Refugees

It's harder now. We should have done more at the outset.

I don't think ethel has asked pertinent questions. Most of the issues she raises have already been covered in previous posts. "Stay and fight" for instance - for and against whom - Assad's forces/those opposed to Assad/ISIS/the Kurds/the US forces?

The issue of how some of the refugees are dressed has also been covered. Because you have a bit of money, some decent clothes and a nice house doesn't make you immune from being bombed or being caught up in gunfire between opposing militias.

It is effectively a civil war in Syria, with the additional complication of ISIS. plus the anti-Assad groups that have aligned themselves with ISIS, as well as groups that have aligned themselves with the US or the Kurds. It is a total mess and I can't see what benefit is to be gained by further bombing which, despite what governments say, cannot be strategically targeted to avoid citizens being killed and horribly injured and which will cause further damage to water and sewage systems, roads and all the day-to-day amenities that we take for granted.

There is no way you can compare this situation to Britain's situation during WW2. Britain was united against an external enemy, not divided by civil war.

Jingl's comment about the Arab Spring is a pertinent one. I have always been uneasy about interfering militarily in cultures we cannot fully understand, as we do not know what we might unleash.

Many years ago, I sat with an immigrant friend (Turkish originally but multilingual and of very mixed ancestry), who predicted exactly what has happened following the invasion of Iraq and more pertinently what is happening now with the rise and rise of extremist Islamism.

It seems quite obvious to me that the men should leave and hope to rescue the rest of the family when they have reached safety. My in-laws were caught in Poland when the Germans invaded. The two brothers and a 17 year old left to fight for the freedom of their country from outside Poland. One wife, who was childless, used her wiles to escape, nearly losing her life in a horrendous journey across Europe to Lisbon and thence to the UK to reunite with her husband. The other brother fought the Germans and their allies throughout the war and survived to hunt for the wife and daughter left behind, miraculously finding them alive. His son eventually joined the RAF and was killed in the Battle of Britain when his plane was shot down. It would have been near impossible for men to escape along with their wives and children and had they stayed to face the music they would surely have been killed. That's the way it was and still is.

I don't think it is obvious at all that the men should leave the women and children to their fate.

Inside Syria the bombing of village bakeries means that there is no bread, neither is there clean water. Possibly no home, no shelter. If a bakery manages to operate at all it is the women who are left to queue for bread to feed their families - pregnant women have been shot and killed in these queues. People are starving.
Charity workers are risking their lives to go there to rebuild bakeries, take flour and water purification equipment.

At least if people have managed to escape over the border to a safe refuge there will be some help and food and water, even if the refugee camps are not where anyone would really want to be.

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

Message withdrawn at poster's request.

But what can we do about this despot? - nothing.
We can at least try and help those who are caught in the fallout.

between Assad and IS the Syrian people are between a rock and a hard place.

I am pleased we are taking refugees from the camps, as they are the poorer ones, with no money to pay traffickers.

IS do not have much presence in Syria. It is Assad needs getting rid of.

some of you have made a lot of fuss about my comments, I really don't watch much tv and only occasionally read the Daily Mail. until recently I hadn't heard much news about the migrants and I really did wonder what it was all about. I tend not to bother with international news as it doesn't affect me and I really cant do anything about it.

I do know that if one of these people came to live next door of course I would be helpful and sympathetic. I just wonder how it is possible in a modern society to just walk out from responsibilities. Have these people left mortgages, jobs, taken the children from school/nursery, left bank accounts etc and just quietly fled. I know if I were to do that I would be in trouble.
I also wonder if they could not have made a protest to their government, Im sure they could have had a national strike or something as we would have done in Britain. We are all supposed to live in a democracy so why is it necessary to take such drastic action.

etheltbags1 Syria was a very sophisticated country with a good health system, education system and so on, but it was not a democracy. A bitter and drawn-out civil war has destroyed people's homes and a lot of infrastructure, as well as killing many civilians. People are not walking away from their responsibilities – their jobs are gone, their homes are gone, their schools are gone, their hospitals are gone, their whole way of life is gone and sometimes their families are gone too. Food and clean water are in short supply. They are trying to escape with their lives.

Resolving this terrible situation will be complex in the extreme. Some think it would be the best of a bad job to leave Assad – a tyrannical dictator not unlike the late Saddam Hussein who was also a Ba'athist – in power on the grounds that at least he provided stability (the mantra of Western powers) and "better the devil you know than the devil you don't". There are several anti-Assad factions who not only fight against a ruthless government but also among themselves. IS also has a presence in Syria.

Many Syrians themselves don't know who to support or don't want to support any of these factions. All they want is peace but have no idea how to establish it. Western powers bombing the country only adds to the chaos while unlikely to achieve this aim.

thank you absent for putting the situation so clearly. It is a disgrace that the west is bombing them and maybe they should leave
Assad in power. I will research this online and make a more detailed opinion from there.

