A proposal to help the Syrian refugees stay within Sunni Arab countries
Well worth reading, and containing some surprising and little-known facts:
Yet most of the Syrian refugees have been taken in not by Western countries but by Syria’s neighboring states: Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, whose capacity has been overwhelmed. Lebanon, with a population of around four million and a territory smaller than Maryland, is hosting over a million Syrian refugees. Young people are overrepresented in the refugee population, so that more than half of the school-aged children in Lebanon are now Syrian.
It is estimated that an extraordinary number of people have left Syria, or have been driven from their neighborhoods within Syria (this is from a year ago):
Already, more than 10 million Syrians ”” nearly half of the country’s population ”” are estimated to live as refugees, either living as internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Syria or having fled to Turkey, Lebanon or Jordan.
If you’re confused by the difference between the terms “displaced persons” (familiar from WWII) and “refugees,” you’re not alone. A great many of the Syrians we call refugees don’t actually fit the definition of “refugee” in the legal sense:
“A [refugee is a] person who owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country…
That fits the Christian Syrians but I don’t see how it fits the Sunni Syrians. They appear to me to be displaced persons, both internal and international. However, if this is true, it doesn’t seem to matter much to those in charge right now.
More about displaced persons of the internal variety:
A forced migrant who left his or her home because of political persecution or violence, but did not cross an international border, is commonly considered to be the less well-defined category of internally displaced person (IDP), and is subject to more tenuous international protection…A migrant who fled because of economic hardship is an economic migrant.
Back to the plan in the original article:
Some 83 percent of Jordan’s refugees live in cities””around 170,000 in Amman alone. Their situation is clearly unsustainable: without access to international or state assistance, children grow up without education and families deplete their savings. The fate of the refugees who stay in the camps is similarly unfortunate: there, displaced Syrians languish under extreme dependency…
To avoid such outcomes, donor states and international organizations such as the UN have urged the governments of Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey to permanently integrate Syrian refugees into their societies. But leaders in those countries are deeply resistant to that idea, because they perceive refugees as a threat to domestic employment and a drain on stretched budgets. Nor are Syrian refugees easily incorporated into the fragile ethnic and sectarian balances that are crucial for maintaining stability in all three countries.
Take a moment to think about it. Jordan, Lebanon, and Turkey, majority Muslim countries which are ethnically and culturally similar (quite a bit less so for Turkey, but still a lot more similar than Western Europe or the US) are keeping the refugees in camps because they are afraid of the consequences of integrating them into their countries. And yet we are not supposed to feel a similar reluctance? What’s more, my guess is that the given reasons for those countries’ refusal is not the entire story; they may be all too aware of the possibilities for disruption and even terrorism in their own countries.
To continue:
An effective refugee policy should improve the lives of the refugees in the short term and the prospects of the region in the long term, and it should also serve the economic and security interests of the host states.
Jordan offers one place to begin. There, a reconsidered refugee policy would integrate displaced Syrians into specially created economic zones, offering Syrian refugees employment and autonomy, incubating businesses in preparation for the eventual end of the civil war in Syria, and aiding Jordan’s aspirations for industrial development. Such an approach would align the interests of a host state with the needs of refugees and might prove broadly applicable to refugee crises elsewhere.
There’s much more. I have no idea whether this would work, but it seems a lot better than what we’re doing now—which means it’s probably never going to happen.
Of course it’s a good idea.
I wonder why it hasn’t occurred to our rulers yet?
Industrial development? What a joke. Is there a single factory producing anything in the entire middle east (other than in Israel)?
The UN loves their “camp” solution for refugees (more properly DPs, as pointed out in the article.
I visited refugees in a number of countries, and witnessed the work of the UNHCR (High Commission for Refugees) close up. Their work goes with a lot of unintended consequences.
If they give food it is generally not what is locally palatable, so the DPs sell it into the local market to generate money to buy cigarettes and beer (or soft drinks if they are observant Muslims).
If they give materials for housing and preparing food the DPs are resented for having more than the locals.
And in this case the push is to industrialize. I can just imagine how well it will go over to have Syrians in Jordan getting jobs that the Jordanians would love to have. That’s pretty much a guarantee for bad relations.
I’m not against making life easier for DPs. I am against doing things for DPs that will create animosity with the local population. Money is not always the solution. It’s a lesson liberals never learn.
snopercod:
I believe that Jordan is most likely to be able to go that route of all the countries in that area, though.
