The world refugee crisis has displaced a record 65 million people from their homes, the most since the end of World War II. The majority of these uprooted people remain within their countries, but over 20 million have no other alternative but to flee due to fear of persecution.
“Refuge: Transforming a Broken Refugee System” by Alexander Betts and Paul Collier gives a sobering account of how the refugee crisis has affected Europe.
In 2015, the world experienced the gravity of the problem when refugees and migrants seeking better economic opportunities moved simultaneously from the poorer regions of the world to the richest. During that same year, more than 1 million asylum-seekers came to Europe. European governments are still struggling to find adequate solutions and until now, their response has been incoherent and unsatisfactory. Despite a series of high-level conferences organized by the UN, a consensus has still not been reached on a strategy for the future of the global refugee system. The UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) is both failing to provide protection to refugees and to find long-term solutions to their plight, the two main reasons for which it was founded.
Since its creation in 1950, the UNHCR has been, in fact, adapting to change. It was originally set up as a temporary organization with no funding and a staff of a few hundred people. Sixty-seven years later it has offices all over the world and an annual budget exceeding $5 billion. The scope of its mission is not only legal but also operational: engaged in the protection of refugees, stateless persons, internally displaced persons and victims of natural disasters. In the aftermath of the Asian tsunami in 2004, the UN secretary-general asked UNHCR to provide assistance in Sri Lanka and Indonesia. UNHCR responded that this was an “unprecedented” and exceptional move, outside its mandate. But soon the exception became the rule.
One of the main ideas of this book is that the events thats led to a refugee crisis in Europe are due to the adoption of policies that created avoidable problems. The Shengen treaty led to the creation of the Schengen Area comprising 26 European states in which internal borders have been abolished. As a result, any citizen can move across the borders of member countries. The authors highlight “the extraordinary disconnection between the will to implement the outcome and the will to make it workable. This vast area was created without either an agreement on common external immigration policies or the creation of a common external border police.”
The entire Schengen Area is an open space. With no police on the border between Italy and the neighboring Schengen countries such as France and Austria, the migrants can move freely from one country to another. But that does not entitle them to file for asylum, work or even gain the nationality. To survive migrants can only expect to find a below-minimum-wage-job or resort to criminality. The least regulated market in Europe is Britain. Unlike the rest of Europe, the United Kingdom has no national identity card and it is not part of Schengen. This explains the presence of a huge refugee camp near Calais, which has now been dismantled.
The Syrian refugee crisis was grossly mishandled. The displaced Syrian population fled mainly to Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon. International agencies failed to coordinate their efforts. The UNHCR reacted by providing food and shelter in camps but 85 percent of the refugees avoided the camps in Jordan; in Turkey, up to 90 percent of the refugees wanted the right to work. The World Bank classified these three countries as “upper-middle income” and as such they were not entitled to receive help.
The most important fact regarding refugees is that the majority remain in their region of origin or in neighboring countries. “There is a mismatch in terms of attention and resources. We focus on the 10 percent who reach the developed world but neglect the nearly 90 percent who stay in developing regions of the world,” wrote Betts and Collier.
The majority of the world’s refugees remain in neighboring countries. In other words, the countries with the least capacity end up hosting refugees and bear the greatest responsibility.
Lebanon is currently hosting over 1 million Syrian refugees who represent 25 percent of its entire population. Kenya and Uganda host together 1 million refugees, which is equivalent to the total number of asylum-seekers to enter all 28 of the EU’s member states. Pakistan, until Turkey took over, was the world’s biggest refugee-hosting country because of its neighbor, Afghanistan.
The Dadaab camp in Kenya was established in 1992 to host 90,000 refugees fleeing Somalia’s civil war. It is now 26 years old and shelters a population of nearly half a million refugees. The Za’atari camp in Jordan hosts 83,000 inhabitants and although it has a more vibrant market, superior basic services, it follows the same model.
“Those people arriving in Europe or North America are often extremely vulnerable and their lives matter, but so too do the lives of the nearly 90 percent left behind. Today, the world spends approximately $75 billion a year on the 10 percent of refugees who move to developed regions and only $5 billion a year on the 90 percent who remain in developing regions,” wrote the authors.