My late uncle, who was a BBC world service broadcaster & journalist, was Syrian . My cousins are therefore half Syrian. I am astonished at the insular approach to life some people have and then, whilst admitting limited knowledge seem to be criticising the ordinary people of Syria: doctors, teachers, electicians, journalists, nurses, gardeners, PAs, administrators, insurance brokers etc etc, just like us and our families start to leave their established homes and lives in droves.
People do not abandon comfortable homes and lives on a whim ... really it is so awful. Imagine going to bed tonight and hearing bombing at the end of the road, smelling gas, tanks rolling down the High St where you live. That is what it has been like in the towns an cities in Syria. The shops cannot open, hospitals have limited electricity /supplies etc etc etc. The whole infrastructure is in ruins. Many people did wait as long as possible but so many deaths and no easy access to food /water has forced people to flee for their lives. Most ordinary Syrians did not cause this situations nor did they want it. Let us do what we would want people to do for us in that situation.

It would be good if we could stop all war - let alone this one! .... and you can't blame the Arab Spring ,JingleBellsFrocks!
Humankind has been warring with each other, probably since we evolved into our present state of being, over territory, wealth, food, holding on to our 'stuff', power and influence and no doubt other reasons. I'd like to feel more optimistic about peace but I don't feel it right now. I do believe that if every one of us could behave towards each other each day in a compassionate and humane way as individuals, things might be different. We are however, human animals and I fear it is not in our nature to do so. I can only hope but my heart bleeds.

I hope this message doesn't reproduce itself again and again.... I am not sure why I am posting in multiples. Has anyone got any ideas what is going wrong?

Thank you Penstemon, for your post and putting so clearly and with real authority, what happens in a war torn city. Your very last sentence tells us what we should do.

Refugees should seek asylum in the first safe country they reach. I understand this requirement was changed yesterday to cope with the migrants reaching Germany but it is to be reinstated today. Economic migrants are not refugees and should be sent back home IMO. We have enough people of our own here who need help. I live in Cambridge, a very affluent city but even here we have people living rough on the streets, women as well as men. Why can't our government do something them? What about homeless ex servicemen, can't something be done for them?

Ruthie150 - are you suggesting that until we have no homeless people in the UK, the country can't afford to help people fleeing a war zone? Incidentally, homelessness has increased dramatically because of our governments policies, particularly the bed room tax.

So who is an economic migrant these days?

www.theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/03/david-cameron-help-refugees-must-stop-calling-them-economic-migrants

Cameron has history of calling them economic migrants to mean he need do very little until they are classified.
He also has a history of not going along with the rest of Europe.
I noticed that there are lawyers who have donated hours of their time to the Save the Children refugee appeal to speed up the application process. The man who started the Justgiving page wanted to raise £7,500. In less than a day, £50,000 had been pledged.

There was a very good analysis of the situation by Patrick Kingsley yesterday. The west took 1.3 million Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam war, but we all worked together, and there were no major difficulties. Cameron seems to be dragged kicking and screaming to the realisation that his countrymen are more compassionate than he is.
He still hasn't said how many Britain will help.

I think there are only two people that I will listen to when it comes to the drowning of the two children and their mother.

The father at the their graveside took full responsibility and asked for Arab countries to give more help. The Aunt has taken full responsibility and has said she wished she never sent them the money to pay the traffickers and they would safe and alive today.

Their safety was not an issue and should be acknowledged if the father and the Aunt can accept that point then it is acceptable to me. I am most certainly not lacking in empathy as I have been so often accused of, but there are some scenarios that should not be used to sway an argument and I take my hat off to the honesty of the father and aunt.

The family were seeking a better life, not fleeing for their safety. There are billions of people throughout the world who would want to seek a better life. Whether it be a child living on a rubbish tip in Africa to a child being used as slave labour in Asia, the list goes on. The world is in a mess , it always has been and always will be .

I agree with the view that refugees should be from the camps and working with the appropriate refugee organisations for the reasons of safety, ensuring they are genuinely in need and control of numbers. I am sick and tired of the UK being chastised by some and called unsympathetic.

The world has to step up and the UNited Nations is showing to be the most impotent body of them all. If shame is to be apportioned then at least apply it to those countries not steping up to the plate , especially those Muslim Arabic and African nations who are doing bugger all.

Must distinguish between genuine refugees and economic migrants. The UK does not have the infrastructure to be able to accommodate everyone, sadly. Personally I feel the decision to take refugees from the refugee camps is the best one to discourage unscrupulous people traffickers who exploit the vulnerable- and that means making good safer places for refugees to go so they don't have to undertake these terrible journeys.

News channels, including the BBC seem to be calling them migrants.

Presumably because that is what they are, and because there is a big mix of both refugees and economic migrants.

I dont think that the left wing in particular did refugees any favours at all, by trying to say, or writing refugees all the time, instead of facing up to the fact that there are many many economic migrants too.

If everyone said from the start, that there was a mixture, then genuine refugees would have got help a lot lot quicker in my opinion.

Once the two were seperated, the plight of the refugees was far more obvious.