Suddenly, the Syrian refugee crisis is no longer a massive, incomprehensible number. Suddenly, the Syrian refugee crisis has a heart-rending face, that of a three-year-old boy lying lifeless on a Turkish beach.
Perhaps now, Canada and other countries will step up efforts to deal with the largest refugee crisis since the Second World War.
Media around the world were showing photographs Wednesday of Alan Kurdi, the Syrian boy whose body washed up on a beach in Turkey. Alan, his five-year-old brother Ghalib and his mother Rehan were among a dozen people who drowned when their small boat capsized as the refugees attempted to make the hazardous trip from Turkey to the Greek island of Kos. The boys’ father, Abdullah, survived.
Alan is only one of 2,500 refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean this year while trying to reach western Europe. He and his family were just a few among the 350,000 people from Syria, Afghanistan and Turkey arriving at European Union borders so far this year in search of freedom and safety.
They are among the four million Syrians who have fled their war-ravaged country.
And those are but a fraction of the 60 million refugees the UN says are displaced by conflicts in the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa.
It is difficult for human beings to process numbers like that, to see them in terms of real people. The mind goes numb.
But a photograph of a toddler in a red T-shirt and blue shorts, lying face-down in the wet sand, plunges an arrow through all the statistics and gets right to the heart of the matter — human lives are at stake. The photograph of a dead child stirs up almost unbearable emotion, and so it should. It illustrates powerfully that children and others are suffering and dying through no fault of their own; without outside help, the dying and suffering will continue.
The Canadian government is taking intense criticism. Abdullah Kurdi’s sister Tima, who lives in Coquitlam, says her brother had been hoping to get to Canada.
Citizenship and Immigration Canada says it did not receive a refugee application from Abdullah, but confirmed it had received an application from his brother, Mohammed, which “was incomplete and did not meet regulatory requirements.”
It would be simplistic to lay the blame on the Canadian government — the Turkish government makes it difficult for refugees, denying them exit visas if they don’t have passports. Kurds in Syria are frequently denied passports.
While bureaucracies dither over documents, people are starving and dying.
Syria is an evil maelstrom of war, where millions of people faced with two choices at home — the frying pan or the fire — have fled elsewhere in hopes of surviving. As long as wars continue in Syria and other places, refugee numbers will grow.
In 1972, a photograph of a badly injured, naked, nine-year-old Vietnamese girl fleeing a burning village burst upon the world. It became an emblem of the human suffering inflicted by the Vietnam War, and helped bring an end to the conflict.
Phan Thi Kim Phuc, the girl in the photo, survived and became a propaganda symbol for the new Vietnamese regime, eventually travelling to Cuba to study, where she met and married another Vietnamese student. On their honeymoon trip to Moscow, they got off the plane in Gander, N.L., and found asylum in Canada.
Canada cannot give refuge to the millions who need it, but it can take in many thousands more than it is doing.
If a photograph can help that happen, the death of little Alan Kurdi will have meaning.
