When the world does not finish closing the door to the drama of the pandemic, it is already opening a new one towards a potential humanitarian trance of Dantesque characteristics: the possibility that the war in Ukraine unleashes a new crisis of displaced persons and refugees in Europe. With more than 3 million people fleeing their country in just three weeks of conflictthe forced movement already exceeds other exoduses such as Afghanistan (2.6 million), South Sudan (2.2 million) and Myanmar (1.1 million), the most populous in the last decade.
And the emergency revives the worst episodes of discrimination at the hands of a discourse that describes Ukrainians as a “different” vulnerable type, through a bias of European affinity. Which hides a worrying double standard. because the construction of a narrative about the tragedy by certain western media and politicians in order to generate empathy with the Ukrainian victims, puts in the background thousands of African and Asian people who continue to flee their homes to save their lives.
expulsive spiral
The number of people displaced from Ukraine is highly volatile. Since February 24, when the invasion began fled to Poland (1.8 million), Romania (467 thousand), Moldova (344 thousand), Hungary (272 thousand), Slovakia (220 thousand) and, to a lesser extent, Belarus (155 thousand) and the Russian Federation itself (1,800). Of that total, 2.3 million left the country during the first two weeks of March, as the Russian offensive on Ukrainian territory expanded. One million did it in just seven days. Nearly 90% are women and children.
As stated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the international agency specializing in these crises, the escalation of the conflict in Ukraine has caused the destruction of civilian infrastructure and has forced people to flee their homes in search of safety, protection and assistance. In the first week of the war alone, more than a million displaced persons had already crossed the borders, and that is not counting the almost 2 million who have not yet crossed, but have already left their places of residence and escaped within Ukrainian territory. . They are the so-called internal displacements, less visible, but just as serious.
Prior to the start of the conflict, they were already counted within the country, up to 1.4 million people displaced without crossing borders. To a great extent as a consequence of the war in the eastern region of the country since 2014. Added to this number are the people who required some type of humanitarian assistance due to their state of vulnerability and which, towards the end of 2021, the United Nations estimated at nearly three million. Hence, specialists already categorized the situation prior to the invasion as volatile and extremely fragile inside Ukraine. Now it exploded, triggering an emergency of immeasurable proportions.
It is no coincidence that, given the dynamics of the conflict and its potential humanitarian impact, UNHCR has already raised the emergency in Ukraine to level 3, the highest within its scale. The projections raise an alarm, because Europe could face a new humanitarian crisis like the one that shook the continent with the war in Syria, between 2012 and 2015. The lack of an extended and lasting truce between the parties only contributes to paying for the worst scenarios, with a curve that would touch the 4 million people displaced outside Ukraine in the near future.
double standard
Europe knows about these tragedies because it has experienced them, directly or indirectly, throughout its history. In the last decade alone, it has represented the point of arrival for million people who fled Syria. The flow is incessant, it preceded the internal war in that country, it was strengthened during the confrontation against ISIS, and it did not stop even during the pandemic. And they also come from other trouble spots in Asia and Africa.
Only in this way can it be explained that, with mostly closed borders, the number of displaced persons, asylum seekers and refugees in the world reached a new record in 2020: more than 82.4 million. The figure released this year will be much higher, and will continue to climb as it has for a decade.
However, in the face of the conflict in Ukraine, a narrative characterized by an affinity bias has been installed. The one who describes the Ukrainian people as “Europeans with blue eyes and blond hair”, and kyiv is praised as a “civilized and relatively European” place. Against this, the historic Temporary Protection Directive is activated by the European Union, created in 2001 after the war in Kosovo. Good news, although it leads to the question of why it is now, and not before. On the contrary, European governments have negotiated with Turkey and Libya in the past to close off people trying to cross.
In the last eleven years, more than 13 million people have been forced to leave Syria to save their lives. Almost half, about 6.7 million, survive in poverty in neighboring countries. It has also not been easy for people of African and Asian descent who lived there to escape from Ukraine. In this dangerous but not innocent categorization between vulnerable, lies the double standard that also colors humanitarian aid in times of war.
You may also like