I was at a interfaith Thanksgiving prayer gathering last night: Catholic, Jewish, Methodist and Islamic, held this year at the syogogue. (I think the young Imam was the only Muslim present in about 500 people.) Our priest quoted a number of 60 million refugees, 30 million of whom are children. Is that a real number?? It sounded inflated.
Sharon W:
The priest is throwing words and numbers around without understanding them, in order to make a point.
Syria has about 22 million people (or did until recently). There certainly cannot be 60 million Syrian refugees. If he meant in the world as a whole, he’s talking about UN estimates of refugees and displaced people, including internally displaced people, in the world, according to UN figures. Read the whole thing. The majority are IDPs.
Thank you Neo. I figured that was the case. I like our priest, but like most in the clergy, he holds the UN in high regard. Something I regularly pray about!
Remember that Jordan already got burned once by Palestinian refugees. They became violent and tried to overthrow the government under the current king’s father, IIRC.
Jordan has more firsthand experience with absorbing Muslim refugees than almost any other Arab country.
“That fits the Christian Syrians but I don’t see how it fits the Sunni Syrians. They appear to me to be displaced persons, both internal and international. However, if this is true, it doesn’t seem to matter much to those in charge right now.” neo
“Exposed: Obama’s Love for Jihadis and Hate for Christians”
“SYRIANS ARE A NATION OF TERRORIST SUPPORTERS”
“10,000 Syrian refugees mean 1,300 ISIS supporters.”
“One in five Syrians say Islamic State is a good thing, poll says”
Well, it does matter to those in charge, IF this is intentional. Another question of fool or knave? Personally, I have no doubt as to the answer. The decided lack of Christian refugees is the tip off.
The 10,000 ‘refugees’ are just the tip of the coming wave. The goal has to be the creation of the pre-conditions prefatory to civil unrest.
First, purchase the needed weaponry (done), then arm Federal agencies(done), then create the conditions that will lead to massive civil unrest.
Declare martial law and then the US Military has to support the “lawfully elected” government. Then use executive orders such as #13603* and new international treaties that legally would supersede the US Constitution to secure complete control.
*provides the framework and authority for the allocation or appropriation of resources, materials and services to promote national defense. Note that there is no expressed limitation upon that authority.
Of course the journal, Foreign Affairs (FA), will pontificate and tell others what an “effective” refugee policy to “integrate” displaced Syrians should be.
Like the advice for Jordan: “specially created economic zones, offering Syrian refugees employment and autonomy, incubating businesses in preparation for the eventual end of the civil war in Syria, and aiding Jordan’s aspirations for industrial development.”
Using what for money? Offering employment? and autonomy, in a country not their own? Aiding aspirations for development? The FA solution is totally delusional, insane.
Last time this was tried, by “Palestinians”, the Jordanian army had to kick them out, back in the 1970s.
Foreign Affairs is a useless journal. We do not need its diagnoses; we can do that ourselves. And its prescriptions for treatment are useless, beyond bizarre, despite the preposterous suggestion that “it might prove broadly applicable to refugee crises elsewhere”(note the hedge word “might”).
he holds the UN in high regard.
Trust not in principalities nor powers, Sharon. They will stab you in the back.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PFO1AtjoUoo
Interesting life story from a Christian refugee from Lebanon, when Muslims were conducting genocide on the Christian towns.
neo-neocon Says: yet we are not supposed to feel a similar reluctance?
To comment would be mansplaining/whitesplaining so I digress to thinking about flowers and butterflies instead. But if that does not please i can due bucolic nature scenes and run down temples in the third world.
Frog:
I cited the article not so much for its specific prescriptions (about which, as I said, I have no idea whether they would work) as for its statistics on where the displaced people are, how many are internally displaced and how many are externally displaced, and my conclusions about the distinctions between refugees and displaced persons.
To comment would be mansplaining/whitesplaining so I digress to thinking about flowers and butterflies instead.
A ghost wouldn’t worry about the threat of splaining anything from the academic vampires around it.
Learn warrior virtues, spit in the eye of Leftist academics, and fight them.
snopercod Says:
November 24th, 2015 at 3:33 pm
Industrial development? What a joke. Is there a single factory producing anything in the entire middle east (other than in Israel)?
