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The price of silence

Sep 12,2015 - Last updated at Sep 12,2015

The photo of the body of 3-year-old Syrian child Aylan Kurdi washed on the shore in Turkey’s resort city Bodrum last week shocked the world and spurred immediate reaction to deal with the floods of migrants, mostly from Syria, crossing European borders by sea, buses, trains and even by foot.

Europe is bearing the brunt of the crisis, since it is on the receiving end, while other nations can afford to issue one pious recommendation after another, not feeling the impact of the massive wave of humanity from the Middle East and Africa.

Had the shores of the US been closer, the country would have received a fair share of migrants.

The recent wave of migration into Europe is unprecedented in scale since World War II, when, like now, refugees fled oppression, wars and destruction, seeking sanctuary, peace and a bit of freedom.

The reaction of the international community has been muted to a great extent regarding the genesis of the migration crisis.

The root causes of the phenomenon of migration from Syria and Iraq is no doubt familiar to all policy makers in Europe and the US.

The chain of events in Iraq that followed the invasion of the country by the US and its allies in 2003 had indeed set the stage for the break up of the country. What followed is now history.

Syria is no different. For nearly five agonising years, the killing machine had been in motion in Syria, before the world had ever heard of Daesh or other terrorist groups now fighting on the country’s soil.

For all of us who want a solution to the Syrian refugee crisis, there is a pressing need to recognise the root causes of the Syrian conflict that still kills innocent people by the hundreds every day.

The seeds for the Syrian conflict were sown much before the entry of “terrorists” into the battlefield there. They can be traced to the oppressive regime reaction to the people’s peaceful demonstrations in the spring of 2011 when all they asked was a little bit more freedom, the release of the thousands of prisoners of consciousness languishing in Syrian jails for many decades, and the introduction, at last, of an all-inclusive democracy and not one based on one political party or the hegemony of one ethnic group over all others.

The world let the Syrian people bleed and their houses, cities, schools and infrastructure systematically destroyed by indiscriminate bombing, most of it carried out by the Syrian war machine and warplanes.

Even chemical weapons were deployed against civilians in August 2013 without spurring any meaningful international response.

We all remember President Barack Obama’s red line warning to Damascus, after which Syrians were wondering whether there was a nation that really cared what happened to them.

Now Europe is feeling the consequences, and rightly so: European capitals are directly responsible for letting all the death and destruction to go on in Syria before their very eyes.

More than 300,000 Syrians lost their lives without Europe as much as lifting a finger to silence the guns and the warplanes.

 

The day of reckoning, especially in Europe, has arrived and now it has to pay the price for its silence in the face of the mass killings and destruction in Syria.

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