees rehoused. It’s a broader question about public sympathy in an age of mass media.
Because we know the stories of these refugees. They are not the anonymous masses of the European war exodus, glimpsed only in newsreels or forming the background sentence in a news report. They have Twitter and Instagram accounts.
We have seen their photos, read their names, heard their voices. Many have told their stories first hand on video sharing sites – some even document their journeys from Syria. We know more about the refugees from Syria than we have known about any group of refugees at any point in human history. Why then are we still indifferent?
There are explanations, but they are partial at best. Yes, Europe is living through the remnants of a recession. Yes, the long legacy of the propaganda against Islam that accompanied the war on terror is still felt. Yes, we are living in a self-centered age.
But those reasons are partial. Otherwise, how to explain the generosity of individuals?
The question at the heart of this is how did we become so hard-hearted? When did the walls erected around us, of borders and nationalities and religion, suddenly become so real, at a time of such crisis?
Perhaps, after all, that is the most fascinating and frightening part of the crisis. Not that we cannot live as one big human family at the best of times – it is self-evident that, for most of us, most of the time, we cannot.
But that, at the very worst of times, at the moment of catastrophe, at the point where the disaster approaches, the divisions melt away and we look around and realise that we will stand or fall together, at the moment when all the rules should change, we still cannot tear down those walls and see the huddled masses for who they are. They are us, a fraction of a second later, a sliver of land away, the us who took a heartbreaking decision that none of us has yet had to make.
falyafai@thenational.ae
On Twitter: @FaisalAlYafai
