The new top emergency relief official at the UN on Wednesday urged the world’s rich countries to step up aid to war zones in the Middle East and Africa so that refugees are not forced to seek safety in Europe.
“If you’re frightened for your life or unable to feed your children, your first response is to flee to where you think you might be able to meet those needs,” UN Undersecretary General for Humanitarian Affairs Stephen O’Brien said in an interview, having recently returned from his first visits to Syria, Iraq and Yemen.
O’Brien was referring to the influx of people, many of them from countries like Syria, into Europe in search of refuge.
Photo: AFP
The UN refugee agency on Wednesday estimated that 3,000 people a day were coming into the Balkans alone. In the first half of the year, at least 137,000 people crossed the Mediterranean to Europe, creating a political crisis on the Continent and giving rise to sometimes-violent anti-immigrant sentiment.
O’Brien suggested that a better approach would be to devote more money to aiding families in their home countries before they feel they have no choice but flight.
“You may find it’s an economically as well as a more socially and politically smart way of meeting the pressures that are now arising out of migration,” he said.
His agency, the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, says it needs US$19.44 billion this year to provide aid to 78 million people around the world, most of them in conflict zones. Only 35 percent of that money has been pledged or received, underscoring the financial pressures facing the agency.
“If we do not address the migration crisis very rapidly, it becomes a humanitarian crisis,” he said.
O’Brien, a former member of the British parliament and close aide of British Prime Minister David Cameron, was appointed to the UN post in March. He has since visited some of the worst humanitarian crisis zones.
On his first visit to Syria earlier this month, a market in a Damascus suburb was hit in an airstrike.
“I was appalled, shocked,” he said, especially as it was carried out just hours after he had met with Syrian government officials and discussed the need for all warring parties to comply with international humanitarian law.
In a briefing to the UN Security Council last week, he described his visit to South Sudan last month as a “deeply harrowing experience,” and told the council the attacks on civilians by warring parties there were “inhumane and illegal.”
Asked about the signing of a peace agreement on Wednesday between leaders of the antagonists in South Sudan, O’Brien said: “It would have been worse if there hadn’t been a signature.”
“I am optimistic that this is an important and necessary step,” he said.
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