Refugees can contribute to the GDP of European countries, and that is where development funds are needed. Refugees have a fundamental right to expect a pathway to autonomy. And the best way to help them is to privilege their regions of origin because it makes it easier to go home.
When Manbij, a town of 100,000 people, in northern Syria, managed to get rid of Daesh, people immediately flocked in from Turkey back into Syria.
The Syrian refugee crisis, which has involved European countries, offers a chance to rethink a strategy and should first take into consideration the refugees’ skills, talents and aspirations then conceive of an approach that could enable a refugee to work and live an autonomous and dignified life. The idea is that a refugee is not just a humanitarian case but a development issue.
Uganda hosts over 500,000 refugees from Somalia, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Burundi, Rwanda, Ethiopia and Eritrea; it is the third-largest host country in Africa. Unlike Kenya and Ethiopia, its neighbors, Uganda has taken a radically different approach to refugees. It has given refugees the right to work and a significant degree of freedom of movement. It allows refugees to start businesses and seek employment. It also gives refugees plots of land to cultivate for both subsistence and commercial agriculture. Uganda is a unique success story that shows what refugees can achieve when they are given the proper means.
Despite more constraints, one can find a similar atmosphere of innovation and inventiveness among the Syrian refugee community in Jordan. In the Za’atari refugee camp, there is no work and all the economic activity is highly regulated. However, creativity is everywhere. The bustling main street is known as “Shams Elysees,” reminding us of the famous Champs Elysees in Paris, the most beautiful avenue in the world.
All refugee families are given a caravan to live in provided by the generosity of one of the members of the Gulf states. Many of these caravans are transformed into shops on the camp’s Shams Elysees or they are made into furniture. The creativity and the entrepreneurship so alive in the Za’atari refugee camp make us wonder why refugees are not allowed to work. Betts and Collier believe that refugees represent an opportunity to transition to manufacturing. The core of their idea is to create economic zones that would employ refugees. Setting up production in a haven country can be done when and if CEOs are determined to succeed. In Mexico, an American firm succeeded in setting up a production line in six weeks.
This book offers an in-depth coverage of the refugee crisis. Betts and Collier underline the necessity of creating safe havens in the countries that neighbor conflict and crisis because this is where most of the refugees are so they can easily go back and rebuild their countries. The authors also criticize the way camps are managed. The current humanitarian assistance model leads nowhere, it is out of touch with the contemporary world and refugees do not want to stay the authors argue. The authors suggest the creation of a new model that will provide autonomy, employment and dignity to refugees. There is also much hope that Antonio Guterres, the current UN secretary- general, who was former high commissioner for refugees, is in the best position to implement the necessary changes to the refugee system. Ultimately, the biggest funders: The United States, Japan, Canada, Australia and the European states are the ones who have the capacity to ask for meaningful change.
“Only in moments of crisis can changes to the international system be made, and so the scale of the challenge should not be discouraging but galvanizing. We hand over to you.”
Yes, indeed, each one of us should reflect on the obligations and rights that stem from our common humanity. Isn’t it our duty to support the basic human dignity of those whose lives and human rights are severely threatened?
Book Review: How Europe is squandering opportunities to boost its economy with refugee workers
Book Review: How Europe is squandering opportunities to boost its economy with refugee workers
Britain’s Stonehenge is yet again a source of fascination ahead of the winter solstice
LONDON: It’s that time of year when crowds of pagans, druids, hippies and tourists head to Stonehenge in Britain to celebrate the winter solstice, with the shortest day and the longest night in the Northern Hemisphere.
Thousands are expected on Saturday at the megalithic circle on a plain in southern England as the first rays of sun break through the giant stones that make up one of world’s most famous prehistoric monuments.
Rain has been forecast but there is no doubt it won’t be able to drown out the drumming, chanting and cheering.
Beyond the fascination of the ritual, the eternal question may still linger in the back of the minds of many visitors: What was the real meaning and purpose of Stonehenge?
The site has been the subject of vigorous debate, with some theories seemingly more outlandish, if not alien, than others.
This year, those gathering will have something new to discuss.
In a paper published in the journal Archaeology International, researchers from University College London and Aberystwyth University say that the site on Salisbury Plain, about 128 kilometers (80 miles) southwest of London, may have had some unifying purpose in ancient times.
