 
NHUCH: Welcome to
today's Starr Forum
on the global refugee crisis.
Today's event is
co-sponsored by the MIT
Center for International
Studies and the Inter University
Committee on
International Migration.
I'm Michelle Nhuch
and I'm thrilled
that you're here
to be participating
in this timely discussion.
Today's talk will be a panel
discussion followed by Q&A
with the audience.
For Q&A, I just want to ask that
you line up behind the mics.
We are taking a
video of the event
and we need to capture audio.
And I wanted to
say the talk will
be moderated by Anna Hardman.
Dr. Hardman has taught at Tufts
University in the Economics
Department since 1995.
Her research focuses on urban
economics and on migration.
She's a member of
the Inter University
Committee on
International Migration
and is currently organizing
a workshop at MIT
on the economics of
forced migration.
Dr. Hardman will provide a brief
overview of the global refugee
crisis and also
introduce our panelists.
Please join me in
welcoming Dr. Hardman.
[APPLAUSE]
HARDMAN: Michelle, thank you.
What I'd like to do is start
by introducing the panelists
and then give my very
brief introduction
to the subject of
today's discussion.
Our first speaker
will be Ali Aljundi,
who's a project officer for
Syria with our Oxfam America.
He's been a Syrian civil
activist whose brought
his diverse experience
and wide knowledge
of the Syrian conflict to
his work at Oxfam America
as a Syria Project Officer.
Ali's work focuses on peace
building and empowering
Syrian civil society.
Before he left
Syria in 2012, Ali
participated in
establishing a local NGO,
he contributed to launching
that NGO's platform,
he helped to secure funds
for sustainable community
empowerment projects.
He's also worked at United
Nations Relief and Work
Agency on Youth Employment
and Career Development.
He has a Bachelor's degree
in economics from Damascus
University and a masters in
Sustainable International
Development from Brandeis.
Our second speaker is
Nahuel Arenas who's
worked with Oxfam since 2007.
He's led humanitarian
responses in Mozambique, Chad,
Mauritania, Burkina
Faso, and South Sudan,
and provided support for
Oxfam's response in Haiti.
He had previously worked for
Action Against Hunger and Japan
International Cooperation Agency
in a number of other countries.
He has a master's degree from
SOAS in London in International
Politics and has degrees in
Crisis Management and Public
Policy.
He joined Oxfam in 2013 as
Deputy Humanitarian Director.
He's now the Director of Oxfam
America's Humanitarian Response
Department.
Our third speaker is Jennifer
Leaning, the Francois-Xavier
Bagnoud Professor
of the Practice
of Health and Human
Rights at the Harvard
School of Public Health.
Dr. Leaning directed the
program on humanitarian crises
and human rights at the Harvard
School of Public Health.
Subsequently, she was founder
and co-director of the Harvard
Humanitarian Initiative.
Professor Leaning's research
and policy interests
include international
humanitarian law
in crisis settings,
human security
in the context of forced
migration and conflict.
She has field experience in
problems of public health
and human rights in
crisis situations,
she's written widely
on those issues.
I have to say, I
remember very well
a talk she gave a year or so ago
at the Center for International
Studies in which she talked
about the Syria crisis
in particular, and
which really made,
to me, a great
deal of difference
in the degree of awareness of
how profound the problem was.
Professor Leaning has
co-founded and served
on the board of Physicians
for Human Rights,
on the boards of Physicians for
Social Responsibility and Oxfam
America, and then there's
a list of journals
she's edited, publishers
for which she's
on the board of
directors of syndics.
I'm going to stop
because if I read
the whole of Professor
Leaning's bio,
we would be here a long time.
Our last speaker is Serena
Parekh, an Assistant Professor
of Philosophy at Northeastern
University with degrees
from Boston College, Catholic
University of Louvain,
and a BA from McGill.
Professor Parekh's
primary interests
are social and political
philosophy and the philosophy
of human rights.
She's working on a manuscript
about our moral obligations
to refugees, which
is forthcoming.
It's going to come out
from Routledge in 2016.
The tentative title is
"Refugees and the Ethics
of Forced Displacement."
And that is our
board of speakers.
You will be hearing
them in a minute.
I'm going to try to be just a
little provocative in talking
about-- introducing the topic
of the global refugee crisis
by asking first, is it global?
Is what we're seeing in
migration today really global?
When, if we're thinking
about Syria, what about--
are the forced migrants
fleeing Syria, or Syria, Iraq,
and Afghanistan,
and the countries
providing shelter for,
or to some extent,
providing shelter for them,
either in camps in Jordan,
Lebanon, or other, is that part
of this global refugee crisis?
Is this a global
refugee crisis which
also includes refugees
and regular migrants who
are leaving Myanmar?
Who are leaving Central America?
Is it because Europe
is the destination
that the Syrian
crisis has attracted
so much more attention?
I don't say enough,
and certainly not
enough of a
humanitarian response.
But I think that's a question
that deserves to be asked.
Next question.
The title of this event
includes the word refugees.
Does legal status matter?
I don't expect
that everybody here
is familiar with the legal
definition of refugees
but I hope that one or
more of the speakers
will address that issue, that
just because somebody leaves
their country because
they're afraid
doesn't automatically make
them, in legal terms, a refugee.
 
Doesn't automatically make
them eligible for asylum.
It may make them eligible
to apply for asylum
but there's a long wait between
applying and getting asylum.
Thirdly, what makes it a crisis?
Is it the size of the flow?
The pace with
which it increased?
Is it the destinations?
Which is back to Europe,
which is reluctant,
Lebanon, which is overwhelmed,
Jordan, overwhelmed?
Turkey, using the crisis to
seek to elicit concessions
from the European Union?
Is it that the character
of migrants, particularly
the Syrian migrants,
seems to be significantly
different from many previous
large refugee flows, in Kosovo,
in Rwanda, and so on?
And not least, is
it the smugglers?
Is it the fact that the
smuggling industry appears
to have become much more
important and much more
dangerous than it
has been in the past?
And I guess lastly,
highly visible deaths.
I'm not going to
introduce all the numbers
but let me just-- the
New York Times recently
had a really excellent
article which
showed the relative
size-- the photograph is
about 160 migrants waiting
in southern Hungary
to board a bus to
get registered,
but can you see a minute
blip, 160 migrants,
in the corner of the
image that you're seeing?
That's the scale of those people
relative to the 160,000 people
who were supposed to be
allocated to different EU
countries under the
plan that's still being
debated and negotiated at best.
The 549 refugees in
Greece, Italy, and Hungary
who were the only ones to
be eligible for that EU
resettlement plan, the
1.3 million people who've
applied for asylum this year,
or the 4.7 million asylum
seekers who are in Turkey,
Lebanon, and Jordan.
And finally, is it the
dangerous sea arrivals?
Many of the stories that we've
been reading in the press
are about dangerous
sea arrivals,
about the numbers of people.
Certainly this summer, I saw
an island I'm familiar with,
which has received so far
this year 4,600 refugees,
migrants, what we
want to call them--
I'm not sure I'm comfortable
choosing a single word
but certainly people
traveling in great distress,
in great need-- that's an
island with a full time
population of less
than 2,000 people
and that's not one of the places
most overwhelmed by refugees
by any means.
I'd like to introduce
now I've said a little.
Ali Aljundi, you're
our first speaker.
 
ALJUNDI: Good
afternoon, everyone,
and thanks for giving
me the opportunity
to talk about Syria,
my beloved country.
 
So I'll talk in my presentation
about Syrian culture, conflict
roots, conflict timeline,
and conflict impact
on the Syrian people, and
about the refugee crisis
which is everybody's
talking about now,
and I will close
with some comments.
So first, Syria has
one of the oldest
civilization in the
history and everybody
has some rules in Syria.
If you see on this
map, you will see
multiculture, multi-ethnic
and religious group,
they were living with each
other for thousands of years,
literally thousands of years.
On the left you can
see this picture.
This is from old Damascus
in a [INAUDIBLE] called
[NON-ENGLISH SPEECH].
This is a Jewish family house.
One of my friends,
who was a refugee,
immigrated from
Palestine to Damascus.
He lived next to this
family and he told me,
when he was a child, he
used to come to this family
and to turn on their
gas on Saturdays
because Jewish families
are not allowed
to turn gas on on Saturdays.
So they respect each other,
they celebrate the eve,
they celebrate all the occasions
and they were still living
there like this until recently.
 
So opposite to now, we are
talk about the refugee crisis.
Syria was a host of
refugees from the area.
First from the genocide
against Armenian
happened in 1915 Syria
received-- in '15,
Syria received more than
100,000 refugees from Armenia
and the people in Aleppo
were very generous
with their own saving.
They received them and allowed
them to start their own lives.
I am from the middle
of Syria and my town,
it is a rural area, we received
few families from Armenia.
The people there, the local
community, they helped them.
They gave them a
land and helped them
to make a church in the town.
Still the ruins of
this church there.
It is a Muslim district but
they helped the people to do.
And because we have a lot
of grapes in our area,
so they open one of the
best wine factories in Syria
in the 1940s and '50s.
So when the Palestinian
Nakba happened in 1948,
Syria received Palestinians,
more than a half
million people, and they
gave them full properties
to live and to start
their own life.
When Iraq-- I mean,
the invasion happened,
and [INAUDIBLE] conflict
in Iraq happened,
Syria received more
than one million people,
Iraqis, refugees.
Also, Lebanon, when they have
conflicts, civil war in 1975
and then 2006, they received
thousands of people.
Others also.
So this is a culture
where we-- when I came,
I came to United States to
study masters in Brandeis.
So the first day in my
school, I went there, I
met one American Somali.
He hugged me and
said, are you Syrian?
I said, yes.
Just then I thought he started--
almost he wanted to cry.
I said, why are doing this?
He said, because my cousin
was a refugee in Syria
and he used to go there,
and he loved that country,
and he told me a lot
about your civilization,
about your culture, how
you deal with the people.
So I mean, this is
the culture where
we were before this happened.
 
