- Moderator
- #41
Wealthy Gulf Nations Are Criticized for Tepid Response to Syrian Refugee Crisis
“Burden sharing has no meaning in the Gulf, and the Saudi, Emirati and Qatari approach has been to sign a check and let everyone else deal with it,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch for its Middle East and North Africa division. “Now everyone else is saying, ‘That’s not fair.’ ”
There are, in fact, hundreds of thousands of Syrians in the Gulf, where vast oil wealth and relatively small citizen populations have made the countries prime destinations for workers from poorer Arab countries and elsewhere. While many expatriates are professionals who have built lucrative careers there, most are low-paid laborers who give up their rights to get jobs and can be deported with little notice.
This group now contains many Syrians who have fled the war, although they get none of the protections or financial support that come with legal refugee or asylum status, nor a path to future citizenship — benefits Gulf countries do not grant.
...Fueling the criticism is the tremendous wealth in the Gulf, a region filled with sprawling malls, gleaming skyscrapers and wide boulevards clogged with S.U.V.s. That opulence is clearly lacking in Syria’s neighbors, where most of the conflict’s more than four million refugees are....
Jordan, for example, has an annual per capita income of $11,000 and has received 630,000 refugees. Lebanon is richer, but has more than 1.2 million Syrians, making them about one-quarter of the population.
Turkey has the most, about two million, with a per capita income of $20,000.
Those average incomes are a fraction of the figures for Qatar, $143,000; Kuwait, $71,000; or Saudi Arabia, $52,000, according to the International Monetary Fund.