Chronicle of failure

“The West didn’t come close to offering a solution to the biggest refugee crisis since 1945” – cartoon about the global community’s pettiness when it comes to aid.

It was one early morning in February 2016. Night after night, Syrian refugees crossed from Turkey to the East Aegean islands in completely overcrowded rubber boats, when a woman who originally came from Aleppo told me shortly after her arrival on the coast of Lesbos: "I thank God for this rescue, but I never wanted to leave Syria." She was by no means alone, on the contrary, almost all refugees from Syria said the same thing at the time. And although they never actually wanted to leave their homeland, but had hoped for a better, freer future in their country, the people from there (together with refugees from Afghanistan, Yemen and the Congo) were largely the reason why the UN spoke for the first time in 2014 that they were now dealing with the biggest refugee catastrophe since the end of the Second World War.

Since then, it has repeated this statement every year: In fact, since then, the number of not only Syrian refugees, but of all refugees worldwide, has sadly monotonously exceeded that of the previous year and, according to the UN, amounted to around 120 million in 2026 (in 2014 there were still 60 million). When Bashar al-Assad's dictatorship was overthrown, over thirteen million Syrians were either refugees or internally displaced persons, roughly half of Syria's population that lived in the country before 2011.

In April 2012, the UN refugee agency NHCR had registered just 55,000 Syrians in neighboring countries, a very manageable and comparatively easy number of people to care for.

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