So the approach
I'm using, I will
use the humanitarian aspect when
looking for the Syrian crisis.
It is development
in the reverse.
And it happened everywhere
because of social exclusion,
marginalization, slow economic
growth, in addition to
some other reasons
or factors related
to the conflict of the identity.
So Syria started in 2000 the
Economic Liberation Process,
but this process
was not accompanied
by the reform and law
regulations and the building
in suitable institutions.
So this one, I will try to say
the key factors that why we
have social problems in Syria.
So the liberation
of economy that
they started, it made
the disparity high,
increased the disparity
between the rural areas
and the urban areas.
It doubled in that time.
Also, it deteriorated
the agriculture sector,
which was one of the
main sources of income
for the people, because
they cut the subsidies
and we have very heavy
throughout 2006, 2009,
which took 60% of the
livestock in Syria.
So with this, we have
internal immigration
from rural areas to
main cities, and they
made informal
circlings, and these
are the people who started
anew that probably--
who felt discluded, and
who felt marginalized
and lacked job opportunities.
Also, the government tried
to allow the public sector--
the private sector
to play it slow
but because we don't
have the regulations,
we don't have the
empowering environment,
so the labor market managed
to absorb 400,000 only out
of 1.6 million
newcomers to the market.
So these are the
situation, I mean,
what was happening in
Syria before the crisis.
So they did not
come in one night.
So the conflict in Syria started
by peaceful demonstrations
in [INAUDIBLE] in March 2011.
And then, in the summer, it
moved to more violent conflict
with the establishment
of the Syrian Free Army
and the extremist groups
were started, I mean forming,
the conflict with
the government.
So the brutal and the
violence started by that time.
In 2012, Kofi Annan tried to
solve the problem in Geneva One
and he failed.
Then we have Geneva Two
in 2014, it failed also.
And after that, the
[INAUDIBLE] announced
it's [INAUDIBLE] in
[INAUDIBLE] in August, 2014.
Followed by that, United
States air strike started,
and then we have
Russia now started it's
own air strikes on the Syria.
So this is what's going
on in the country.
If you see a [INAUDIBLE]
like it is a proxy, war,
it's a new war.
Well, you cannot, I mean,
say this is internal factors,
these are external factors.
So it is making the
conflict worse and worse.
And we cannot see, I mean--
the violent conflict,
we cannot see it without the
Russia, United States, Iraq,
Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
and Iran conflict.
The original conflict played
a critical role in this.
It's what-- if we
see now with it--
because of the vacuum of power
and the problems, you see,
[INAUDIBLE] Syria became
attractive destination
for all extremists
from all the worlds.
We have now-- some
estimations, they
say we have 7,000
groups, militant groups,
fighting in the country.
So this is some of the
humanitarian crisis.
So, first thing now, we
don't have any mechanism
to protect the civilians,
which is very most needed
for the people to
stay in the country.
There is at least 250,000
killed, one million
injured, and 7.6
million displaced.
When we talk about displaced, we
see the figure, but 7.6 million
means they lost their houses,
children without education,
forced labor, child labor,
the associated things.
No health services,
no basic services.
So this is some of the
things that-- and so,
in addition, we have five
million people in hard to reach
areas.
500,000 among them
are in besieged areas.
So this is the crisis
we are talking about.
Some economic factors,
we have war economy
now we have groups, fighting
groups, in the country.
They have benefits from
kidnapping, looting,
and smuggling, and selling
goods in unimaginable prices.
So there are people now
who are benefit from this.
Also, the sanctions,
the European sanctions,
the Syrian exports.
Syrian exports also supported,
enhanced, this war economy.
The Syrian currency depreciated
from 45 Syrian pound for $1
to 340 now.
More than 6 times.
7 million now live in extreme
poverty and we lost about 40%
of the capital investment
and of the economy.
The estimated losses of this
about more than $200 billion
they put the loss in the Syrian
crisis from 2011 until now.
See the impact on the education.
Syria was one of the best
companies in the education.
We have like 96% for
men literacy rate.
Now 50%, 52% of the
kids without school.
For years, most of them,
they did not go to school.
90% in Daesh, the terrorist
area, they don't go to school.
And we have 4,000
schools now either used
for displaced people
or out of work.
In addition to the risk
of going and teaching,
and the lack of
staff, so many things.
This has also some associated
results in-- the kids,
they go and work for to
support their families.
There are many issues
related to this, also.
So the health sector,
the basic services
are missing in the country.
More than 60% of
the infrastructure
is already destroyed.
Like in my hometown,
in the middle of Syria,
where this little arrow--
I talked to my mom,
she told me they stay
15 days without water
and that the electricity
comes few hours a day.
So I mean, this is the kind
of life the people are living.
 
So we have some programs
in the United Nation trying
to help the Syrian
people, I will not talk--
but still, there are five
million people under served.
It is very difficult to
access and to reach them.
So refugee crisis.
If you see now we have-- we
talk about four million refugee
crisis.
Why this crisis?
People are escaping because they
don't have any other option not
because they want
to have internet
or to see TV in the United
States or other countries.
They don't have any
other option but still
they have the courage
to travel and to have
all the risks to save their
families and their lives.
Refugee crisis for Syria is more
than Europe or United States
because we are losing all
the higher educated people.
We are losing all the human
resources, it is a brain drain.
 
Now we talk about the refugee
crisis, we forget the reason.
Look at these two charts.
You see the casualties?
It goes in the same
direction with the refugees.
So more casualties,
more dead people
[INAUDIBLE], you
have more refugees.
So this is the
root of the crisis,
where we have to think not only
to solve the refugee crisis.
 
So what we can do?
Now all the people thinking
about providing more arms, more
weapons, more develop,
it is very obvious
that there is no
military solution.
And everybody from
United Security Council
talk about political solution
but in practice, they're
providing different
parties with more weapons.
So we need some
more work on this
to implement the United
Nations resolutions.
So this is the key thing.
We have to find things how to
protect the civilians in Syria.
If we don't protect
them, they will not
stop from going
outside the country.
So we have to deal with this.
In brief, we have to deal with
the crisis and its source,
not at borders.
It Is not to put more walls
because people will not
stop fleeing.
Provide them with
some other options
and they will be happy to
stay in their countries.
So at last, please, as
Syrians, please give us
some hope that we will, someday,
will go back to our country
and participate in
rebuilding our country.
It is very big
task but hopefully
we will be able to do
something in the future.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
 
Good evening, my name
is Nahuel Arenas.
I work at Oxfam as
Humanitarian Director.
Thank you for
inviting me and I'm
honored to be a member,
a part, of this panel.
My presentation will
have three parts.
One, I will present some
facts and figures to put
the crisis in perspective.
Then I will share
with you some stories
of Syrian refugees, some
of their personal stories,
trying to illustrate the
extended nature of this crisis.
And then I will talk about
what organizations like Oxfam
are doing and what we
think about this crisis.
So this is the most recent
aspect of the crisis
and what we all
are hearing about
is the arrival of refugees
alongside incoming migrants
in Europe.
More than 600,000 people arrived
through the Mediterranean
this year alone.
 
We have seen peaks of up
to 7,000 people per day
and this is why this
crisis in Europe
is most of all a
protection crisis.
The winter is
coming, the shelter
are always overstretched.
There is no enough facilities.
25% of the arrivals are
children and up to 6,000
unaccompanied children
have been registered.
Of course, the
risk of smugglers,
traffickers, all sorts
of abuse, is there.
 
Most of them are
arriving are Syrians.
I don't know if semantically
we should call it
the global crisis
but what I know
is that one in every five
displaced persons in the world
is a Syrian.
So it's the largest uprooted
people in the world today.
So we are talking
about more than 250,000
this year is arriving
from Syria alongside
on with other nationalities like
Afghanistan, Iraq, and Eritrea.
But particularly in the
Mediterranean route,
Syrians are 70% of arrivals.
 
But going back to the
root of this crisis,
we know that there
are-- Ali has mentioned
7.6 million Syrians
displaced within Syria
and more 4 millions refugees.
Most of them are
in four countries,
particularly in Turkey, about
2 million, more than a million
in Lebanon-- this is
registered refugees.
I will talk more about the
Lebanese case in a moment.
650,000 in Jordan, 250,000,
more or less, in Iraq.
But now we are going to talk
a little bit about the funding
of this response.
The reason why we see these
effects in Europe now,
it's clear, it's
just the consequence
of increasing desperation
and hopelessness of Syrians
that see that their only chance
to get safety and dignity
is risking their lives
and crossing into Europe.
 
So according to this data
coming from the European Union,
half a million Syrians
have requested for asylum.
 
Just to put it in
perspective, if they were all
granted asylum that
would mean-- that
would represent 0.07% of
the European population.
And even if Germany
accepted all of them,
that would represent only
0.6% of Germany's population.
Just keep these numbers in
mind because I will also
talk about what is the situation
in some of the neighboring
countries like Jordan
and particularly Lebanon.
So who are the Syrians
coming to Europe?
A recent study by [? Reach, ?]
this is from September,
tells us that they're
predominantly young and male.
The reason is
because it is costly
and it is a trip of high
risk, so many of them
go in advance of
their families and try
to get a more safe and
legal way for their families
to join them later on.
An important piece of
information, the majority
of them have been
previously living
as refugees in neighboring
countries like Jordan, Lebanon,
and Turkey, and Iraq,
which also confirms
that the situation in
these neighboring countries
is not giving them
a sense of safety,
and sense of dignity
and certainty.
 
As Ali pointed out, this is--
Syria was a medium income
country and these refugees
are in, most of them,
in middle income countries.
That makes the nature of this
crisis very different one,
and also in terms of
providing assistance, that
makes it much more challenging.
Most of the Syrians
in these countries
are not in refugee camps.
They are renting a
house or an apartment
in places like Beirut or Amman.
The decreasing aid, the
lack of opportunities,
no jobs, uncertainty, I
mentioned this already,
but also the sense that there
is a window of opportunity now.
Many of them are hearing some
political leaders in Europe
and thinking that this is an
opportunity, that they might
be welcome, and they don't
want to lose this chance,
particularly before
the winter starts.
And it seems that the
train will continue.
UNHCR are planning to
receive 1.5 million this year
and another 1.5 next year.
So we are in October
now, and 10 months
into the year the aid appeal for
Syria is only being funded 44%.
This means that there
are drastic cuts in aid.
You either reduce the
quality of the assistance
you are providing, or
you reduce the number
of people that are
receiving assistance,
or in most of the cases, both.
 
The countries that are hosting
these refugees, like Jordan,
and Lebanon, and Turkey,
have been really generous.
They have taken a
disproportionate burden
in hosting refugees
and the support
that other countries have
provided has been very limited.
So you can see some
of these figures.
Turkey, I read
yesterday in the news,
claims that they
had spent already
8 billion Euros in supporting
and taking care of refugees.
Europe is, I read, willing
to provide one billion.
So there you see the gap and you
see the political complexity.
Countries like Jordan spending
around $870 million a year.
Iraq, the Kurdish
government, is doing a lot.
They are hosting
refugees in camps,
predominantly in
the Kurdish region,
but Iraq has a humanitarian
crisis of its own.
There are 2.5
million of internally
displaced people in Iraq.
 