%%%
Bingo ! We have a winner.
This pipe dream is all soft and fuzzy.
The only viable solution is simply a check written to Amman.
That’s it.
We don’t want them settling down anywhere else.
Barry Soetoro’s scheme is treasonous.
Turkey doesn’t need funding. Erdogan is getting plenty from Barry, Qatar, and KSA.
&&&&
The shoot-down is madness.
It wouldn’t matter if Russia actually was flying over Turkish air space.
Russia is not bombing Turkey, or anything else.
I actually believe that the Russians were crossing Turkey.
The single ‘nose’ sticking south is so trivial (unoccupied) that the short cut seemed harmless to the pilot.
It’s a pretty good bet that the Turks DID warn the Russians over and over — but not on this occasion.
(It’ be patently impossible.)
What’s been happening is that the Russians have gotten used to crossing that stub of land — and the bitching of the Turks.
The above sequence explains why the Pentagon believes the Turks’ version of events.
The Russian, so-called, flight trace looks like it was drawn with a propaganda marker.
The Turkish trace looks like a digital download from their radar net. It’s MUCH more credible.
The Turks should’ve let such trivial transgressions slide. They stand as nothing compared to the meddling that Erdogan has engaged in.
Hollande is chilling Putin; Barry is chilling Erdogan.
I rather doubt that Erdogan or Putin will climb back down.
I see them doubling down.
This is where Barry’s treason is leading us.
International affairs are a blot on Hitlery’s record.
She took a big dump on Moscow and Damascus and Baghdad.
This stink is the result.
The Turks were worried that their logistics supply to the Islamic Jihad in Syria would be disrupted or found out. That’s why the jet crossed in the space, then crossed out as a fireball a few seconds later, like 10-17s.
There’s no way any high ups in Turkey gave the authorization, this sounds like a local man operation, who was given orders to cover up operations.
Ymarsakar, Really?
I mean, Really?
Thanks for removing all doubt…
Immigration, poverty, refugees and gumballs.
Lotta gumbals … lotta voters though!
Yea, really. A ghost can also fight, didn’t ya know that.
If zombies and Leftist vampires can, so can ghosts.
Also former leader of the ultra right party in France, has called for execution of Islamic state caliphate jihadists using the guillotine.
Ultra right translates to “patriotic conservatism” in US terms.
Neo:
“Foreign Affairs” is the house organ for Establishment diplomats like Nicholas Burns. The ones who are still telling us that Islamic State or ISIL is also known as ISIS.
Another current FA story is “The End of Pax Americana-Why Washington’s Middle East Pullback Makes Sense.” Oh,yeah? Really? I better read that. There’s probably stuff in that about what great goodness the Iran deal gets “us”.
Reading FA for facts (with implicit or explicit accompanying policy recommendations) strikes me as a bit much. Some of the facts you cite were definitions (“internally displaced”), useful to know in order to speak fluent Diplomatese when having a cocktail with Burns; and others were estimates.
You subscribe to it?
Frog:
I certainly don’t subscribe to it. I’m not about to have cocktails with diplomats, either, but I find the facts I cited very interesting, and the distinctions between the classes of displaced people are important because so many people who want us to take the displaced Syrians lump them all together as “refugees,” which they are not.
The Christian Syrians would qualify as refugees, however—although the administration certainly isn’t pushing us to take them, or to defend them in countries such as Syria, either.
neo…
Quite the opposite is the case.
Barry absolutely shuns non-Muslims.
They don’t help his hijrah whatsoever.
neo and blert: After a little research, I discovered that Jordan has (had?) a garment industry. From a NY Times articles complaining about sweatshops:
The article mentioned “Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Hanes, Eddie Bauer, Lands’ End or Macy’s”.
But here’s the thing: “among Jordanians, factory work tends to be seen as shameful.” I’m reading T.E. Lawrence at the moment and that was his evaluation of the Arab culture as well. Slaves and servants did all the work in those days and I see no reason to believe that attitude has changed much over the last 90 years.
Ymarsakar Says: Yea, really. A ghost can also fight, didn’t ya know that.
