THESE countries boast an embarrassment of riches.
But as European governments face global scrutiny over their struggle to accommodate a mass exodus of refugees from war-torn Syria, what are the rich Gulf nations doing to help?
Absolutely nothing.
Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Bahrain have offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees, according to new data from Amnesty International.
The apparent indifference of the Gulf states is especially blunt considering they are some of the nearest neighbours to devastated Syria, where civil war and the threat of Islamic State militants have displaced millions of people.
Thousands of refugees are risking their lives in desperate hope of finding safety and prosperity in stable nations. Many have died trying to get there.
“I’m most indignant over the Arab countries who are rolling in money and who only take very few refugees,” Danish Finance Minister Claus Hjort Frederiksen said in an interview this week.
“Countries like Saudi Arabia. It’s completely scandalous.”
They’re not alone. Russia, Japan, Singapore and South Korea have also been called out by Amnesty International for offering zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees.
More than four million Syrian refugees have been resettled in just five nations: Turkey (1.9 million Syrian refugees), Lebanon (1.2 million), Jordan (650,000), Iraq (249,463) and Egypt (132,375).
Globally, 104,410 resettlement places have been offered, but that’s a mere 2.6 per cent of the total population of Syrian refugees, Amnesty International said.
And their lives there are not easy. Funding shortages have forced many refugees in Lebanon to live on less than half a dollar a day, while in Jordan, 80 per cent live below the poverty line.
But in Saudi Arabia, some citizens routinely leave the air-conditioning on in their empty homes while they jet around the world.
In a television interview this week, Kuwaiti commentator Fahad Alshelaimi said his country was simply too expensive for refugees, New York Timesreported.
“You can’t welcome people from another environment and another place who have psychological or nervous system problems or trauma and enter them into societies,” he said, adding Kuwait was more appropriate for labourers.
Others argue the Gulf states have generously contributed humanitarian aid.
How much are they helping?
According to the New York Times, Kuwait has given more than $US304 million to the United Nation’s Syria response fund this year, making it the world’s third-largest donor. Saudi Arabia has donated $US18.4 million.
The UAE has provided more than $US540 million in relief and humanitarian assistance, Bloomberg said.
The BBC reported when workers at national industries in the Gulf region were asked to sacrifice part of their salary for Syria’s refugees, many said yes.
It is also important to note there are hundreds of thousands of Syrians already living in the Gulf region, including those who fled the war.
A spokesman for UNHCR told Bloomberg there were around 500,000 Syrians living in Saudi Arabia but they were not classified as refugees.
Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a political-science professor in the United Arab Emirates, argued his country alone had taken in 160,000 Syrians in the last three years.
“If it wasn’t for the Gulf states, you would expect these millions to be in a much more tragic state than they are,” he said.
“This finger-pointing at the Gulf that they are not doing anything, it is just not true.”
Different international clubs
As the Gulf states are not signatories to the UN’s 1951 Refugee Convention, those who flee to the Gulf states receive no protection or financial support and no citizenship.
Syrian children caught in a sandstorm on Monday at a refugee camp in Lebanon, one of five primary host nations for Syrian refugees. Picture: AFP / STR Source: AFP
Syrian migrants in these states often trade their rights to secure work as low-paid labourers and can be deported with little notice, the New York Times reported.
Questions were also raised about some Gulf states’ culpability in the current humanitarian crisis. Elements within Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the UAE and Kuwait have been accused of supporting the Syrian conflict by conspicuously arming and fundingrebel and Islamist factions fighting Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s regime.
Another complication is that Gulf countries have long been wary of opening their doors to refugees, said Michael Stephens, a Middle East research fellow at Qatar’s Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies.
In an article for the BBC, he said in Qatar and the UAE, where native populations were the minority, an influx of even 30,000 refugees could upset the demographic balance.
He also said the Gulf states were worried about security threats from Syrian refugees, and deep fears that loyalists of Syria’s Assad regime would exact revenge within the Gulf region.
“Screening of Syrian travellers to the Gulf began apace, and it became markedly more difficult for Syrians to receive work permits or renew existing permits,” he said.
“The policy has not yet changed, with Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE extremely concerned about the potential for Assad loyalists to strike back.
“Rumours have persisted in the Gulf for the past three years of cells of terrorist suspects being rounded up quietly and detained, although no direct proof of a plot by Assad supporters has ever come to light in public.”
He added, however, that demographic and social pressures were not “enough of a reason” to decline accepting refugees.
Changing attitudes
As the world grows ever moved by the plight of Syria’s refugees — especially after the heart-wrenching image of drowned refugee toddler Aylan Kurdi — sympathy is rising within the Gulf states as well.
Ashamed of their region’s lack of action, Gulf citizens have taken to social media to call on their governments to do more to assist refugees.
The Arabic hashtag #Welcoming_Syria’s_refugees_is_a_Gulf_duty has been used more than 33,000 times on Twitter in a week, the BBC reported.
People have tweeted powerful images of people drowned at sea, children being carried over barbed wire, or families sleeping rough as they fled their homeland.
And the #ArabConscience is being used by those who feel the Arab world is ignoring refugees.
In a column for Kuwait’s Alaan newspaper on Sunday, Zeid al-Zeid wrote: “It gives us a glimmer of hope after these recent drowning episodes to see broad campaigns of sympathy and solidarity with the issue of Syrian refugees by governments and peoples in some European countries.
“But it makes us sorry and makes us wonder about the absence of any official response by Arab states ... we’re seeing a silence that’s scandalous.”
Piers Akerman discusses the Europe refugee crisis
Western awareness
Meanwhile Oscar-winning actor and special envoy of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, Angelina Jolie, called for a distinction to be made between economic migrants and those fleeing persecution and danger in an editorial in the UK’s The Times.
Jolie wrote that while economic migrants, who were trying to escape extreme poverty, had human rights that needed to be met, refugees fleeing their war-ravaged homelands were “facing an immediate need to be saved from persecution and death and their rights are defined in international law”.
“That is why effective reception and screening are so important, to enable claims to be analysed and protection extended to those who need it,” she said.
Her comments come amid reports people seeking asylum in the European Union were using fake documents or destroying their real ones to secure asylum as a refugee, rather than an economic migrant.
Jolie criticised the global response to the humanitarian crisis. She said Syria’s neighbouring countries had been “bearing much greater burdens for years, with exemplary generosity and need more assistance”.
She added the problem would get bigger as the Syrian conflict continued.
“We cannot donate our way out of the crisis, we cannot solve it simply by taking in refugees, we have to find a diplomatic route to end the conflict,” she said.
“Nothing tells us more about the state of the world than the movement of people across borders. It is time to look for long-term solutions and to recognise that governments, not refugees, have to provide the answer.”
(Source: news.com.au)
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