So Iraqis, themselves, are
trying to flee from conflict.
So the case of Lebanon.
Lebanon, it's estimated
that they have a population
of 4.5 million people.
Registered refugees in Lebanon?
More than one million people.
That represents 25%
of their population.
So one in every four people
that you cross in Lebanon
is a Syrian refugee and
this registered refugees.
Because of the pressure
on these countries
and on their economies
they are, of course,
trying to put in place
procedures that restrict
the inflow of refugees.
And so sometimes, and
it's the case in Lebanon,
these procedures are so
onerous and expensive that it
is very difficult for
Syrians to get permits
or to renew their permits.
They are asked to
apply for visas.
Could be tourist
visas, for which
they need to have $1,000
in their pocket and a hotel
booking.
Business visa,
medical visa, student
visa, so it's been a
very, very difficult.
If you're not a
registered refugee,
it's very difficult
for you to get access
to services like health
services, education, schools,
and assistance in general.
So that puts a lot of
pressure also on refugees
and we know the consequences.
 
So let me share some
of these stories.
 
I was in Lebanon last
week and I met this man.
His name is Ahmed Mohammad.
He came to Lebanon this year
in-- most of restrictions posed
by the Lebanese government
are in place just generally
and since May,
the UNHCR actually
stopped registering
refugees in Lebanon.
Again, I'm saying,
Lebanese government
has been very generous
but there's just
been little support
and so their solution
is to post more restrictions.
This man has 13 children.
Of course, as we know, the
people who have the resources,
they might risk it and make
it to Europe but there's also
other very poor people
that cannot do that.
He lives in an, what we call
an informal tented settlement,
because there are no formal
refugee camps in Lebanon,
with his 13 children.
His wife has health issues but
cannot get access to health
services, and they are being
asked by-- the Lebanese
government asked for sponsors
to renew their permits.
They are being asked
for a $1800 per person
by the a Lebanese sponsor.
Multiply that by 15 means
it's impossible for them.
 
Two weeks ago, I've been
visiting our programs in Iraq.
A little bit of
content of what's
happening in Iraq
because there's some
also Iraqis fleeing conflict
and traveling to Europe.
This woman, her house--
below that's her house,
it's been destroyed by
ISIS-- she came back
after the Iraqi forces
with the Shia militias
and the Kurds liberated
the area from ISIS.
She's divorced.
She's in charge of her kid.
She's trying to build
her house by herself.
in towns that have
been freed from ISIS
are still displaced because
the places have been destroyed.
They don't have services,
no water, no electricity,
and some people also
are uncomfortable
if those towns are
now occupied or being
policed by Shia militias.
So this is the situation
in Iraq as well.
Of course, this exacerbates
existing and underlying
[INAUDIBLE] sectarian divisions.
I met this family last week
in a Palestinian refugee
camp in Lebanon.
This is the
Syrian-Palestinian family.
They were living in a
Palestinian refugee camp
in Syria, the Yarmouk Camp.
They had an event
management business.
They have six children.
Two daughters are
university graduates,
one is a mechanical
engineer, the other one
studied English literature.
The place where they were
living was being bombed.
At some point,
they told me, they
would hear bombs
every two minutes.
Next day, al-Nusra, Al-Qaida
affiliated group in Syria,
came through and threatened them
to take it way their daughters,
so they decided to
flee, to go to Lebanon.
In Lebanon, they are also
in a situation of legality,
they don't have proper permits.
In addition to the
restrictions on Syrians,
Palestinians in Lebanon are
banned from exercising more
than 50 professions, so
basically they cannot work.
 
Her son, Omar, the
eldest one there,
she's afraid that he might
get into some kind of trouble
and then there's no
one that can help them.
So they cannot work, they're
living out of handouts.
And so her husband decided to
go to Europe and risk his life.
He took the route
to leave via Libya.
He crossed the desert.
He suffers from asthma so it
was very difficult for him.
He got in a boat in Libya.
A boat next to his
sank and people
drowned, but he made
it to the Netherlands.
And now they are waiting.
It's going to be a long
wait, perhaps 18 months is
the average, until they might
be unified with their father
through legal means.
This is a registration
facility in Serbia,
in the border with Croatia.
There are many, many
registration centers
in Serbia in the
border with Bulgaria
and they the border
with Croatia, as well.
Facilities are
really overstretched.
In Greece, they receive an
average of 5,000 people a day.
You can imagine crowd
situations, lack of information
on their legal status,
on their rights,
protection issues,
unaccompanied children,
lack of appropriate shelter,
lack of communication,
means to communicate
with their families.
Lots of protection risks when
you have these situations--
shared toilets, shared
shelter, shared rooms,
and now we are facing the
challenges of the winter.
 
This woman, her
name is Adamussa.
This photo has been
taken on October 5.
She's in Presevo in Serbia.
She has been
waiting for 72 hours
to get a travel permit
in a migrant and refugee
center in Serbia.
They are from Qamishli in Syria.
Ali, you might help me.
They went first to
Lebanon, then to Turkey,
then they took a
small boat to Greece.
Of course, they paid
smugglers for the boats.
They paid $1,200 for each adult
and half for each children.
She traveled with four children.
But smugglers put-- the boat
was supposed to hold 40 people,
they put extra 10 people and
'10 minutes after they left,
the boat began to sink.
So they were forced to throw all
their belongings into the sea
in order to stay afloat.
The night before
this photo was taken,
they were exploited
by a taxi driver
who overcharged the
family and then made
them exit his vehicle
shortly after they got it.
Then they had to walk for 10
hours to reach this place.
This is the last one.
I took this picture last week
in an informal tented settlement
in the Bekka Valley in Lebanon.
These two children,
they were playing.
I asked them, what
are you doing?
They said, we are
building the house
we are going to live in
when we go back to Syria.
I think for me this represents
that these people are fleeing
not poverty, they're fleeing
conflict and refugees
that just want to go home.
So what Oxfam-- what
we have been doing,
we have reached in
Syria, in Jordan,
in Lebanon, more than 1.6
million people with lifesaving
clean water, sanitation,
and other relief
supplies like blankets, stoves,
voucher for hygiene supplies,
building showers and toilet
blocks in refugee camps,
in formal settlements, and also
in some of these desert routes
that people use to
fly from conflict.
This is the Zaatari
camp in Jordan
where Oxfam has built
a water scheme that
is serving the 85,000
people that live there.
But we also because
many of these schemes
or repair wells, in Jordan, in
host communities in the Bekka
Valley in Lebanon,
and also inside Syria,
where we have rehabilitating
systems in Damascus.
Also, we are planning
to rehabilitate a water
system in Aleppo that
will give more than one
million people clean water.
This is a different
kind of project.
I visited these projects
last week in the Bekka Valley
in Lebanon.
This is, just as an example, a
solid waste treatment facility
that employees refugees
on a rotational basis.
They're being paid $20
a day in harvesting
[INAUDIBLE] for the last
day, and other projects
maintaining public spaces.
But this is in an interesting
place because it's in a town
that-- it's a town where
10,000 Lebanese live,
but they host 40,000 Syrians.
So these kind of projects
not only provide an income
to refugees and dignity
of being able to work,
but also help reduce those
tensions between host
communities and refugees.
 
Distribution center in Serbia.
I won't go into
more detail on that.
So we do think that no
single measure will solve
the displacement crisis but we
think that we need to change
of approach, and one that puts
dignity and safety of people
first.
Europe is now feeling the ripple
effects of the Syria crisis
but this will only increase if
the suffering and violence are
not addressed.
So we are asking rich
countries to contribute
with their fair share both
in funding the aid response
but also recently, at least
10% of the total refugee
population-- the
UNHCR has estimated
that the 10% percent of refugees
are the most vulnerable ones.
And of course,
first and foremost,
the source of the sprawling
crisis needs to be addressed.
We are pushing for the
implementation of the UN
Security Council
resolutions, we are
calling for an immediate halt of
transfer of arms and ammunition
into Syria and deliberate
attacks on civilians,
and of course, called
parties to abide
by international humanitarian
law, international human rights
law and of course, whereby the
political commitment to find
the resolution to the conflict.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
 
LEANING: Good afternoon,
it's a pleasure to be here.
I'm going to be talking
about the sort of broader
overviews of a refugee and
the international system,
and how it is now
working to some extent.
But more, I'm going to give you
an overview of some of the ways
in which we think
about refugee enforced
migration factors from the
perspective of public health.
 
