The Syrian refugee crisis has been described by UN refugee chief Antonio Guterres as the worst since the Rwandan genocide. Well over 2.5 million people have fled the country, and a further 6.5 million are internally displaced. Syrian refugees make up more than a quarter of the population of Lebanon.
When the UK government announced last year that it would accept 500 refugees, it was seen broadly as a positive step after months of resistance to taking any at all. But it was clearly a compromise agreement: a small quota granted so that the UK could avoid taking a larger number of refugees, imposed by the UN, which it could not control. As the New Humanist noted at the time, it was a drop in the ocean given the scale of the crisis. (By comparison, Germany said they would take in 10,000 Syrians).
But now, 500 people does not sound so small after all. Six months after the announcement, it has been revealed that just 24 have actually been allowed to enter Britain. The government says that it will still admit 500 refugees – but that it will be over a three-year period. Labour has blamed the government’s decision to go it alone and avoid the UN programme, while refugee groups have condemned the delay, citing the urgency of the mounting humanitarian crisis.
Over at politics.co.uk, Ian Dunt notes that elements of the government’s scheme are to blame for the tiny number:
“Ministers blame local councils like Sheffield, Manchester and Hull, who have refused requests to take Syrians. But it is their own fault. The relocation scheme lasts for five years but the funding for councils to take the refugees lasts for only one. What did they think was going to happen?”
The British government has certainly made some very positive contributions to the humanitarian crisis in Syria; £600m aid has been supplied to refugees in Jordan and Turkey, while more than 2,000 Syrians who have made it to the UK of their own accord have been given refugee status.
However, greater action is required, given the dizzying scale of the crisis engulfing Syria and the wider region, where the strain of the huge numbers of displaced people is having a serious knock on effect. It is – depressingly – difficult to separate the quietly slow intake of Syrians to the UK from the current political context, where immigration is broadly seen in negative terms and where refugees fleeing conflict are conflated with economic migrants.
When it was announced that 500 Syrians would be given temporary status, some asked whether it was enough, given that 6,000 Syrians were fleeing their homes every day in 2013. Now, with the UK filling that quota at a rate of about one person a week (if that), we have the answer.
