Monday, June 20, 2016

The refugee crisis grows

The number of people displaced by conflict is at the highest level ever recorded, the UN refugee agency says. It estimates that 65.3m people were either refugees, asylum seekers or internally displaced at the end of 2015, an increase of 5m in a year.

This represents one in every 113 people on the planet, the UN agency says.

Turkey is the biggest host country for refugees worldwide, with 2.5m people, followed by Pakistan and Lebanon.

European leaders needed to do more to coordinate policies and to combat negative stereotypes about refugees.
"Those who do the opposite, who stir up public opinion against refugees and migrants, have a responsibility in creating a climate of xenophobia that is very worrying in today's Europe," Filippo Grandi, the UN refugee chief,  told AFP news agency. 


2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Zizek has something to say about this on the Spiked website. The emotional left ( including the SP ) has abandoned any explanation of why there are these numbers of refugees and merely attacks those who fear their arrival in Europe as 'racist'.

ajohnstone said...

As the figures show, Europe is not the region that carries the biggest burden of coping with refugees so perhaps people could turn their attention to those parts of the globe that aren't as wealthy or possess the necessary infrastructures to handle large scale influx of desperate displaced peoples.

France when Algeria obtained its independence had to absorb almost a million pied-noirs.
Germany during unification had to adapt to mass movement of Ossies moving to the west. Where there is a will, there is a way. The point of the UN spokesperson was that there currently does not exist the will.

We can sympathise with this sentiment expressed by Zizek
[quote]the most difficult and important task is a radical economic change that should abolish social conditions that create refugees. The ultimate cause of refugees is today’s global capitalism itself and its geopolitical games, and if we do not transform it radically, immigrants from Greece and other European countries will soon join African refugees. When I was young, such an organized attempt to regulate commons was called Communism. Maybe we should reinvent it. Maybe, this is, in the long term, our only solution.[/quote]

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18385/slavoj-zizek-european-refugee-crisis-and-global-capitalism

We are a world socialist party and our analysis has repeatedly indicated the cause of this crisis - war and poverty caused by capitalism