In Refugee Statistics, a Stark Tale of Global Strife
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Version 0 of 1. Statistics are not usually effective at depicting tragedy, which is why United Nations reports rarely generate passion. But the figures released this past week by the United Nations refugee agency offer perhaps the starkest reflection of the strife raking vast stretches of the globe. The number of people around the world forced by conflict to flee their homes, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported, has soared past 51 million, the highest number since World War II. That’s more than six times the population of New York City, emptied into squalid camps. Half the refugees are children; a growing number of these are on their own, according to the report. More than half of the 6.3 million refugees under the refugee agency’s care have been in exile for five years or more, testifying to conflicts that rage on and on. Most are what the United Nations refers to as “internally displaced” — people who have fled their homes but not their countries. The continuing bloodshed in Syria was the biggest generator of refugees in 2013, but strife in Afghanistan, the Central African Republic, Mali, Somalia and elsewhere added hundreds of thousands, while the eruption of new sectarian strife in Iraq, along with conflicts in places like South Sudan and Ukraine, promised to further swell the ranks of the displaced in 2014. The stunning figures offer a bitter counterpoint to the growing resistance in Europe and the United States to letting in immigrants and asylum seekers, and to the endless sterile blame-games about responsibility for the various conflicts. Only a lucky trickle of the refugees made it to developed countries; the vast majority, 86 percent, were living in developing countries. “There is no humanitarian response able to solve the problems of so many people,” warned António Guterres, the high commissioner for refugees. And the international community had ever less capacity or consensus, he added, to prevent or resolve conflicts. What to Do About Iraq? Whether in fact the United States had the duty or ability to prevent or resolve conflicts far from its shores was once again a subject of bitter debate in America as a brutal Sunni militia rampaged through Iraqi cities for which thousands of American soldiers had fought and died. A chorus of conservatives and neocons, led by veterans of the George W. Bush administration and supported by hawkish pundits, piled on to President Obama, accusing him of pulling American troops out of Iraq too early and too completely, and in general of allowing America to be perceived as weak. “Rarely has a U.S. president been so wrong about so much at the expense of so many,” wrote Dick Cheney with his daughter Liz in The Wall Street Journal, apparently oblivious to the irony of echoing a common sentiment about the president he once served. On Fox News radio, John R. Bolton, one of the more vociferous hawks of the Bush administration, argued, “The fact was the continuing presence of U.S. troops in Iraq was critical to sustaining the victories that we won.” President Obama, by contrast, has made it an article of faith in his foreign policy that military intervention is neither the solution to every problem nor necessary for America to avoid looking weak. He announced on Thursday that he was sending up to 300 military advisers to Baghdad, and was prepared to take “targeted and precise military action,” meaning airstrikes, against the rebel force known as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). But he made clear that there would be no mission creep: It was for Iraq to do the heavy lifting and to find the leaders who could unite them, he firmly declared. And in an indirect retort to his critics, he made clear his belief that the Iraq war had been a mistake: “What’s clear from the last decade is the need for the United States to ask hard questions before we take action abroad, particularly military action.” One issue on which there seemed to be general agreement was that Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki was heavily responsible for creating the Sunni anger on which ISIS fed by openly favoring his fellow Shiites in government and the military. There was a strong feeling that Mr. Maliki had to be replaced by someone better suited for the herculean task of trying to bring Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds together again. Another aspect of the struggle with Middle Eastern extremists that has confounded the Obama administration is what to do with captured terrorists when every effort is being made to empty out the infamous Guantánamo Bay prison. This came up anew after United States commandos and F.B.I. agents captured Ahmed Abu Khattala, the Libyan suspected of a central role in the attack on the United States mission in Benghazi in 2012, in a bold and bloodless midnight raid on Monday. Republicans in Congress have long wielded the Benghazi debacle, in which the ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed, as a political weapon against Mr. Obama; they recently ordered yet another congressional probe, their ninth, into what happened. The seizure of Mr. Abu Khattala, however, did not end the crusade — many Republicans demanded that the captive be dispatched to Guantánamo and not tried in federal court, as the administration plans to do. And Then There’s Ukraine By the standards of Syria or other Middle Eastern conflicts that defy all efforts at resolution, Ukraine is but a blip. Yet three months after Crimea was annexed by Russia, encouraging similar rebellion among Russian speakers in eastern Ukraine, nasty skirmishes persist between them and ineffective Ukrainian forces, confounding hopes in the West and in Ukraine that the conflict will taper off of its own accord. Announcements of a unilateral cease-fire by Ukraine’s new president, Petro O. Poroshenko, and his discussions of a possible peace plan with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia, have done nothing to curb the rebels or stop the bloodshed. One obvious problem is that the Russian-Ukrainian border is porous in the contested regions, allowing Russians and Russian arms unfettered entry into Ukraine. But after Ukrainian forces tried to seal the border this past week, Russia moved troops to several border crossings. The Russians have also maintained pressure on the economic front, cutting off gas supplies to Ukraine. With his ability to turn the military and economic pressures on Kiev up and down, Mr. Putin seems to have Ukraine where he wants it — weak, disordered and dependent. |