They base that on a recent discovery that one of Stonehenge’s stones — the unique stone lying flat at the center of the monument, dubbed the “altar stone” — originated in Scotland, hundreds of miles north of the site.
What was surprising was that it came from so far away. It was long known that the other stones come from all over Britain — including the so-called bluestones, the smaller stones at the site that came from Preseli Hills in southwest Wales, nearly 240 kilometers (150 miles) away.
That varied geology is what makes Stonehenge unique among over 900 stone circles in Britain.
“The fact that all of its stones originated from distant regions ... suggests that the stone circle may have had a political as well as a religious purpose,” said lead author Professor Mike Parker Pearson from UCL’s Institute of Archaeology.
It may have served as a “monument of unification for the peoples of Britain, celebrating their eternal links with their ancestors and the cosmos,” Parker Pearson said.
Whatever its original purpose, Stonehenge today retains an important place in Britain’s culture and history and remains one of the country’s biggest tourist draws — despite the seemingly permanent traffic jams on the nearby A303 highway, a popular route for motorists traveling to and from the southwest of England.
Stonehenge was built on the flat lands of Salisbury Plain in stages, starting 5,000 years ago, with the unique stone circle erected in the late Neolithic period, about 2,500 B.C.
English Heritage, a charity that manages hundreds of historic sites, including Stonehenge, has noted several explanations — from the circle being a coronation place for Danish kings, a druid temple, a cult center for healing, or an astronomical computer for predicting eclipses and solar events.
So as far as symbolism and unification go — maybe Stonehenge really was a Mount Rushmore of its day?
Starbucks workers’ union to strike in LA, Chicago, Seattle before Christmas
The workers’ union representing more than 10,000 Starbucks baristas said its members will strike at stores in Los Angeles, Chicago, and Seattle on Friday morning during the busy holiday season.
Workers United, representing employees at 525 Starbucks stores across the United States, said that walkouts are expected to escalate daily, potentially reaching hundreds of stores nationwide by Christmas Eve, unless Starbucks and the union finalize a collective bargaining agreement.
The union and Starbucks created a “framework” in February to guide organizing and collective bargaining. Negotiations between the company and Workers United began in April, based on the framework, that could also help resolve numerous pending legal disputes.
“Since the February commitment, the company repeatedly pledged publicly that it intended to reach contracts by the end of the year, but it has yet to present workers with a serious economic proposal,” the union said in a statement late on Thursday.
Starbucks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The coffee chain is undergoing a turnaround under its newly appointed top boss Brian Niccol, who aims to restore “coffee house culture” by overhauling cafes, adding more comfortable seating, reducing customer wait-time to less than four minutes, and simplifying its menu.
Invasive ‘murder hornets’ are wiped out in the US, officials say
- There had been no detections of the northern giant hornet in Washington since 2021
- Northern giant hornets pose significant threats to pollinators and native insects
SEATTLE: The world’s largest hornet, an invasive breed dubbed the “murder hornet” for its dangerous sting and ability to slaughter a honeybee hive in a matter of hours, has been declared eradicated in the US, five years after being spotted for the first time in Washington state near the Canadian border.
The Washington and US Departments of Agriculture announced the eradication Wednesday, saying there had been no detections of the northern giant hornet in Washington since 2021.
The news represented an enormous success that included residents agreeing to place traps on their properties and reporting sightings, as well as researchers capturing a live hornet, attaching a tiny radio tracking tag to it with dental floss, and following it through a forest to a nest in an alder tree. Scientists destroyed the nest just as a number of queens were just beginning to emerge, officials said.
“I’ve gotta tell you, as an entomologist — I’ve been doing this for over 25 years now, and it is a rare day when the humans actually get to win one against the insects,” Sven Spichiger, pest program manager of the Washington State Department of Agriculture, told a virtual news conference.
The hornets, which can be 5 centimeters long and were formerly called Asian giant hornets, gained attention in 2013, when they killed 42 people in China and seriously injured 1,675. In the US, around 72 people a year die from bee and hornet stings each year, according to data from the National Institutes of Health.
The hornets were first detected in North America in British Columbia, Canada, in August 2019 and confirmed in Washington state in December 2019, when a Whatcom County resident reported a specimen. A beekeeper also reported hives being attacked and turned over specimens in the summer of 2020. The hornets could have traveled to North America in plant pots or shipping containers, experts said.