So briefly on context in norms,
we'll talk a bit about wars
and why they are so linked
to forced migration,
and then I'll move
into some public health
discussions and a few examples.
So the context in norms,
and actually, Nahuel just
talked about them in his
last parting remarks,
one must bear in mind that
this is what we're taught.
This is what we are bound by.
This is what the international
normative and legal framework
is, enveloping all humanitarian
response, whether it's
Oxfam directors, Oxfam in the
field, International Committee
of the Red Cross has been
pivotal in developing
a lot of these norms.
The UN is very involved
in these issues
and has contributed
in terms of treaties
to much of what we now know
as International Human Rights
Law and Refugee Law.
So this is a set of
covenants and treaties
that are black letter law,
that bind nation states,
that discipline
military, and that
provide the guidance and
the norms for the official
and unofficial that
is institutional
and civil society
humanitarian NGOs.
And if you hear words coming
up like protection or dignity
or safety or public
health, or hear about Oxfam
working on watsan,
all of these are
issues that are
embedded in this context
and have-- to the extent that
they pertain to public health--
are bound by a number of
public health understandings
and guidelines.
So it's not a chaotic field.
Years ago, it was
much more chaotic.
But under the stress of
this particular volume
of forced migrants,
distressed migrants,
the system is having
difficulty meeting
its standards of safety,
dignity, health, protection.
And the fundamental
issue is one of funding,
it's one of manpower,
but behind that,
it's that the extent to
which this system of peace
and security has actually kind
of fallen apart, we cannot,
as a global community, say
with any certainty that
we're actually maintaining
peace and international security
for everyone in the world,
which was the aim and solemn vow
at the end of World War II,
leading to the foundational
language of the UN
charter in 1945.
So it's a climax of issues
that have been taking
their own slow way of
bubbling to the surface,
unaddressed issues,
and we're now
seeing it explode on the
national and international
stage in ways that are catching
some people by surprise.
I don't mean some,
I mean many people,
by surprise, and even
many of us who've
been working within the
system and occasionally
come back and lick our wounds
and think and talk and write
about these things
in academic settings,
and then go work
in another agency
or do investigations
in the field.
Going back and
forth, so your local
and then you come out and
see the bigger picture, still
hasn't prepared a number of
us for the astonishing speed
with which this
calamity has now been
brought upon our seas
and our land mass.
The human security discussion
I will not go into today.
It's one that I'm
deeply interested in
and it provides a certain
amount of surround sound.
It does not sound
as legally based,
it's filled with norms
and understandings
about human beings and their
attachment to the land,
their attachment to each other,
their sense of the future.
And if you look at what's going
on now from human security
perspective, you can see how
devastating this life has
become for millions of people,
probably hundreds of millions,
because-- we'll be
getting to this later
in the talk-- this might well
be the tip of the iceberg.
Behind the people that
are being helped out
of these terrible circumstances,
life-threatening circumstances,
soul destroying
experiences, that people
are being helped out,
including by completely
gracious and
invidious smugglers--
and I agree, Anna,
that the smugglers are
making a big difference.
But if they were not
there, the people
would not be able
to leave and then
we'd have different
sets of issues.
I'm not saying that
you were saying that,
but there are many people making
money out of this, including
a lot of unscrupulous
ones, but the point
being that if they weren't able
to flee, they would be dying
and in terrible
circumstances for the places
they're trying to flee from.
But the fact that
they're trying to flee
suggests that you have to
look backwards and say,
what are they fleeing from?
And this is where this
tip of the iceberg analogy
begins to have some balance
and I will come back
to that in a moment.
And the points that I'm
talking about now here,
in terms of public
health, are the evolution
of public health approaches
over the last 40 years
in an approach to
populations that
have been trying to flee
from war or major disasters.
So public health
in crisis settings
is usually in the setting
of forced migration.
Either a lot of
forced migration,
or some along with people
that are devastated in place.
And a much longer talk would
go into our epidemiology
and understanding
of the conditions
and how people suffer and
how we get to understand
what they need in health terms.
Again, the standards and
the ethics of that, but I
will not talk about that today.
I'm just evoking it here
as the context and norms
in which, when you read about
these things in the papers,
or you talk to us
later in the Q&A,
or in the course
of your own study,
it's very important
for you if you're
critiquing it or applauding it,
that you begin by understanding
the norm and context in which
these efforts are underway.
The recognition that war
is a public health problem
is actually, lamentably, late
in coming to the public health
community.
Public health was built
on the foundations
of water and sanitation,
stopping communicable
and infectious disease.
Long before the germ
theory was understood,
we, in the mid
19th century, began
to reduce deaths in
urban areas by looking
more closely at the water
systems and their pollution
by fecal oral contamination.
Now we get into the mid
to late 20th century
and after two World Wars,
some devastating epidemics
and massacres, and then
on top of that, genocides.
And in the shadow
of a nuclear threat
or the numbers of people at
risk from certain kinds of war,
were astronomical.
Public health community
woke up and began to say,
we need to look at
the conditions that
are causing deaths and morbidity
in these highly contested
armed conflict situations.
So all of us in
public health who
are looking at war
and disaster are
part of a vanguard
of the field that
is really only 75 years
old and really has
gone into high speed in
the late 1980s, mid 1980s,
in the context of response to
famines in the Horn of Africa.
So the methods we
use are developed
for assessment of
famine related mortality
in nutritionally deprived
areas in the Horn of Africa.
That's where the seasoned
practitioners started.
That's where they
started helping
us understand how to
get information out
of relatively chaotic situations
and it's from that legacy
that the rest of us have begun
to learn and teach, and improve
our understanding
and our methods.
So the gurus are that
set of responders,
humanitarian responders, are
now very senior in schools
of public health,
in academic arenas,
they are on the boards or
leadership of major NGOs,
some of them retired.
That generation, as
all generations do,
is fading but they've
been very, very
good at teaching the next
several generations coming up.
And they're the
progenitors of much
of the literature that we
have on public health in war.
So if you look at the
wars of the 20th century,
you can see that we
have a preponderance
of internal conflict, that
they target civilians,
they have inescapable
public health consequences
which often are severe
human rights issues
attendant upon them and
significant environmental
impacts.
And this is possible to see
from the sort of heuristic here.
It's not-- don't press
too hard in statistics,
but in general, at the
start of the 20th century,
the majority of
casualties were military
and by the end of
the 20th century,
the majority great majority,
are civilian, non-combatant.
Hold that in mind.
I have another
set of descriptors
here that-- again, you
could challenge the numbers,
but the trends are
fairly important
and they're powerful, regardless
of quibbling over which war
you're counting as
a war in what year.
You can see here that if
you look at armed conflict
by region from 1946
to 2014, we have
a marked increase in the number
of wars that are beginning
after World War II, and
they are essentially driven
by wars in Africa and Asia.
And you're just starting
to see the edge, 2014,
which is using 2013
data, you're just
starting to see the
edge of the uptick
in the Mideast, which
is the bar in black.
 
The other point this is
not make, though, is that--
and this is cumulative,
it's every year.
You're seeing every year, the
prevalence tracking forward,
and any peak is starting
to show new wars coming in
or others going away,
but it is sedimented.
The point is that these wars
last now for 20, 25, 30 years.
And that is the grim
background upon which we
view what is going on in Syria.
This has all the earmarks
of a war that's going
to go on for a very long time.
 
Then this is a messy
slide, but just look
at the orange, all right?
This is the increase
in the stability
of internal civil
wars or the yellow
is the wars that have
become internationalized
because of international
intervention in them.
And the actual, conventional
wars are a very low number.
It doesn't mean that
the conventional wars
are causing fewer casualties.
When you have
conventional wars, you
have great powers
like the United States
or others with very,
very heavy armaments.
But the civil wars
have a tendency,
a set of characteristics, which
is they lay waste to land,
they attack civilians
and force them to flee,
and they basically
create conditions
that make it very
difficult to return.
So here's where I'd
like to just focus
for a moment, this notion
of forced migration.
Because when we're talking
about public health in war,
we're talking about dealing with
people who are fleeing the war.
It is very difficult
to get into the war
and take care of people,
and we can come back
to that in the Q&A, but
the fundamental issue
of doing good work in
public health is access.
And by access, I mean not
just getting there, but being
able to stay there, to
set up an operation,
and see the disease or
the illness or the surgery
through, rather than having to
move quickly because there's
a threat, or basically have
to fall on the operating room
to protect the patient
because there's a bomb.
You can't really do good
work in the midst of war
and that's an important facet
of the dilemma about Syria
because much of Syria
is now pretty hot,
in terms of the impact
of the war on populations
are huddled there.
So people are either fleeing
from war and atrocity,
or they're fleeing from
major diseases, or famine,
or environmental degradation
or climate change,
and increasingly, their
level of desperation
is high enough it's little
difficult to say, well,
this person who's fleeing a
self-settled suburb in Beirut,
going now to try
to get into Europe.
In other words, Syrian in
Lebanon, getting out of Lebanon
and trying to go into Europe.
Is that person any worse off
than people that are coming out
of the Libyan war and desert?
Or from deep in the Sahil?
They tried for years,
there's increasing drought,
they can't make a living,
Boko Haram is coming there,
and they are fleeing to get
up through the Mediterranean
into Europe.
How do you say that one
person has the capacity
to become a refugee and the
other person is a migrant that
has no status in terms of
claims on safety and protection?
And this massive flood of
refugees that are-- of people,
we-- I'm using the word
distressed migration.
The massive number of people
but you could see when Anna was
talking, there was
this back and forth,
what is the language now ?
And the fact that
we actually aren't
certain about the language
is linked to the fact
that it is a great mixture
of highly miserable people
who are coming from the
collapse of their societies
for a variety of reasons.
And that's why I'm suggesting,
I'm not alone in this,
that we're seeing just the
start of a migration that
has been brewing, essentially,
and the sea of rising
aspirations, that's been
brewing for maybe 40 years.
So we, for all of
these populations,
have core interventions that
link to their emergency needs.
Security, shelter, water,
food, sanitation, health,
and protection.
There's only in one
of those phrases
does the word "health" come in.
But in terms of
norms and protection,
and trying to do right
things for people
in the right sequence, health
is actually not the first thing
you're trying to provide.
The first thing you're
trying to provide for people
is security, space where
they are no longer being
directly targeted.
Then you are trying to give them
a sense of shelter where they
can get in and be collected
with friends or family,
and then there's a
big push for water.
And often, water, and shelter
are in competition for timing,
because you need both
so drastically and fast.
Food, for sure.
People can live with not much
food for quite a long time,
except for pregnant and nursing
mothers and little kids.
And then sanitation
comes in as a key factor
because otherwise you'll see
the eruption of a disease,
because people are
informally congregated,
they're at close quarters,
their immune systems are down,
they're malnourished, and
that's just basically--
and they're subject to the
environment, which is often
cold or wet, and that
essentially breeds disease
of all kinds.
And then protection,
which is essentially
looking at who is
more likely to be
harmed by this
environment than others.
And so you have categories
of vulnerability
that vary depending upon
the situation, the context,
the culture, and we
can talk about that,
but generally speaking,
in these wars,
civilians themselves
are vulnerable.
Then women and children,
people with disabilities,
people who belong to
stigmatized minorities.
These are the
categories of people
you have to pay attention
to, whether they're in camps
or you're encountering
groups of them
in self-settled
situations in urban areas.
The problem now with the
current influx of refugees
is that people are on the move.
Very difficult to count
them or assess them
and as they are coming out
into Lebanon and Jordan,
Turkey to some extent
and certainly in Iraq,
they're not staying in one
place where you can actually get
an assessment of who they are.
Public health people and
UNHCR, so refugee analysts
and protection officers,
we like "camps."
and we put that in
quotes because camps
are dispiriting places and
people in them hate them.
So they're not good ideas.
They're criticized and critiqued
throughout the public health
and humanitarian community.
But from the standpoint
of getting information
and then being able to deal in
response to that information
with groups and
populations and families,
in an effective
and reasonable way,
it's great if they're
one place for a while.
But if they're
self-settled, then it's
very difficult to apply some
of the measures that we know.
And in this context
of forced migration,
more and more issues of
temporary or permanent
displacement come to
the fore, and we're
talking about whether
they can return,
and what are they returning to.
So this is the discourse
in forced migration.
And if you look at
refugees and IDPs
from the end of World
War II, we always
thought we would never see a
peak that we saw at 50 million
in Europe alone at the
end of World War II.
This figure, 50
million, of course
was not counting
the refugees in Asia
or in Africa of whom
there were millions,
as a result of World War II.
So this is that myopia of
the West in counting this.
But in any case, 50 million--
we've not seen it until what
is occurring now.
It's upwards of 60
million refugees and IDPs.
We've got them together
but the majority
of them, the majority of them
are internally displaced.
So we have a number
of interventions.
I've mentioned some
of them, they're just
recapitulating
them now, and when
you are going to try to
get access to a population
to see what is going on
and how to deal with them
and what their
needs are, you first
have to cover the
problem of access.
This is a road in North
Chad/Darfur border area
and we are early days of the
war in Darfur 2004, 2005.
And it's before much of
a camp has been set up,
we know the refugees
there were heading out.
And this is a sandstorm,
very hot, and landmines
from previous
wars, and the winds
were whipping up, over the road,
so you actually lose the road.
You don't want to
because you go off track
and you're going
to hit landlines.
So this is the access for
the humanitarian community.
I was part of a
human rights group,
but this was the access for
the humanitarian community
to just get up and
see what was going on
with the huddled populations.
Every different situation
has different access issues
in terms of security,
the personnel,
and security to the people
you're trying to reach.
The biggest thing
you need, in terms
of trying to understand
what is going on with people
in a public health
context, is information
and much of our work
involves getting information
about the needs that people
have and then including
that you need to get
information on protection.
And the reason some of this is
so important in war enforced
migration is that
the studies that
have been done by
humanitarian actors
trained in the techniques that
were developed in the 1980s
at war related and temporally,
mortality in war zones.
Mortality .
When you look at this, you
find that the great majority
of the deaths occur
not from actual combat,
but from the collapse of
health services and morbidities
from various kinds of wounds
and infectious diseases,
and malnutrition.
This is why public health in
these settings is so important.
 
