Regarding Refugees: Europeans Need to Put Themselves in the Other Person’s Shoes
It is a cold November for Syrian refugees. They are leaving their home country not to live better lives. They cross the Mediterranean for their survival, our most basic need. Many refugees have died when boats carrying them overturned. This too ordinary incident isn’t sensational enough make the headlines anymore. What makes them leave their homeland and wander into strange territories? In Syria, there are religious and political conflicts caused by civil war. Moreover, there are also external factors to this problem. North Korea, Iran, China, Russia and Cuba all support the Syrian government. The United States, Saudi Arabia and Qatar support the rebels. This means Syria has a whole has turned into a battlefield by external countries. These factors has made 13 of the 26 million Syrian people become refugees. This large amount of migration by refugees has created some big problems central to which is what countries will accommodate all these people. The EU has now endeavored to solve this problem with a ‘refugee quota system.’ However, there are some issues as seen from EU assembly’s progress: the timeline for when the refugees will be assigned to each EU country is unknown and whether the refugees will have a choice to which countries they will go to. Moreover, in Europe, many refugee objection groups have appeared and some Europeans have a strong opposition to their country allowing refugees to migrate. They don’t want to share their resources with refugees. However, they should know better about this situation. Historically, refugee situations can occur anywhere. Many European countries experienced refugee migration during World War II. In France, the word ‘tolerance’ used to acknowledge differences and to accept them as they are. We need tolerance during this time of conflict and as more Syrian refugees will try to migrate to Europe out of necessity.