DNA evidence suggested the populations found in British Columbia and Washington were not related and appeared to originate from different countries. There also have been no confirmed reports in British Columbia since 2021, and the nonprofit Invasive Species Center in Canada has said the hornet is also considered eradicated there.
Northern giant hornets pose significant threats to pollinators and native insects. They can wipe out a honeybee hive in as little as 90 minutes, decapitating the bees and then defending the hive as their own, taking the brood to feed their own young.
The hornet can sting through most beekeeper suits, deliver nearly seven times the amount of venom as a honeybee, and sting multiple times. At one point the Washington agriculture department ordered special reinforced suits from China.
Washington is the only state that has had confirmed reports of northern giant hornets. Trappers found four nests in 2020 and 2021.
Spichiger said Washington will remain on the lookout, despite reporting the eradication. He noted that entomologists will continue to monitor traps in Kitsap County, where a resident reported an unconfirmed sighting in October but where trapping efforts and public outreach have come up empty.
He noted that other invasive hornets can also pose problems: Officials in Georgia and South Carolina are fighting yellow-legged hornets, and southern giant hornets were recently detected in Spain.
“We will continue to be vigilant,” Spichiger said.
Re-discovered tapes bear witness to Somaliland identity
HARGEISA: In a library in Somaliland, Hafsa Omer presses play on a small cassette player. The sound of a Somali lute interwoven with a woman’s soft singing fills the room.
Tapping her keyboard, Omer bobs with the rhythm of the pentatonic melody typical in the northern region of the Horn of Africa.
Since 2021, the 21-year-old has been painstakingly archiving and digitising a collection of some 14,000 cassettes at the Cultural Center in Hargeisa, the Somaliland capital.
Bought back, found or donated, the tapes contain more than half a century of the musical, cultural and political life of the region.
Somaliland has run its own affairs since unilaterally declaring independence from Somalia in 1991 but remains unrecognized by any country.
That makes cultural heritage — like the tapes — vital.
“Many people don’t consider these things to be important, but they contain the whole history of my country,” Omer told AFP.
“My people don’t write, they don’t read. All they do is talk.”
Somalis have traditionally been primarily nomadic shepherds, with culture transmitted orally from one generation to another.
What is now Somaliland has long been a center of music and poetry — art that plays a crucial, even political, role in this corner of Africa.
The public radio station, Radio Hargeisa, also has a collection of over 5,000 reels and cassettes, programs and music recorded in its studios since its founding in 1943.
The tens of thousands of hours of tapes in the cultural center tell a less official story — ranging from 1970s counterculture “Somali funk,” to unreleased recordings of play rehearsals and accounts of people’s daily lives.
With small tape recorders becoming widely available in the 1970s and 1980s, Somalilanders got into the habit of corresponding with exiled relatives via cassette.
Gathered around a tape recorder, they would recount intimacies of family life but also survival during a decade-long war that culminated in the declaration of independence in 1991.
The conflict between rebels and the Mogadishu-based military regime of Siad Barre saw around 70 percent of Hargeisa destroyed in 1988.
Jama Musse Jama, director of the cultural center, described how troves of cassettes were recorded “underground” as people met clandestinely to chat, chew the stimulant khat and talk politics.
“They cannot say (these things) in public,” he said. “You find all what didn’t end up in the ordinary, formal recordings of the state — what was happening in the streets.”
Fewer than 5,000 cassettes have been catalogued and only 1,100 digitised, leaving a titanic task for Omer and her team of four friends.
But it has become a fitting cultural odyssey in a place still searching for recognition.
“It’s proof against those who say Somaliland doesn’t exist,” said Jama.
He believes his and Omer’s work will guide younger generations searching for their past — a storied history that stretches beyond their regional conflict to its time as an Italian and British colony and beyond.
“We need to give them an identity,” he said.
“All these stories that make up the identity of the Somaliland people are in these recordings.”
Drones, planes or UFOs? Americans abuzz over mysterious New Jersey sightings
- The saga of the drones reported over New Jersey has reached incredible heights
- ‘How can you say it’s not posing a threat if you don’t know what it is?’