Yarmarskar you moronic ignoramous its a reference to a recent paper and article in the press in which a professor was basically expanding mansplaining to its racist component and in which the target of the point was or should not comment on things..
my ghost thing has to do with someting else
we live in the real world not book land, manga mountain, comic book world, gameland… so grow up..
and the last reference was the point of why open you rmouth and remove all doubt of your idiocy…
really?
when i am a lot of words to spell it out, you get upset
when i use references to things, you cant get them
oy gevalt…
snopercod,: “I’m reading T.E. Lawrence at the moment and that was his evaluation of the Arab culture as well.”
A similar picture comes from “The Haj” by Leon Uris.
I have a friend who spent three years working on contract for Saudi Airlines. His opinion: “When the oil runs out, they’ll just get on their camels and ride back into the desert. It’s the only thing they know or want to know.”
In actuality the oil money is the main reason the Muslim world has been able to grow its population over the last 70 years. Jordan, Syria, and Egypt have not been a part of that, but they have received aid from the Gulf States and the West. Egypt and Tunisia are very dependent on tourism. The jihadis have managed to put a spike in the heart of that source of income. When the oil runs out, things are going to get really desperate there because they can barely support the numbers they have right now. They could be modern and wealthy. Instead they are backwards and indolent. As Churchill said, they are the most retrograde culture on the face of the Earth.
snopercod Says:
November 24th, 2015 at 8:36 pm
neo and blert: After a little research, I discovered that Jordan has (had?) a garment industry. From a NY Times articles complaining about sweatshops:
There are currently 75 factories producing everything from towels to t-shirts, fleeces to frilly knickers. They account for 95 percent of the industrial workforce, and 95 percent of apparel exports.
The article mentioned “Gap, Victoria’s Secret, Hanes, Eddie Bauer, Lands’ End or Macy’s”.
But here’s the thing: “among Jordanians, factory work tends to be seen as shameful.” I’m reading T.E. Lawrence at the moment and that was his evaluation of the Arab culture as well. Slaves and servants did all the work in those days and I see no reason to believe that attitude has changed much over the last 90 years.
%%%
Preach it brother.
I’ve been posting of that cultural reality — and have been snubbed for doing so.
Arabs (male adults) see themselves warriors// jihadis and layabouts.
This is exactly how Gulf Arabs live — and don’t work.
When Muslims reach Europe, they plop down and get back to doing nothing, which is where their expertise lies.
The more industrious craft custom suicide belts — which are not habit forming, I will say.
Their spouses don’t expect anything different. None scold their masters in any way. ( Dare they ? Nope.)
This culture of sloth is identical in every way to that of the antebellum slave aristocracy. They were lazy — as the work was a slave’s role. And the slaves were lazy because they were taxed at 100% of their labor income. Hence, all heavy slave labor was forced labor.
(House slaves usually figured that they were ‘on parole’ and had better put out or much worse may come. It was common for cute gals to tend house — and then be sent to the fields when a fresh (young, cute) replacement became available. The DNA evidence is clear, ‘romance’ was often a major factor.)
Likewise, Muslims figure that raping and enslaving kafir females as chattel is the most pleasurable form of jihad.
So, rape stats in Europe have rocketed to the Moon. These tallies are suppressed by TPTB as they rupture the narrative.
The idea that military-aged Muslims — many are ex-Mercs — are going to step-and-fetch-it for elderly kafir — is sick and twisted dreaming. They will dig graves, instead.
Army ants make poor house pets.
Arrogant, lazy, Muslim, professional, bums roving the day time streets looking to rape wives, daughters and beat down ones sons are no improvement.
It would take Nazi levels of repression to keep them at bay, something that many Germans are coming to realize.
%%%
What galls me the most, Muslims being conflated with Jews. Muslims were the last, die-hard, allies that Nazi Germany had.
Muslims, culturally, are re-tread Nazis. The supreme egos, enslavement, violence, feral warfare, deceits, cultural outrages — they are all there.
All of which makes me question the sanity and reality of American Progressive Jews who are advocating for more alien invasion.
Didn’t they get the memo ?
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blert: My apologies; The article I read wasn’t in the NYT, it was here: http://www.businessoffashion.com/articles/global-currents/made-in-jordan-garment-manufacturing-industry
The article says “There are around 55,000 garment workers in Jordan, and about 75 percent of them are from Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, Myanmar and Madagascar.” Apparently the Jordanians don’t want this work – men especially since ninety percent of the workers are women. (The companies had to set up special areas to segregate the female workers, or course).
