Little Syria in Lesbos

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/18/opinion/roger-cohen-hungary-the-refugee-imperative.html

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MYTILENE, Greece — This is where the odyssey to Germany, or Sweden, or just anywhere that might offer safety, begins for many of the refugees pouring into Europe — on the pine-clad Greek island of Lesbos six miles from the Turkish coast, or about an hour’s crossing in a packed inflatable raft.

By night and day they clamber ashore, initially elated to be out of hell (whether in Syrian form or that of the gun-toting Turkish Mafia taking about $1,250 per person for the brief sea voyage), but soon worn down by the long trudge from the north of the island to the port, by bureaucracy, by fatigue and by lingering trauma.

With their sneakers and denims and backpacks, and American T-shirts and GPS maps on cell phones (when they get them charged), these desperate people are of our shrinking world. They are not alien in any sense. They hold up a mirror to what passes for our culture — its icons and brands and complacency.

Rank and unwashed, often terrorized by years of war, imploring and dismayed, their claim for a slither of dignity and decency is irrefutable. To close the door on them is to revisit humanity’s darkest chapters. Amnesiac Hungary will not be quickly forgiven. Nor will Europe as a whole, nor the United States, if — fortress-like — they fail to offer shelter to the desperate survivors of war and the West’s colossal Syrian hypocrisy.

I found Aisha Alsaddloum, aged 65, in the Kara Tepe transit camp for Syrians on the outskirts of the port town of Mytilene. She had been traveling with her family for 20 days from the northeastern Syrian town of Al-Hasakah. “The country is gone,” she told me. “It is not for living any more. Syria is ashes.”

Like many Syrians I spoke to — about 70 percent of the refugees arriving in Lesbos are from Syria — she described the sick symbiosis of the barbarians of Islamic State and what she called “the system” (President Bashar al-Assad’s apparatus of terror). Theirs is a pantomime of confrontation: The jihadi slaughters with swords, Assad with barrel bombs from aircraft, but for the myriad civilians losing life and limb in the Syrian charnel house it makes no difference. The message from those who have managed to get out is clear: A plague on both their houses.

The Kara Tepe camp offers water and food and basic sanitation. It is a better place to be than the barbed-wire-encircled detention center for Afghans and other non-Syrian refugees nearby. But it is strewn with refuse, its toilets are foul and it is overrun with a stream of new arrivals — pregnant women, little children on the shoulders of their fathers, wide-eyed teenage boys traveling alone. By the end of August, about 96,000 refugees and migrants had reached Lesbos, almost half the Greek total of 205,000, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

“We are anticipating 2,000 to 3,000 people a day in Lesbos for the next weeks or months,” Tyler Jump of the International Rescue Committee told me. “The driver is the conflict in Syria, and until that is solved, people will flee.”

These people have not left by choice. They have left Syria because after more than four years of war they had no choice.

President Vladimir Putin with his cynical support for Assad, and President Obama with his empty pledges, and the Saudis and other Sunni gulf monarchies with their jihad-feeding funding, and Iran with its Assad-buttressing operatives, and a dysfunctional United Nations Security Council, and a feeble Europe, and “harmony”-preaching China — all of them, in their various contributions to the great Syrian debacle, have created this human flood into Lesbos and on into the rest of the European Union. Syria is an immense collective failure. What has changed for the West in the past several weeks is that it has become more difficult to live in denial of this fact.

Western responsibility is engaged by the unfathomable irresponsibility that has turned Syria into a slaughterhouse. President Obama has offered to take in 10,000 Syrian refugees; that is a pittance. A Europe of half a billion people must reject pampered smallness and open its eyes. Desperation cannot be met by penny-counting calculation, or doors slamming shut.

Yasser Kryyem, who has fled from Ghouta (scene of Assad’s unanswered chemical attack in 2013), told me: “Death in Syria comes from both sides of the sword. If you have a beard, you are Islamic State. If you don’t, you are with the regime. They feed off each other. The whole world is playing with us. What has happened in Syria has never happened anywhere: Only civilians are being killed. When Assad falls, so will Islamic State.”

He shook his head. “Obama has been saying since the first days of the revolution that Assad’s days are counted. Well, it will soon be five years.”