Wednesday, June 20, 2018

World Refugee Day 2018 : Arabs are still leading no.1 world refugees

On Wednesday, the World commemorated the World Refugee Day and it seems that the situation of the refugees worldwide is not getting better but rather worse especially for Arab refugees.

The UN’s Refugees watchdog “UNHCR” says the number of refugees worldwide has reached at the end of 2017 in total to 68.5 million people displaced from their homes in its annual report.
This is the highest number of refugees the world has ever seen. Forget about the World Wars of the 20th century, the number of refugees has been increasing for the past 6 years and it does not want to stop.

According to the UNHCR’s numbers, 2.9 million people have become refugees in 2017 only worldwide.
The number of people forcibly displaced from their homes worldwide is 44,000 people every day. That’s an unfortunate record rate as well scary one.
The UNHCR is reporting that 31 people were newly displaced every minute in 2017
Unfortunately, that increase comes at the same time the World is witnessing an awful scary return of right-wing fascism that rejects refugees worldwide.
I do not think that the world has seen such hateful attitude against foreign refugees we are currently witnessing since the World War II.
Now out of those 68.5 refugees who are forced to their home because of conflicts, wars and human rights violations; only 25.4 million refugees are registered with the United Nations’ refugees agencies.
Arabs as in Palestinians and Syrians are still making the biggest group of refugees technically speaking.
Palestinian refugees in 1955
Palestinian refugees in a refugee camp in Jorda
in 1955 


There are 5.4 million Palestinians registered UNRWA.
Palestinian refugees are the biggest group of refugees displaced from their homes even before 1948. For more than 60 years, the world has ignored them.
They are the only people in the world that the United Nations created a special refugees agency for other than the UNHCR.
The Palestinian refugees are also the first people in the world without a truly independent country to return to.
In case you ask why, well simply because their land where they lived there all their history was taken away and was occupied by Zionist settlers thanks to Europeans who decided to get to rid of all Jews in Europe and send them to Palestine so they “Jews” and Arabs go on with an endless fight.

I won’t go into details and explain what has been said thousand times. This is the only way to put it.
The future of Palestinian refugees and their right to return to their homeland are one of the unresolved issues in the Middle East’s peace process.
As US President Donald Trump and his administration think that they resolved the unresolved Jerusalem issue with his stupid decision by recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel.
The Trump administration decided to cut its funding to the UNRWA in order to force the Palestinian people to accept their terms. 
Rich Arab Gulf countries can bail out the UNRWA if they stop to fight each other simply.
Now his son-in-law , the Miracle child of US politics Jared Kushner is touring the Middle East just like a salesman to offer that deal that resolve both the Gaza siege and the refugees in Gaza as well : USD 1 billion investments in Gaza’s economy aka constructing bunch of economic and development projects that will benefit Gaza in North Sinai.

You read it right: in North Sinai. Once again the talk about resettling part of the Palestinian refugees in North Sinai is back at least online in Egypt.
The fact that thousands of Egyptians have been evacuated from their homes in the border city of Rafah in the past three years as part of Egypt’s war on terrorism scares many people. Some Egyptians believe that it could be an introduction to the resettlement project and that the not-so-good economic conditions of Egypt will be used as a negotiation card.
One important fact people also tend to ignore is that neither the Egyptians people nor the Palestinian people will accept this deal.
Syrian refugees in Jordan
Little Syrian refugees in Jordan's Zaatari camp, the biggest UNHCR camp since the WW II
"Reuters"
Moving to the Syrian refugees, the second biggest group of Arab refugees in the world
Out of 19.9 million refugees under the UNHCR Mandate, there are  6.3 million Syrian refugees in the World so far. The Al-Assad regime in Syria says that its population has reached 18 million in 2018.
I do not think that Syrians refugees will return back to their homeland any time soon as long as Al-Assad regime is there protected by Russia and Iranian-backed sectarian militias. I do not think that rich Arab countries that helped in turning the Syrian revolution into a civil war by proxy

There are currently 129,507 Syrian refugees out of 228,941 refugees registered with the UNHCR in Egypt according to its official numbers in June.
The Syrian refugees make up 57% of the refugees registered with the UN refugees body.
Most of those Syrian refugees are concreted in Cairo as well Nile Delta yet there are other undocumented Syrian refugees communities in Upper Egypt.
Unofficially, some are estimating that there are half million Syrian refugees in Egypt.
It is worth to say that President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi always says that Egypt is currently hosting 5 million refugees.

Now interestingly, Egypt and EU reached in December some agreement or understanding accordingly EU countries like Britain and Netherlands are going to take some of the refugees staying in Egypt and resettle them in their territories.
That had been done already in the past few months according to the Egyptian ministry of foreign affairs.
Updated: Portugal offered to resettle 400 refugees residing in Egypt in 2018 and 2019 in its territories.

Despite economic hardships Egypt is facing, I think Syrian refugees who decided to settle down in the country are doing well. From time to time I hear and read about those wonderful projects made to help the Syrian refugees whether through the help of the Syrian community in Egypt or with the help of NGOs and international organizations.

In February, I have read about that beautiful small sports academy to train Syrian kids in Alexandria. I have read also about similar sports academy dedicated to Syrian children in Cairo.
In May, I have known that the UNHCR decided with local authorities to develop and upgrade the famous Syrian street in October city. 

I wanted to talk about the situation of Myanmar’s Rohingya refugees but I guess it will be too much for this post.

1 comment:

  1. May Allah swt help the Refuge to
    Survive and return to their home land.

    ReplyDelete

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