THE REFUGEE CRISIS SHOWS THE WORLD’S MORAL FAILURE.

When Nobel Laureate ‘Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore exclaims - “where the mind is without fear, and boundaries do not fragment the world,” he emphasizes the liberty that is innate to the human soul. He wishes for an ‘eternal brotherhood’ to proliferate in the global community. A century after those lines were written, the community still confronts the virtues of fear, hatred, terror, and divisiveness in the form of a ‘refugee crisis’.

History of mankind illustrates that all groups of people from various races (mongoloid, negroid, Caucasian) are in fact, immigrants. The ‘Out of Africa’ theory of anthropologists and supported by historians and archaeologists such as Richard Leakey, states that no continental community is in actuality a native of it, as all of us have migrated from Africa.

This notion of having a common ancestor instills in us a feeling that each community is a group of refugees on the face of the earth. The Indo-Aryans migrated to the Indian subcontinent in the Early Vedic Age and established a culture of their own.

The concepts of emigration and immigration are integral to the movement or rather ‘evolution’ of human civilization. The mere difference that makes an immigrant a refugee is that the latter’s native region suffers from socio-economic and political factors that make it unsuitable for residing. Refugees face the threat of persecution at their homes and hence are in constant search for ‘new homes’.

The recent refugee crisis all over the world is not a new event but a continuation of dismal consequences brought about by the nation-state order of the globe. A continuous exodus of people ravaged by wars since the hundred years’ war, colonial wars, trade wars, and finally the two world wars that shook the entire nation-state setup producing more refugees, especially in the Balkan states.

The fact that refugees are ‘victims’ of scenarios created by the western powers themselves is ignored by world leaders. And this highlights the moral failure that international affairs have encountered in the case of refugees.

The United States of America a seventeenth-century ‘paradise of refugees and immigrants’ touted as the ‘land of opportunities’ has created wars that have led to an irreconcilable loss of human life and have created a ‘millennial class’ of refugees in Vietnam, Persian Gulf, Afghanistan, and North Africa.

The new wave of ‘Protectionism’ in world politics has exacerbated the situation. The claim of ‘building a wall’ between the US and Mexico is a frivolous attempt at solving the refugee crisis. As the Buddha said, “Hatred can never be conquered by hatred, it can only be conquered by compassion.”

This compassion has been a void in the foreign policies of great powers towards least developed economies. The ‘moral bankruptcy’ of the Bretton woods institutions such as the world bank and the international monetary fund has behaved like a pair of ‘sitting ducks’. The former has announced policies for the development of middle and lower-income nations, however, the refugees that confront life-threatening situations in these countries have been neglected. The world bank and IMF have created not only economic development but post-war peace processes a goal they have failed to achieve.

Similarly, the fickleness of the United Nations Organization has been brought to center stage by the refugee crisis. The failure of the sustainable development goals and the millennium development goals as holistic parameters of global growth is certain. Through these goals have been met in several nations, the truth that over 28% of the human population is ‘on-the-move’ as refugees that are devoid of basic amenities, remains.

The UN High Commissioner on Refugees (UNHCR) is one of the very few organizations recognized by governments of nations. This is a unique scenario that perpetuates the refugee crisis because ‘refugees’ all over have been refused to be recognized as per their nationalities. For example, the Rohingya from Rakhine in Myanmar are not recognized as ‘citizens’. They are illegal migrants by the virtue of being ‘nation-less people.’

A further erosion of morality appears in the case of ‘bad neighborhoods’ the international organization of migration (IOM) reports that neglect of the poverty and terrorism in a neighboring country results in a refugee crisis at home. For example, terrorism in Pakistan has affected India since 1947.

Another aspect is the old philosophy of ‘good terrorism versus bad terrorism.’ this notion has become a roadblock to the signing of the CCIT Comprehensive Convention on International Terrorism a possible solution to ending the war on terror and easing the refugee crisis.

The ex-communication of the native Houthis by Saudi Arabian Sunni-sponsored militias in Yemen presents another picture of the refugee crisis. The western power that has taken a step forward in Syria to safeguard their national interests have completely ignored Yemen where a civil war is underway. Yemen has been ignored primarily because the US has an ally in Saudi Arabia and Russia doesn’t have a naval base in Yemen, unlike Syria. The moral failure of the world is explicit here. The Machiavellian notion of national self-interest overrides the basic tenets of humanity. Economic gains drive the thirst of powerful nations that claim to be vanguards of the global community but in reality are capitalist MNCs that look for profit in each case.

The Syrian war has displaced over six million people, the Israel - Palestine conflict has caused 3-4 million homeless denizens and the Islamic State (ISIS) has worsened the state of affairs in the middle east. Oil-exporting politically stable countries such as UAE and Saudi Arabia allegedly fund wars globally to fuel their economies and further alienate their vicinities in the West Asian region.

The rise of Islamic fundamentalism is also a result of the refugee crisis. The pre-9/11 and post-9/11 worlds are marked by alienated groups of youth who were handed guns in place of books. The rise in bomb blasts and public violence in France and Belgium in the past two years is, thus, a consequence of the dangers posed by the refugee crisis.

The worries about jobs and standards of living are shallow when it comes to a pan-global threat to humanity. The rise of right-wing regimes and a prime example of ‘Brexit’ do portray a divided picture of the world which is the main reason behind the moral failure of the world. However, the potential for human development draws a positive image for the future. Germany, for example, began vocational training for refugees and offered them cheap labor-intensive livelihood.

‘Politics of power’ has oppressed the downtrodden for a long time. It is now needed to have a consensus over embracing the homeless and descaling human conflict in precarious regions. A recent decline in the forces of Daesh, Al Shabad, and Boko Haram is reminiscent of the decline of Al-Qaeda post-laden assassination. However, the key is to build sustainable economic establishments.

Imbalance anywhere can affect well-founded structures, thus, a move to remove the global trust deficit and build human resources is the need of the hour. Health and education are inalienable rights no one should be deprived of the message that the Nobel winners Kailash Satyarthi and Malala Yousafzai gave together, despite belonging to countries that have drawn bad blood against each other for years.

‘Nation’ can never be an erosion of what is ‘human’. A ‘global village’ is unsustainable if it is plagued with divisiveness and separatism. After all, a refugee is indeed a citizen whose potential remains to be explored. Tagore’s dream of a united world is the ultimate sustainable goal that remains to be achieved.