The first use of
humanitarian methods
to assess what was going on
in refugees in a war setting,
not in a famine or
massive calamity setting,
was in the early
1990s in the Gulf War,
where a study was done to
the Kurdish refugees who
had fled out the comfortable
areas they lived in Iraq, up
to the Turkish border.
It was after the wake of the
Gulf War, when the US decided
not to go into Iraq, which
most of us thought then
was a good idea, and looking
back, it was a very good idea.
But we allowed Saddam
Hussein to think
that he could go after the
Kurds and he went after them,
and they fled to the North.
Turkey closed its borders
to the Kurdish refugees
and they were up there
in barren, high, exposed,
mountainous areas.
And these were suburban curves.
And the question, we heard
that they were dying,
and the question was why?
And people thought it
was because they didn't
have blankets, they didn't have
shelter, they didn't have food.
And a study went
up, team went up,
to actually do
mortality studies,
and this is what they found.
Death by age, Kurdish refugees.
You can see that the majority
who are dying are kids, right?
Okay, age is very important.
And the next thing you
learn when you ask who died
and how old they were, you
ask why and it turns out
it was diarrheal disease.
This population did
not know how to deal
with stream water, which
is scanty in any case,
and they were drinking it, they
were defecating and washing
in it, they were washing
their clothes in it,
and they were cleaning their
houses and their tents with it.
And so you had a complete
contamination of the water
sources and everybody
was sick with diarrhea,
and the children were dying.
This was what taught everybody
that the same techniques you
use in the study of famine and
disaster affected populations,
are going to give you a very
good insights as to what's
going on in public
health in war zones.
And I just would like to
leave you with one point
about-- it was picked up in
one of the talks earlier.
Why do people flee in war?
It's because they're
being attacked in war.
And this is the
streets of Sarajevo
during the siege in 1990s.
Snipers around the hills
were killing people.
There was no water,
no food, they'd
go out to try to get something,
people got shot, civilians.
People fled, trying to leave,
on days where the UN allowed
a ceasefire to take place,
precipitously left the areas
where they were the
stigmatized population.
And as they left, you
had phenomenal issues
of Child Protection
and separation.
This is ICRC trying to work on
this, so the kid had a label,
but in this bedlam,
families are separated
and it takes a very
long time for people
to come back
together to reunite.
And so what I'd like to end here
on this point is that you can
try to get access, you can
try to get the measures in,
you try to work within norms.
But the numbers now
are at a place where
we have to have different
methods and different ideas
and different approaches,
and in the Q&A
I'd be glad to go into
some of those ideas
if you're interested.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
 
PAREKH: Hello, my
name's Serena Parekh,
I'm a professor of philosophy
at Northeastern University
and I'm afraid from
being a representative
of the stodgiest
discipline, I don't
have a PowerPoint to
share with you today
but I will be talking about our
moral obligations to refugees.
So the war in Syria
has, of course,
been going on for
several years now
but it's only
recently that we've
begun discussing our moral
responsibility to refugees.
And I actually traced
this moment back
to the publication of photo of
Alan Kurdi, the Syrian child
who washed up on
the shores of Turkey
late in the summer of this year.
And it was after this
moment that people
started using the language
of moral responsibility
and moral obligation,
including politicians
like David Cameron,
who really hadn't
used that language before.
So now there's a debate,
hotly contested in the media,
among politicians,
and of course,
in philosophy,
over what precisely
our moral obligations are to
refugees, to people fleeing
conflict and forced-- and other
forms of forced displacement.
So what I thought
would be helpful today
is to talk about how the
international community has
understood our
obligations to refugees,
both theoretically and
in international law,
and then suggest
some ways that we
might reframe the way we think
about our moral obligations
to refugees.
So I of course don't
have time to discuss
how it would be
grounded in theory
or to show how it would
be realized in practice,
but I hope to just begin a more
robust conversation about how
we might understand our moral
obligations to refugees.
To begin, I want to point
out that it's not widely
agreed that we have
obligations to refugees, indeed
that we have moral obligations
to any needy non-citizens
period.
Many people believe our only
moral obligations are to people
who are fellow citizens.
If we do have obligations
to non-citizens,
they're what are
sometimes called
good Samaritan obligations, so
we have obligations to help,
but only when they need is
great and the cost to us
is very, very small.
And this, of course,
doesn't really
apply to the contemporary
situation of refugees
as we've learned about
even this evening.
The need is very, very high and
so these Samaritan obligations
don't really get us very far.
So if we're looking at where
do our moral obligations
to refugees come from
in international law,
we go back to the period at the
end of the Second World War,
as was discussed earlier.
So at the end of the
Second World War,
we realized we had done
something terrible.
Here were innocent people
being displaced from their home
countries, fleeing persecution,
and if we ignored them,
they would go back and they
would be killed, or tortured,
or some horrible
thing, and we realized
we did a terrible
job of that and we
needed to do a better job.
So at the end of the
Second World War,
we, the international
community, agreed
upon a set of international
legal norms that
was codified in the UN
Refugee Convention of 1951,
and this led to the formation
of the UN High Commissioner
for Refugees, who's sometimes
referred to as the UNHCR.
So this is the largest
international body
that deals with refugees.
And the UNHCR was tasked with
implementing this UN Convention
on refugees as well as
protecting refugees and finding
one at the three durable
solutions, as they're called.
Either repatriation
to their home country
once conflict has
ended, resettlement
in a third country,
or integration
into the host country where
the refugees find themselves.
What I want to suggest, is
that in the Refugee Convention
there are two asymmetrical
sets of obligations
that pertain to states.
So the first set of obligations
has to do with asylum seekers.
So asylum seekers are
people who are actually
physically in the territory
of the country they're
claiming asylum in.
So the pictures
we've been seeing
of Syrian migrants
in Greece and Italy
and throughout Europe,
these are asylum seekers.
And the most strongly recognized
legal norm and moral norm
is the norm of non-refoulement.
This says that a state cannot
send an asylum seeker back
to his home country if he or
she has a well-founded fear
of persecution.
So at the very least, if
somebody's claiming asylum,
a state has an obligation
to hear their claim
and to assess whether
their claim is legitimate,
whether they really are
fleeing persecution or not.
And this, frankly,
is why you don't
see sort of mass
deportations of people
coming from Syria or
from other places.
They can't, according
to international law.
I mean, what's interesting
is the extent countries will
go to avoid people
coming to their territory
for that reason, but I'll
talk about that in a minute.
But this is a very strong,
widely recognized, and widely
supported international norm.
So that's on the one hand.
On the other hand, we have
obligations to refugees
who are in refugee camps.
So people who are
considered refugees
according to the UNHCR,
the UN High Commissioner
for Human Rights, but are
abroad, or oftentimes,
most often, close to the
situation of conflict.
So, as we heard about earlier,
the majority of Syrian refugees
are the five countries
that are closest to Syria.
Now, we have very,
very few obligations
to refugees that are not
physically in our country.
In fact, there is no
moral or legal norm
that requires us to
resettle refugees
and there is no
requirement to fund
the UNHCR or any other
refugee organization.
Everything is strictly a matter
of generosity and benevolence.
So it's a supererogatory duty,
as we would say in philosophy,
and not a matter of obligation.
So if we resettle
refugees, it's because we
are generous, and kind,
and we love to help people,
but not because we're fulfilling
a moral or legal norm.
So you see that we have these
two really broad, asymmetrical
obligations to
refugees and I think
this has led to three
consequences, some of which
have been alluded to already.
The first consequence is that,
not surprisingly, the UNHCR
has been chronically
underfunded since its inception
and as of today.
As was mentioned earlier, the
UNHCR receives less than 40%
of what is needed in order
to fund humanitarian response
to Syrian refugees and to
refugees everywhere else
in the world.
This has meant-- and
in fact, their funding
has gotten lower as conflict has
gotten worse, as there has been
more deaths of civilians
and more refugees fleeing
from Syria, so they've
gotten less in proportion
to their need.
Things have gotten so bad
that for the first time
since the start of
the war, more people
are returning from
Jordan to Syria instead
of coming from Syria to Jordan.
So let me pause on
this for a moment.
Refugee camps in Jordan are now
so bad that individuals in them
are choosing,
preferring, to go back
to the chaos and deprivation
and hardship of civil war
rather than to live
in refugee camps.
So refugee camps
are, in many ways,
not what they're supposed to be.
Namely, places of refuge,
places of security,
places where you could access
health care, rights, security,
dignity, and so on.
So we've done a terrible job of
funding the humanitarian relief
effort.
And again, because there's no
moral obligation that states
"feel."
Anything we do is generous
and anything we don't do,
we should not be criticized
for not doing it.
The second outcome of this
asymmetry in obligations
is the discrepancy
in burden sharing.
So globally speaking,
87% of people
who are forcibly displaced
remain in the global south.
So, on the one hand.
On the other hand, less
than 1% of refugees,
of people the UNHCR
designates as refugees,
are ever resettled in the west.
So that's a huge discrepancy.
And this is, of course,
true in the case of Syria.
So though there have been about
650,000 asylum applications
in Europe, the vast
majority, of course,
remain within Lebanon, Turkey,
and the other countries
surrounding it, creating a huge
burden for these countries.
So the debate within the Western
media and among politicians
is, whether we should
be resettling 1%, 2%, 3%
of refugees, and of
course, this doesn't even
come close to addressing the
real core of the problem.
It fails to even question
the morality of whether it
is acceptable for the
poorest states in the world
to bear the biggest burden of
hosting refugee populations.
That's not even a
question that's raised.
Finally, the final outcome of
this asymmetry in obligations,
that we have no moral
or legal obligation
to resettle refugees
but strong obligations
to process asylum
seekers, is that countries
in the global north
have been largely
concerned with implementing
policies of containment.
They've aimed to contain refugee
flows as their primary concern
rather than to actually
take seriously the rights
and dignity of refugees.
So this is why the vast
majority of refugees
remain in protracted
situations in the global south.
Some have argued
that encampment,
placing refugees
and long term camps,
has become the de
facto fourth solution.
This is, in fact, how we've
decided to solve the refugee
crisis, by keeping them in camps
far away from Western shores.
Two thirds of refugees live
in protracted situations,
on average for 17 years, and
40% of refugees live in camps
and within these camps, they
are not permitted to work,
so they are entirely dependent
on international aid, which
as I mentioned earlier
is sorely lacking,
or illegal work to survive for,
again, these prolonged periods
of time in the global south.
So to stress, this is
an outcome of the sort
of out shoot of how
international law has developed
and the way we've
chosen to instantiate
our moral thinking
about refugees
into international law.
So northern states have few
obligations or incentives
to help refugees not
on their territory.
But because of the
strength of the principle
of non-refoulement they
have strong incentives
to keep refugees as far as
possible from their territory.
And this is why
Western states have
been largely concerned
with favoring
policies of containing
refugee flows outside
of Western regions.
So in short, Western
states acknowledge
that refugees need help,
but at the same time are
very anxious to
make sure that they
don't come close to actually
affecting us politically.
So this outcome can be seen
when we look at the way
the three durable solutions
that I mentioned have actually
been put into practice.
So in 2014,
according to numbers,
there were 59.5 million forcibly
displaced people in the world.
126,000 were able to return
to their home countries.
Another 105,000 were resettled
in 20 different countries
around the world and there's
no data on local integration
that's available.
So what happens then to the
more than 59.2 million people
who are outside of
their homes but do not
qualify for any kind
of state protection.
The answer is that they remain
in the global south in refugee
camps or in informal
settlements in urban areas,
supported by largely
underfunded UNHCR.
Now there are, of course,
NGO humanitarian groups.
 
