It’s Time For World Leaders To Lead

Of the 15-member UN Security Council, the five permanent members—U.K., U.S., China, France and Russia—have full veto power over any substantive resolution. And the power to secure the safety of our fragile world.

“Every mother’s desire is to raise children in a peaceful environment but when the worst happens and she finds herself in a refugee camp, she has no option than to remain emotionally stable for the sake of her children,” says 31-year-old award-winning peace activist Rose Mbone who founded The Legend Kenya at age 22 in Korogocho, one of Kenya’s largest shanty towns with 200,000 residents. “When a woman has no place to call home, her life is disrupted, and this directly affects how she raises her children–it pains her when she is not in a position to provide very basic needs like food, shelter, clothing and security to her family.”

As World Refugee Day nears, let’s humanize the global crisis of displacement and the institutional, systemic causes of the ongoing wars, atrocities, and conflicts unleashed by state-supported extremists. Focusing merely on the unfolding symptoms–largest refugee and displacement crisis since World War II–doesn’t do justice.

While snippets of the 10-year war in Syria splash across TV screens with footnotes of the largest refugee crisis, not much is discussed on the collateral damage. Some 6.6 million Syrians had to flee their homeland, over six million remain internally displaced living in psychological tumult while 5.5 million Syrians are in temporary, crumbling camps and shelters across Jordan, Iraq, Egypt, Lebanon and Turkey. 

As a volunteer at Belgium’s Serve the City, Beccy Mack reflects on her conversation with Ahmad (pseudonym) from the northern Syrian town of Tell Abyad who had to flee his homeland in 2014 on his last year of college studies in systems network management and economics. Faced with the harsh choice of fighting or getting killed, he left his family and homeland behind, spending over a year in Turkey before embarking on a 24-day journey on a boat to Greece then to Serbia where he walked for days with “500 or 600 people trying to cross the borders.” Safeguarding his cash from smugglers, remaining invisible to the local police, walking for days under heavy rainstorms, drinking little water, relying on “sugary stuff” for energy, he slept little and still has nightmares about the violent shootout on the border of Serbia and Hungry where his best friend was shot to death.

Arriving in Belgium exhausted, Ahmad “slept a couple of hours in the street.” Now after six years he has his legal papers–a Belgium ID, and a resident’s card.

“No one in Syria wanted to destroy the system or to kick out the residents. We wanted to have our rights,” Ahmad relayed to Mack explaining how when extremists got involved, they destroyed the “very idea of having rights.” Envying those who are dead, Ahmad says “a lot of people wish they are dead in Syria…if you are dead, you have nothing else to do, you will not feel anything.”

^{Erasing Our World’s Ancient Civilizations And Sites}

Some of the world’s top humanitarian crises are unfolding in our most ancient sites. Yet most only know about the wars and conflicts only.

As one of the most ancient civilizations, Syria was part of the “Fertile Crescent” of rich agriculture, and home to one of the oldest cities ever excavated—Ebla (3,000 BCE) whose population spoke one of the oldest known written languages. Damascus is one of the most celebrated, progressive cities where since ancient times people of all religions coexisted and co-governed.

Yemen’s seven-year proxy war and conflict has displaced over one million people, spread cholera outbreaks, medicine shortages, and famine–creating such a magnitude of humanitarian crisis that the UN labeled it “the worst in the world.”

Yemen, which means South Arabia in Arabic, was once the center of high civilization and wealth on the Arabian peninsula. Called Arabia Felix, or “Happy Arabia” by the Romans, Yemen’s Ma’rib Dam, built around 700 B.C. by the kings of Saba (biblical Sheba) watered lush fertile plains. Wealthy merchants crossed the “Frankincense country” as a gateway between the Mediterranean world and Indian ports. Home to people of many faiths, the Yemeni island Socotra, near present day Somalia, was once home to the oldest Christian communities.

As the world’s humanitarian crisis continues to intensify, the great powers’ financial, environmental, and political leadership ineptitude and failures further push our world to the brink of chaos and potential extinction. This dysfunctionality was further exacerbated and amplified by the pandemic, driving the world to the brink of global disaster.

Even a global pandemic didn’t stop warmongering nations such as Turkey, Azerbaijan, Saudi Arabia, Israel, Myanmar, Colombia, U.S., Egypt and U.K. among others. Forging ahead they unleashed more wars, authoritarianism, state-sponsored atrocities, and crackdowns on liberties to quench state “interests” with no concern of the repercussions on the lives, safety, dignity and the rights of the common folks who pay the highest price for the power games of the few.

The humanitarian disasters and the hands-off practice leaves unresolved crisis poised to resurface as we witnessed this year in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, in Burma (Myanmar), and last year in the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh-Azerbaijan conflict.

Short of turning our precious world into a planet of the displaced, what’s the responsibility of those in the security council who hold the faith of our world in their voting powers and economic coffers? Instead of supporting more instability by unleashing further destruction, world leaders could practice leadership skills to secure our world’s safety and peace.

Perhaps Naomi Klein’s Coronavirus Capitalism reflects this perfectly: “In times of crisis, seemingly impossible ideas suddenly become possible. But whose ideas? Sensible fair ones designed to keep as many people as possible safe, secure, and healthy? Or predatory ideas–designed to further enrich the already unimaginably wealthy while leaving the most vulnerable further exposed?”