The dead child and the West’s stance on refugees

The recent picture of the child all-dolled up and lying dead on the beach had drenched our hearts with tears. He was one of the thousands of refugees who were trying to escape to safety from the civil war raging in the Middle-east.

Sadly it only reflects how cruelly the West treated the fleeing men, women and children; how cruelly the West dealt with a problem that was mostly its own making.

The Middle-east had been a not-so-volatile a region for many years. Yes, despots ruled many of these countries and there were cross border skirmishes, muscle flexing and diatribes, and of course the sudden invasion of Kuwait by Iraq. But nothing to suggest any lingering, bloody and messy civil war, suicide bombs and genocide. 

Suddenly, the West, especially the United States and the United Kingdom, invented the dreadful and imagined weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. After some sword rattling, the attack began on Iraq that led to the killings of millions beside the so-called trial and hanging of Saddam Hussein. 

But things got worse. It then found other despots like Gaddafi of Libya and Bashar al-Assad of Syria totally unacceptable. And so they invested in those countries. Arms were supplied to the so-called rebels. The whole region turned volatile and was ripped apart.

That induced the influx of refugees, and how did the West behave when these people started arriving at its doorsteps? Many of the western countries wanted to block the refugees from entering their territories.  Refugee camps were burned down, they were pushed out. And the head of governments started discussing grudgingly how they could disperse the refugees among themselves.

However, the interesting thing is 80 percent of the political refugees are sheltered by the developing poor countries – by Pakistan, Syria and Iran. It then becomes a global shame that the rich countries would hesitate so much to take in the fleeing people.

Even a poor and highly populated country like Bangladesh had accepted the Rohingyas who were persecuted in Myanmar. Bangladesh was in no position to accept refugees in a part of the country whose ecology was in a critical state. It was then the West had been pressing Bangladesh to give shelter to the Rohingyas.

Sadly today the same West fidgets about taking refugees of their own making.