And effectively what this is, is
the success of a Western policy
that is aimed at
containing refugee flows as
far as possible
from Western shores,
and this is why the current
crisis is often discussed
as a crisis for Europe.
It's a crisis of a failure
of this policy for Europeans
and only secondarily,
a humanitarian crisis
for the refugees themselves.
This is why it's not surprising
that in the EU's most recent
talks with Turkey, they focused
on how can Turkey do a better
job of containing refugees,
rather than on discussing how
the basic rights and dignity
of refugees within Turkey
can be preserved and
helped and supported.
And of course, Europe is not the
only country that's doing this.
There was a recent piece
in the New York Times
that revealed that the United
States, in the past year,
has paid tens of
millions of dollars
to the Mexican government to
intercept asylum seekers coming
from Central America to the US.
So we all remember our
asylum crisis last year,
when we had thousands and
thousands of children crossing
over the border in the
south of the United States
to seek asylum, and this was
terrible, public relations
disaster, we didn't know what
to do with them, so rather
than saying, well, how can
we address the situation
at it's root?
How can we set up centers
for protection and aid,
and preserve their human rights?
Our way of dealing
with the crisis
has been to say,
well, what can we
do to make sure they don't
show up in the first place?
And what that's meant is to
pay the Mexican government
to intercept asylum
seekers at train stations,
migrant centers, other
kinds of shelters,
other kinds of
places of protection.
So given this very
dreary situation,
it's important to
step back and ask,
despite the political
realities of what's going on,
how ought we to think
about our moral obligations
to refugees, in light of
the realities of forced
displacement in the 21 century?
And let me just briefly remind
you what we're talking about
or what this reality is.
A population roughly the size
of Italy, 59.5 million people,
live outside the protection
of the nation state.
When a person finds herself
displaced from her home
country, due to war, political
persecution, gang violence,
environmental destruction,
she will, on average,
remain displaced for
close to a generation
and oftentimes longer.
Of the forcibly displaced
considered refugees, which
is a small, small portion
of those people considered
who are displaced,
less than 1% will ever
be resettled in the west.
Though the number is
slightly higher at the moment
for Syrian refugees.
So if we do have moral
obligations to refugees,
as at least many people have
begun to wonder and discuss
out loud, it's crucial
that we expand our way
of thinking about helping
refugees from simply thinking
about it in terms
of resettlement
to engaging many of
the other forms of harm
that they experience.
I think we ought to take
seriously the moral obligations
to the forcibly
displaced that we have
while they are
between their homes.
That is, while they're between
their initial situation
of displacement, which
of course everybody
agrees is wrong and
bad and terrible,
to a solution,
whatever solution that
may be, whether
it's returning home
or resettlement or
local integration,
which everyone of course
agrees is a good thing.
Most of the people
who are displaced
remain in these
in between periods
for prolonged periods
of time and suffer
violations of dignity and
rights in a profound way.
One of the specific
harms I think
we have a moral
obligation to address
is the use of refugee camps to
deny the displaced basic rights
and political participation
for prolonged periods of time.
I think we morally
ought to challenge
the practice of
using camps as spaces
of containment and confinement.
And of course, this
is a problem that's
distinct from a question
of resettlement, which
of course is a different
moral obligation that we have
and that we should
discuss, but we ought also
to think about how we allow
refugees to be treated
while they are displaced,
while they're awaiting
this more permanent solution.
The reason the ethical
treatment of the displaced
is often ignored is
because it's seen
as both exceptional
and temporary.
But displacement is so much a
fact of everyday political life
that, far from being
seen as exceptional,
it ought to be seen
as a ought to be
treated as a normal
outcome of political life.
And secondly, rather than being
temporary, as I've mentioned,
the average displacement
is close to 20 years.
This is a long term
duration that we
ought to be preparing for
and thinking about morally.
So we can't just think about
immediate humanitarian relief
as bodies to be
kept alive but we
must think about human beings
in this long term duration
that they will be living
in, for increasing
longer periods of time in
increasingly large numbers.
And in addition, we
ought to challenge
the practices of states
that aim to contain refugees
in other countries and prevent
them from seeking asylum
in a different country.
And the right to
seek and enjoy asylum
is a foundational right in
the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights.
In the US, I feel like we hear
very often about the brutality
of Central America and what
people are fleeing from there
and yet, as far
as I know, little
has been said about the
Obama administration's
policy of preventing asylum
seekers from coming to the US
through paying the Mexican
government to essentially raid
migrant shelters,
train stations,
and other safe havens,
and forcibly return people
to places where their
lives are in danger.
This, of course, is
a gross violation
of the spirit, if
not the letter,
of the law against
non-refoulement.
And it's morally reprehensible,
regardless of how
politically expedient it is.
So to conclude,
there is, of course,
a philosophical debate
over how to ground
these moral obligations.
There's an economic debate
over how we would pay for them,
and there's a political
debate over how
we would convince
our fellow citizens
to take on the challenge
of helping refugees.
That's all true but I think
it would be an achievement
if we merely acknowledge the
gross moral injustice that
is at the heart of our
current refugee policies
and that we have
a moral obligation
to consider the treatment
of the displaced
through all stages of
their displacement,
not just in terms
of resettlement.
So to connect my claims
to the recent refugee
crisis in Europe, we
can say that on my view,
the moral obligation
of the United
States to Syrian
refugees is not exhausted
by resettling 10,000 refugees.
Even though this may seem
like a large number to some,
we must continue to ask, what's
going to happen to the close
to 4 million and
growing number of people
from Syria that have been
displaced from the war?
Under what conditions will
they be forced to live?
Even if we are not willing
to resettle more refugees,
we are still obliged to ask
this question and the answer
to it may require that
we substantially increase
our funding, indeed
when we fully
fund the humanitarian response,
that we lobby other countries
to resettle more
refugees, that we come up
with temporary legal
protection statuses
and other temporary measures
in surrounding countries
that actually protect the
dignity and rights of refugees
and not merely keep them
alive in their bodies.
We must be concerned with
our ethical obligations
to millions of people who will
never be resettled in the west
and will spend decades
living in refugee camps that
are supported, at least in part,
by the policies of our states
that aim to contain refugees
far from our borders.
We ought to challenge
states towards building
a more just refugee regime,
one that takes seriously
the full human rights
of the displaced.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
 
HARDMAN: Is this on?
Okay, thank you all.
We now have some
time for questions.
As Michelle said,
we'd like you to stand
in line at the microphones
if you have questions
so that you can be recorded
for the video this event,
and I see we have at least
one question over there.
We can start with you.
AUDIENCE: Blake
Parker, Amnesty MIT.
I wanted to compliment Oxfam
for what you do in Zaatari.
I've hosted and
housed Syrian refugees
for the past few years.
I have never met one
looking for a handout.
Paying them to work
is something that's
needed, just for
their own dignity.
They're not looking
for something for free,
they want to earn
a living, and I
want to compliment
you guys for that.
So the question I
have could either
be for you Professor Hardman,
or for Professor Parekh.
It's a refugee issue but
it's not related to Syria,
it's in Iraq.
In Baghdad, at Camp Liberty, the
[? Ash ?] [? Raffi ?] refugees
do have a legal and
a moral obligation ,
signed by Colonel [? Westmont ?]
and I met him at the White
House, for their protection.
Yet Obama has
completely ignored this.
Their protection is
not being afford it.
There's a medical siege and
blockade on Camp Liberty.
People are dying because they
can't receive medication.
I sent two doctors that were
turned away under threat of,
if they did not turn
around and walk away,
they wouldn't have time
to say their prayers.
And so this is a case
where there actually is
a legal and a moral obligation.
Could you comment
on what might be
able to be done to address
something like that, please?
One of you?
Whoever is qualified?
HARDMAN: Perhaps Professor
Leaning or Professor Parekh?
LEANING: Well, I can start.
 