CHATHAM, New Jersey: That buzzing coming out of New Jersey? It’s unclear if it’s drones or something else, but for sure the nighttime sightings are producing tons of talk, a raft of conspiracy theories and craned necks looking skyward.
Cropping up on local news and social media sites around Thanksgiving, the saga of the drones reported over New Jersey has reached incredible heights.
This week seems to have begun a new, higher-profile chapter: Lawmakers are demanding (but so far not getting) explanations from federal and state authorities about what’s behind them. Gov. Phil Murphy wrote to President Joe Biden asking for answers. New Jersey’s new senator, Andy Kim, spent Thursday night on a drone hunt in rural northern New Jersey, and posted about it on X.
More drone sightings have been reported in New York City, and Mayor Eric Adams says the city is investigating and collaborating with New Jersey and federal officials. And then President-elect Donald Trump posted that he believes the government knows more than it’s saying. “Let the public know, and now. Otherwise, shoot them down!!!” he posted on his social media site.
But perhaps the most fantastic development is the dizzying proliferation of conspiracies, none of which has been confirmed or suggested by federal and state officials who say they’re looking into what’s happening. It has become shorthand to refer to the flying machines as drones, but there are questions about whether what people are seeing are unmanned aircraft or something else.
Some theorize the drones came from an Iranian mothership. Others think they are the Secret Service making sure President-elect Donald Trump’s Bedminster property is secure. Others worry about China. The deep state. And on.
In the face of uncertainty, people have done what they do in 2024: Create a social media group.
The Facebook page, New Jersey Mystery Drones — let’s solve it, has nearly 44,000 members, up from 39,000 late Thursday. People are posting their photo and video sightings, and the online commenters take it from there.
One video shows a whitish light flying in a darkened sky, and one commenter concludes it’s otherworldly. “Straight up orbs,” the person says. Others weigh in to say it’s a plane or maybe a satellite. Another group called for hunting the drones literally, shooting them down like turkeys. (Do not shoot at anything in the sky, experts warn.)
Trisha Bushey, 48, of Lebanon Township, New Jersey, lives near Round Valley Reservoir where there have been numerous sightings. She said she first posted photos online last month wondering what the objects were and became convinced they were drones when she saw how they moved and when her son showed her on a flight tracking site that no planes were around. Now she’s glued to the Mystery Drones page, she said.
“I find myself — instead of Christmas shopping or cleaning my house — checking it,” she said.
She doesn’t buy what the governor said, that the drones aren’t a risk to public safety. Murphy told Biden on Friday that residents need answers. The federal Homeland Security Department and FBI also said in a joint statement they have no evidence that the sightings pose “a national security or public safety threat or have a foreign nexus.”
“How can you say it’s not posing a threat if you don’t know what it is?” she said. “I think that’s why so many people are uneasy.”
Then there’s the notion that people could misunderstand what they’re seeing. William Austin is the president of Warren County Community College, which has a drone technology degree program, and is coincidentally located in one of the sighting hotspots.
Austin says he has looked at videos of purported drones and that airplanes are being misidentified as drones. He cited an optical effect called parallax, which is the apparent shift of an object when viewed from different perspectives. Austin encouraged people to download flight and drone tracker apps so they can better understand what they’re looking at.
Nonetheless, people continue to come up with their own theories.
“It represents the United States of America in 2024,” Austin said. “We’ve lost trust in our institutions, and we need it.”
Federal officials echo Austin’s view that many of the sightings are piloted aircraft such as planes and helicopters being mistaken for drones, according to lawmakers and Murphy.
That’s not really convincing for many, though, who are homing in on the sightings beyond just New Jersey and the East Coast, where others have reported seeing the objects.
For Seph Divine, 34, another member of the drone hunting group who lives in Eugene, Oregon, it feels as if it’s up to citizen sleuths to solve the mystery. He said he tries to be a voice of reason, encouraging people to fact check their information, while also asking probing questions.
“My main goal is I don’t want people to be caught up in the hysteria and I also want people to not just ignore it at the same time,” he said.
“Whether or not it’s foreign military or some secret access program or something otherworldly, whatever it is, all I’m saying is it’s alarming that this is happening so suddenly and so consistently for hours at a time,” he added.
