The camps don’t work

The civil war in Syria, and the resulting displacement of half the population, has been the tragedy of our times. We cannot turn our backs on the ten million people who have been forced to flee their homes. Every decent society knows this and knows that it’s our moral duty to come up with a workable way of helping the refugees. But while the scale of the displacement is substantial, it is not unmanageable. The 21st century should be capable of dealing with such catastrophes and we must prepare ourselves actually to do so.

To rise to the challenge, we need to combine the instinctive compassion that mass suffering arouses with the dispassionate analysis necessary to craft an effective response. We need the heart supported by the head. The growing humanitarian crisis has come about because we’ve deployed one without the other. Our response has veered between the heartless head and the headless heart, and the results have been calamitous.

Paul Collier and Kevin Watkins from Save the Children discuss how to make aid work again:

We all, by and large, agree that we have a duty to help refugees. We have a duty of rescue, but what does that entail? The standard example in moral philosophy is of the child drowning in the pond. We, as passers-by, have an unequivocal duty to pull the child out. We are not entitled to protest, ‘Where are the parents?’ or, ‘Why isn’t there a fence?’ Similarly, the child is not shouting, ‘I demand my rights!’ It shouts ‘Help!’ Having pulled the child out, we should then use our best endeavours to get it dry, and to return it safely to its parents. What, then, is the equivalent for a displaced family? The common duty is to do what is reasonably possible to restore normality.

So here’s the crucial question: what, beyond safety itself, are the critical elements of normality for a Syrian refugee? The entire international refugee support system has presumed that the answer is food and shelter.