The promise was made at a
time when it could be kept
and now it can't be kept,
because the United States is
not in control of what's
happening on the ground in Iraq
and these camps are places
that are under various sector
controls.
So they can exert
influence but as you know,
it's not something that
Obama or the American public
have wanted to go back
into with any form
of substantial influence
on the ground, which
requires people on the
ground and military people
on the ground.
So there are so many things
that have deteriorated
and disintegrated in Iraq and
in Afghanistan that were first
marginally working.
The US comes in and many things
happen and much is destroyed,
the US leaves, and then
whatever the forces
are we were trying
to combat, now
in a different configuration
are beginning to seep back.
And so we are now
dealing with something
like Taliban takeover
of Kunduz, which
was captured in the first months
of the war in fall of 2001.
So this is a cycle
that is going on.
It's bigger than
refugee promises.
It is many, many
promises get thrust aside
when nation states
go to war, and that's
one of the reasons one
has to pay attention
to what you say you're going to
do when you advance militarily
into a place, because
you break things.
Now, coming back
to the protection
that is created by a military
document that is transmitted
to the Commander in Chief.
That is not part of refugee law.
That is part of occupation and
in an occupation setting, which
is what we did actually
impose on Iraq.
And that was one
of the reasons why
there was a lot of contention
about the use of occupation,
because occupation law
has enormous obligations
towards the population that
is under your occupation
authority, including protecting
stigmatized minorities.
That goes up through
the Commander in Chief
and he can decide yes or no,
if he's going to honor it,
within the context
of the occupation.
But it's not part of
international refugee law.
It's basically part of the
Fourth Geneva Convention.
But as we came out and
the occupation ended,
then you're really much in a
level of a moral obligation
of a state to a small segment
of a population to which it
is actually more
thoroughly obligated,
but this one was
particularly singled out.
How can that be
actually actualized
into a practical response?
And I've given you the practical
answer that it can't but I'd
be interested in what
the philosopher says.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
HARDMAN: Parekh?
PAREKH: So to me
it seems like it's
symptomatic of a larger
condition under which refugees
are treated.
So even when there
are legal norms,
like the norms around
non-refoulement,
states routinely violate
them and states do not
call each other out on that.
There are many, many examples
of the human rights of refugees
being routinely
violated, but states
are very interested
in making sure
that they don't criticize each
other over their treatment
of refugees, precisely
so that they themselves
are aren't criticized over
their treatment of refugees.
So it's a very small, particular
instance of this larger
problem, that these
are our population who
have no state to appeal
to for their human rights.
There's no body who's going
to adjudicate their claims
and so states know that.
And they know that
they can sort of
fudge their promises to refugees
in ways that they can't, maybe
other people like
their citizens,
or citizens of other states.
HARDMAN: I'm going to take
a question over here next.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
First, thank you for a
very informative discussion
and dialogue that's
very much needed.
My question's not
necessarily in line with this
but more so, given the economic
and climate change associated
and another exasperating factors
with migration populations,
what is the role and how do
we address the role of NGOs,
transnational corporations,
and other non-state actors
in their, facilities
in their addressing
of international
development as a preemptive
act but also as they're
doing work on the ground
and in crises like this.
One of the examples
I'm thinking about
currently is in Kiribati
in Fiji, the continuing
of bottled water
by the Fiji company
while people are trying to
buy land to just grow food.
Or even right here
at home, Oakland,
where Nestle continues
to bottle water
while there's a drought
going on in California.
PAREKH: Like this?
AUDIENCE: Yes.
HARDMAN: Nahuel, I
think [INAUDIBLE].
ARENAS: Yeah, so can you
repeat your question?
What is your question?
AUDIENCE: My question
was just how do we
as an international
community and as academics
and individuals address
the role of NGOs
and transnational corporations
and non-state actors
and in their practices in the
realm of how their actions
impact global migration issues?
ARENAS: Wow, OK.
 
LEANING: Can I suggest?
You began by asking a
really good question
around environmental
degradation and drought
and diminishing water supplies,
and what are NGOs doing,
A, to address that in
a way that keeps people
home rather than has
them flee or what
or who are the bad
guys that are there,
and how is that
being dealt with?
And Oxfam is one of
the good guys that
deals with that, so you're on.
[LAUGHTER]
ARENAS: Okay and perhaps
we can link with it
with climate issues at the
source of the Syria conflict.
I don't know if
you/ But you know,
from an Oxfam perspective,
when we do different things,
we are a multi-minded
organization.
We do long term
programming, which
address climate change
issues, agriculture,
the rights of people.
We do emergency
response such as what
you've seen in my presentation.
But we also do
advocacy and campaign,
and we try to do the three of
them in an integrated manner.
So when we address a
problem, a symptom,
we also look at what
are the rights of people
that are being affected.
So that's how we approach it
and sometimes in our companies
we target the private
sector, sometimes we
are allies of the
private sector,
depending on what is the issue.
In the-- you mentioned the
South Pacific climate change.
It's a very visual thing.
I've been to the Solomon Islands
and I've been in the response
to the cyclone
[INAUDIBLE] this year
and you can hear
stories of people
that have to be relocated
from islands because
of the rise of the sea level.
And so in those
kind of situations,
we try to help
people, first of all,
adapt to their new
realities, perhaps
those are technical
solutions out there
but also we try to address the
issues around the policies.
How the government is addressing
the problem structurally.
That's what I-- I think
that's at least our approach.
Other organizations have
different approaches
and I think they're all valid.
Some of them have a
very clear mandates
to do medical assistance
and that's fine.
Others look at more
globally or-- but that's
the Oxfam approach.
Do you want to say
something about climate
change in the Syrian conflict?
ALJUNDI: Yeah, I mean, not only
the climate change, I think.
The key approach of
Oxfam, as Nahuel said,
it's about empowering
the local actors.
So in the Syrian
context, empowering
the local actors is not
an easy, especially we
have historically a
weak civil society.
So when the conflict
started, you
have like half of
the country or 60%
of the country in hard to
reach or opposition, out
of the regime control, of the
Syrian government controlled
areas.
So how to access this?
We have the
[INAUDIBLE] people who
took the lead at the
beginning and started
providing mostly
medical, shelter,
and some other services.
What are the things we are
trying to do some, like how
to empower these
as a local actor
or as a bridge between the
international community,
the international NGOs,
and the local communities
in these areas.
So that's one of the issues
we are trying to work.
The other thing is,
Oxfam also tried
to make the people to
help the people to decide
what they want.
So in Syria, even before I
work with Aga Khan foundation
and this, the drought.
I was in Syria and we
have a very heavy drought
in 2006, 2009,
and the government
was going the wrong direction.
They were providing help
for drip irrigation.
You have a critical
problem with drought
and you are giving
the people loans.
So we work on the
capacity of people,
raising their awareness,
how to consume less water,
not to use the water,
only more efficiently.
Because according to their
policies, what was happening
is more production from the--
and more consumption at the end
of the water resources.
So the key issue was to empower
the local people to design
and to help them to
decide what they need
and to think strategically.
And I think this is one of
the issue Oxfam is good at.
HARDMAN: Thank you.
I'm going to take a
question over there next.
AUDIENCE: Well,
we have to wonder
what the end game is
here, whether it's
resettlement or repatriation?
David Cameron has announced
that Syrian refugees who
come to the UK, which few
can get in, once they reach
a majority age of
18, will be returned
to their country of origin.
There's no, as I understand
it, right of resettlement,
but there is a right of
return in the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights.
There's also one in the Covenant
on Political and Human Rights.
But that, too, is a
very vague concept,
so if people are
unwilling to return,
should they be returned
by countries which have
volunteered to resettle them?
And secondly, people
who wish to return
but are being forcibly
barred from return,
such as Palestinians,
should we make an exception
in the right of return?
How strong is our
right and obligation
is the right of
return, depending
on the context in which
it's being defined?
 