These factories were built to “help” the Jordanians, but very few of them will work there. Is it the money? The article says “A monthly minimum wage of just 110 Jordanian Dinars (about $155) for garment sector employees makes it an attractive set-up.” That doesn’t sound “attractive” to me, since the median wage in Jordan is $1,500 JOD.
Christian Syrians are certainly in a lamentable position, but I hardly think that Sunni Syrians have much more of an option of returning home. There are essentially two groups controlling the great majority of Syria: the Islamic State and the Assad regime. Now, if you’re a Sunni Syrian, neither of these options is really palatable. The Islamic State is not a great place to live, both because of the distasteful nature of the regime and the possibility of being blown to smithereens by us or, should they ever actually attack IS, the Russians. On the other hand, the regime is run by the Alawite sect and acts increasingly like an Alawite militia. If they’re pushed to the brink, they’ll probably resort to ethnically cleansing the Alawite homeland (the coast west of the An-Nusayriyah Mountains) of Sunnis and just fortifying themselves there. Moving to the regime-controlled territory is betting on the goodwill of a heretical sect that sees you as an existential threat and a potential traitor. Sure, the Islamic State won’t *immediately* kill you like they might if you were a Christian, but they’ll force you to live like a religious fanatic, which, despite the rhetoric, is not what a majority of Syrian Arabs want.
Jordan may be superficially culturally similar, but Turkey and Lebanon are certainly not. Turkey is “culturally similar” to Arabs in the same way that Austria is “culturally similar” to Czechs. They might share the same religion, but there is a long history of pseudo-colonial control on one side, and a resentment of that control on the other. Moreover, Turkey hates having minorities: its overriding concern is preventing secessionist movements from succeeding. As for Lebanon, the idea of the Christians or Shia agreeing to assimilate another million Sunnis in the country–which give the Sunnis a plurality if not a majority of the population–is laughable. And despite Jordan’s Sunni Arab majority, its regime–which is the most America-friendly part of that country–rests on top of a delicate balance between Bedouins and Palestinians.
Also, I don’t think anyone (especially the Turks, Lebanese, or Jordanians) blame us for our reluctance to take refugees, but rather our reluctance to take such a tiny proportion of refugees. It’s not like Lebanese people rolled out the red carpet for a million Syrians–they host them because the Syrians were able to walk in, and now those Syrians are their responsibility. But I can see how the refusal by a country of almost 320 million to take in 1% of the refugees being handled by a country of 4 million would seem absurd. It’s doubly absurd to the Lebanese, who roll their eyes at the possibility of the pinpricks of terrorism we might theoretically suffer from a Syrian refugee, when they fought a massive and incredibly bloody civil war precipitated by the arrival of Sunni Arab refugees.
The only real solution is getting control over a substantial portion of Syria back and accommodating DPs and refugees there. Ideally, we would allow Syria and Iraq to be partitioned into slightly more homogeneous nation-states: as it is, we’re fighting for the unity of Yugoslavia despite the wishes of its inhabitants.
“The only real solution is….”
Actually the only real solution is some form of neo-colonialism.
But that’s a pipe dream.
The reason for that is that the elites have decided that helping out refugees (or whatever one wishes to call them) is not the priority here.
Not at all.
The elites have decided that the time has come to punish the west for the first round of colonialism.
And the means of doing so are finally at hand.
snopercod:
I wouldn’t swear to this—memory can play tricks—but I think I remember having worn garments that said “made in Jordan” inside.
Bryan, nice summary of the situation ala the competing religious and ethnic groups in Syria, Turkey, and Iraq. Re-drawing national boundaries to create more religiously homogenous entities makes a lot of sense to me. Now, if the multi-culti, SJW, “It’s a Small World After All” progressives would consider it, their might be a possibility of some peace in the next 20 years.
What we are seeing in the ME reminds me of the old saying my Grandmother taught me.
“Birds of a feather flock together
And so do pigs and swine.
Ducks and geese will have their choice,
And so will I have mine.”
When given a choice humans prefer to live among/with people who share their cultural values.
my ghost thing has to do with someting else
Okay, so your train is fine.
But here’s the thing: “among Jordanians, factory work tends to be seen as shameful.” I’m reading T.E. Lawrence at the moment and that was his evaluation of the Arab culture as well. Slaves and servants did all the work in those days and I see no reason to believe that attitude has changed much over the last 90 years.
***
And all the Arabs are above average….