HARDMAN: Thank you.
Does anyone have a-- yes?
PAREKH: So, I'd be
happy to answer that.
So the question
of repatriation is
that it's always
voluntary repatriation
though what I've read
is that in recent years,
the UNHCR, the UN High
Commissioner for Refugees who
adjudicates these
sorts of matters,
has changed the
definition of voluntary.
It's no longer means that
it's voluntary on the part
of the people who
are being returned.
It means that the
UNHCR has determined
that the country,
the home country,
is in a state in
which people ought
to want to return home to.
So it's taken the agency
away from refugees
in determining whether or not
they should or should not be
returned to their home country.
So there is still an element
of voluntary-ness there.
People can't be
forced to be returned,
but it has moved away
from a subjective concept
of voluntary-ness to
an objective concept
of voluntary-ness.
So that's the first part.
The second thing I wanted to
mention about your question
is that I think when we
think about, well, what
is the solution for refugees?
Is that either repatriation
or is it resettlement?
Are we just going to
resettle every refugee that
comes from every conflict?
And I think there's kind
of a false dichotomy
there because ultimately,
everyone wants a solution.
As Ali mentioned earlier,
most refugees want to be home.
Most human beings want to
be in their home country.
That's their home, that's
where they would like to be.
So if people are not going
home, we can assume, I think,
that it's for good reason.
Now, having said
that, of course,
the States aren't going
to be opening their doors
to resettling refugees.
So I really think
that we ought to be
taking more seriously this
interim period of displacement.
It's the case now that people
live not just their lives,
but the lives of their children
and their children's children.
People have generations
in refugee camps
in this time between
displacement and solution,
whatever form that
takes, and we just
don't pay enough
attention to that,
either politically or morally.
And we end up contributing
to all kinds of policies
and practices that
actually undermine
the life of refugees in ways
that don't need to be done.
So for example, the
use the refugee camps
as long term ways of hosting
displaced populations
isn't necessary.
And from a public
health point of view,
it's often very
critiqued as not even
being the best
way of doing this.
So if we can focus a little
bit on this in between,
certainly, look at the end
game and look at the solution,
but I sometimes worry that
looking at the solution
detracts us from
this reality which
is that most
displaced people are
going to live their lives
as displaced people.
And we ought to treat them
well while they are displaced.
We should not be
allowed to suggest them
to systematic deprivations
of their human rights
while they're displaced, just
because they're displace.
HARDMAN: Professor Leaning?
LEANING: Well, I would
say that legal definitions
and practical definitions
that are accepted by everybody
are useful because this
world is built on migration
and people are moving
for all kinds of reasons.
The extent to which
migration both distressed
and truly voluntary,
I want to get
to a better job
within my own country,
the ways in which nation states
deal with that are always
within the context of
protectionist sovereignty
in natural borders.
So internal migration
within your country,
if it's promoting
economic growth is great.
If it's because people can't
live in one part of the country
and need to go somewhere else
for a range of reasons, which
is sort of a root cause of the
Syrian war because of drought
and ridiculous state policies
in relationship to drought,
then it winds up being a
source of internal security
and the government
has to deal with it.
Now in that context, just
the way I'm describing it,
this is not an
international problem.
But it's when the issues
within one country
begin to create people
leaving their country that we
get into the issues
that are at a level
of international discussion
and, right now, consternation.
And so there, I think, we
need to use the language that
currently exists, for a
moment, think about how
states are going to respond.
There still is a distinction
between refugees and generally,
externally displaced people.
Externally displaced.
There are people who leave who
are not designated as refugees
yet, they have just fled.
All four million of the
Syrians that are now
in Lebanon, Turkey,
Iraq, and Jordan,
and Egypt, and
wherever else they are,
all of them have
been designated,
blanket, as refugees by UNHCR.
They are, therefore,
to be treated seriously
for asylum cases.
Now where they can go
and how they get there
and how they get a hearing
is another question,
but all of them, and
many of the four million
are people who have come
from refugee camps already,
they have all been
designated as refugees.
So that is off the
table as an argument.
They now need to go
through the process
and that's a very good thing.
The process may
take months or years
but that designation
is what people
have fought for in many other
battles and never gotten.
Okay.
Now, the millions
that are displaced
because of distress in their
own country and they leave,
many of them are what we are
now calling distressed migrants
and that's where I
think some of the issues
that we're talking
about here apply.
That is, they're
outside their country,
they do not have a home
they can go back to,
they do somehow find
their place somewhere,
or they are in
these vast refugee
camps that actually include
a whole lot of people
that are not refugees.
They're just being warehoused.
So the camps on the border
between Kenya and Somalia,
those camps are filled
with people who would never
qualify as refugees.
But they can't go back,
because of war and fighting,
or they're coming in
from parts of Kenya
and going into the refugee
camp because there's
a little bit more aid there.
Because Kenya is becoming
terrible to live in,
particularly the
north desert area.
So you have these
great numbers of people
who are not yet classified
as one thing or another
and it is a misery.
And this is where I
completely agree with you.
We need to be
thinking about people
who are in these transit zones.
Being in a transit and
gray zone for generations
is an appalling dilemma.
It's not really a
condition of life
that meets safety, dignity, and
attends to any of the values
we've enshrined in
international law.
And I think that the
International Committee
is slowly coming to recognized
that this is not tenable.
And yet it's also not
tenable within some
of the nation states.
I mean, Nigeria has the
third largest number
of IDPs in the world.
Now, Nigeria's big, so you
could have a whole section
of that population head
around Lagos and Abuja,
and they'd have
the largest number.
But still, when you
think that there
are IDPs on the
outskirts of Nigeria
that basically are bigger than
the ground area of like Lagos,
similarly with Kabul.
They're IDPs and the extension
of the footprint of Kabul
is now all DPs from
elsewhere in Afghanistan.
So the problem of
classification of refugees
is tight and problematic, but at
least it's a little bit stable.
And what we have no
way of classifying
right now are these people
who are externally displaced
in these gray areas, and some
of them are in refugee camps,
many of them are in the cities,
or in these distress countries
where much of the
population of urban areas
are really composed
of people who've
fled untenable parts
of that nation state
to be around an area
where there's just
a little bit of
commercial activity
and a little bit of anonymity.
This is what's happening
around the world
and then on top of that, we
have this massive flow to Europe
that is arresting our attention.
HARDMAN: Thank you.
I'd like to take
one last question.
AUDIENCE: Thank you.
HARDMAN: Tell us who you are.
AUDIENCE: I'm from Tufts
University, I'm a student.
And I just want
to know, we talked
about norms and obligations that
states should have to refugees,
but we've seen that even
obligations that states agree
to in international
agreements they
don't abide by when it's not
their incentive to do so.
And so I was wondering,
what you think
it requires for states
to have an incentive
to actually help refugees and
to fulfill their obligations?
Do you think it's a moot
point to consider that?
And do you think
NGOs are actually
going to be the ones
doing most of the work
and we shouldn't really think
about states as incentives?
PAREKH: That's a
terrific question.
Absolutely not a moot point, I
think a fairly profound point.
How do you actually
motivate states
to consider the
interest of refugees
who, by definition,
are outside of the zone
of moral consideration,
we by definition
don't have to worry about
what refugees think about us
or what they say about us or
whether they like us or not?
You're absolutely right.
So the way I think about
it is, if we in the West,
if we in the US, for example,
could even acknowledge
that what we are doing, our
policies towards refugees,
was problematic, was
morally problematic, in ways
that I feel like-- I mean,
there's a parallel with the way
we've thought about global
poverty for a long time.
It used to be, well,
there are poor countries
who are poor because
they made bad decisions
and we can help them out
when we feel like it.
I feel like now there's a
consensus that well, that's
a too simplistic of a
view of global poverty
and we're actually
systematically
interrelated in the
causes of poverty
and it's not just
they made mistakes.
It's actually a result of
our policies around finance
and development and
so on and so forth,
and therefore our
obligations are
to actually reformulate
a system so that it's
more just in the future.
I feel like just changing
our thinking around refugees
to actually understand
what's really at stake
and how the crisis, or what
the problems around containment
of the displaced and warehousing
are the result of our policies
and our interest in
keeping refugees contained.
I feel like if we
in the West actually
acknowledge that, at least we
would be able to discuss it.
At least it would
become something
within the frame of our
moral consideration.
It will always be an uphill
battle getting people
to think about helping people
who we get nothing from,
essentially.
And some people
have argued, well,
we can't fight that battle.
We should always just
think about incentives.
Stability, security, there are
good political motivations,
economic motivations you could
give to countries to care
about refugees, but I think
at the end of the day,
if you don't have that
strong moral foundation
to those principles,
they don't tend
to amount to much because often
they're not as strong as people
would like to believe.
So I think it's a really, really
profound and important question
to think about how
to motivate it.
And I am not hopeless,
I am very optimistic.
People have changed how
they think about refugees
historically,
people have changed
how they've thought
about the global poor,
people have changed how they've
thought about victims as people
not in need of help, say
during the Second World War,
to people who are
completely entitled our aid
and we did something
terrible in not helping them.
But it takes time, and
it takes awareness,
and it takes a change in global
politics to make that happen.
Thank you.
HARDMAN: I said that
was the last question
but there's one question here.
AUDIENCE: Hello.
I'm an architect.
I used to work in
Damascus during 2009
and now I'm
formulating my thesis
in urban design
around the refugee
crisis in the Mediterranean.
I have two questions for Arenas.
You referred to the need
for open, safe, legal routes
to asylum.
I was wondering if
there are precedents,
legal precedents on that?
And then a second
question would be
if you have an opinion
or an explanation why
the east Mediterranean route
rised as the first entry
point to Europe this year?
And then, since there has been
a lot of references on camps,
I was wondering
who has the agency
on designing these camps?
 
ARENAS: When I was referring
to other safer and legal routes
to third countries,
I was thinking
about world based immigration,
about university places,
about possibilities for
family reunification.
That's what I was referring to.
I think that in terms
of what we know,
why people risk their
lives and get in the boats
and try to get to Europe.
This trip is expensive--
AUDIENCE: I think my question
is more why they do it
through the east
Mediterranean route,
whereas until 2014 it
was mostly through Italy.
So I was wondering,
what is your opinion
about the shift from
Italy to Greece,
if there is an explanation
that you came up
through your research?
ARENAS: No, I didn't
do research on that.
But what I know is that
recently many search and rescue
operations in Italy have
been shifted to border patrol
and that makes a
lot of difference.
LEANING: Could I just
comment on that one thing?
And then because you've got
another big one to answer,
but-- We don't know what
a lot that people actually
want, these hundreds of
thousands who are moving.
And this is already a
very interesting question
for the NGOs and UNHCR.
They're developing ways in
which they might sort of have
cellphone conversations with
people as a way of serving them
because there are a mix of
motives as people are moving.
But what we understand, and I
actually have just gotten this
through the zeitgeist, so I
can't give you a reference,
is that Italy has made it very
difficult during those years
when it was the favored place.
And now most of the
refugees who are coming out
are actually looking
for a place where
they can make not just
a life from day to day,
but they can make a really
good life, a reasonable life.
I mean, their aspirations are
getting a little bit assertive,
which is fabulous, but they
realized that Italy is not
going to be a place for them.
Even though, they
want to get higher up
in the northern countries
where there are odds that they
could actually get a job.
Italy is not the
place where they're
going to make a livelihood.
So that there's a set
of economic reasons
that are making people
go through Greece
and then get as far north
as they can quickly.
And this is what is fascinating
about the agencies of refugees,
and I might want to temper
a little bit what you said,
which is the receiving nations
are those that are watching
the people trying to come in.
They don't necessarily
think that these refugees
will get to them.
There's a huge
argument and you're
the expert on this, Anna, but
what is the economic value
of a refugee or a
distressed migration person,
if not classic refugee.
There's a lot of
data on both sides
to suggest they're really
valuable over the next several
years, or actually over
the first few years
they're kind of a drag and
then they get valuable,
or that they're
never valuable, which
I think most analysts
would say is poppycock.
So this issue of
they're trying to find
a life means they're going to
try to be part of the world.
And that is, I think, behind
their saying Italy is not
a good way station.
HARDMAN: I think
another thing is
that Italy was
attractive but for people
already in camps in
Turkey, for example,
it was much easier to leave
and go through Greece.
Greece used to
have a land border
which people could cross.
It was extremely porous.
That land border was
closed with a fence
and it was after that
fence was completed
that a much larger
fraction of people
started being obliged to use
a much more dangerous sea
route to cross into Greece.
And I think not with the
expectation of staying there
but rather with the expectation
that they would expedite
their journey
beyond to countries
where people really
did want to suffer.
It's not that Greece
and its current crisis
was an attractive destination.
ALJUNDI: So may I add something?
HARDMAN: Yes, please.
ALJUNDI: Both Greece and Italy,
they are transit countries.
I have five of my
family, my siblings,
they travel to Sweden
but through Greece.
It is easier to go from Turkey.
And they are not destination,
I mean both, so this is why.
ARENAS: In Macedonia,
people spend sometimes
hours to get from one border
to the other and then continue.
When people stay in
Serbia two, three days,
it's because they are
queueing to be registered.
They have no interest
in staying there.
HARDMAN: I think
an important lesson
is that refugees just
like other migrants,
just like everyone else,
are rational people who
are looking, given the
resources they have,
to achieve the best they can for
themselves, for their families.
It may be a single
person migrating
but with a refugee,
in other words,
but somebody who's
migrating in order
to send money back to their
family who may have been left
behind in a camp somewhere or in
an informal settlement outside
of town.
ALJUNDI: Most of the
people who arrive to Europe
are middle income.
Because it cost my
siblings, each one
I think about 8,000 euros
to reach Sweden, which
is not available to anybody.
So this is why.
HARDMAN: Okay, we're
definitely over time.
It's my job to close
this discussion
and I want to thank the
panelists very much.
Thank you all for coming
and I hope some of us
will be continuing this
conversation in the aisles.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
 
