Two major take-aways from 2015

In reviewing the year that ended last night, there are two things that stand out in my mind as particularly significant for the world at large: the burgeoning refugee crisis and the environmental agreement that world leaders drafted at year’s end in Paris.

One has been ongoing throughout the year (and decade) and is the direct consequence of the misery caused by constant war and violence, and it is now beginning to significantly affect the leader-nations in the West that, directly or indirectly, feed the source of the crisis—be it through proxy war interests, massive arms sales, political and/or material support for one belligerent or another, or simply through failure to seek a disinterested international humanitarian solution to the root cause of the problem.  The other is just beginning and is a manifestation of how world leaders are finally—very late in the game—waking up to the fact that their countries can no longer ignore the extreme damage that years of corrupt, self-interested, commercially expedient, intentionally misleading and ultimately pernicious and retrograde policies have wrought in the environment in which we all live and which we all require for our survival. In short, it is a tacit admission, finally, that if something isn’t done right here and now to stem the tide of environmental deterioration, we are not going to make it as a species and will, sooner rather than later, be going the way of the dinosaur.

And in reflecting on this, I realized that the two things are intimately linked. How so? Because they’re both part and parcel of the same negligent attitude that world powers have taken toward their duty to humanity and the environment we live in since the end of World War II—or in other words, ever since they’ve known better and have done squat to significantly change the world. The situation the world finds itself in today is, then, the result of intentional mismanagement of both the peace and development processes, with the tacit aim of rewarding greed, power and arrogance at the expense of worldwide human cooperation, tranquility and advancement.

After 2014, which was a disastrous year for world peace, in 2015 many of us had hoped for a better turn of events, a more sane world climate, a more humanistic approach to international disputes. But we got, instead, a deepening world crisis in humanitarian terms. The most obvious manifestation of that crisis is the fact that people displaced around the world, mostly due to war or the aftermath of war, now number over 60 million, the greatest number of refugees and refuge-seekers since the devastation wreaked by World War II.

At the center of the refugee crisis lies Syria, where what has been dubbed a “civil war”, but which is actually the setting for a variety of international proxy wars, is now well into its fifth year. It is a war in which international community leaders have either joined and taken sides in order to protect their own regional interests—and in doing so have made the situation devastatingly worse—or in which they have turned their backs completely and pretended that the carnage that rages on daily in that war-torn country, at a tremendous human cost, is of no concern to them. In both cases, they are part of the problem and what stands in the way of a solution. And it is fitting and proper, then, that the humanitarian debris of that and numerous other wars and their aftermath is now washing up on Western shores.

And this is not a problem that will be going away any time soon, no matter how much razor wire Western nations string along their borders, because life in the living hells from which would-be refugees are hemorrhaging by the millions is much worse than any number of barriers thrown up across the paths along which they are fleeing. Or rather, the problem won’t be going away any time soon unless the Big Five on the UN Security Council and world leaders as a whole put their own commercial and political interests behind them and agree to forge the only solution possible to this growing problem: namely, world peace.

Syria has become, in a sense, the laboratory that tests the commitment (or lack of same) of world leaders to peace, democracy and human development. The international conflict there has already cost at least a quarter-million lives, and hundreds of thousands more, the vast majority civilians, have been injured or maimed for life. The conflict is the direct result of the combination of superpower interference and competition, which has maintained an exceedingly cruel dictatorship in charge of the country for the past four decades in which power has passed from father to son and in which authentic democracy has been conspicuous by its absence.

Refugees from the Syrian War have burgeoned at a rate of a million a year and today total 4.2 million. Another 7.6 million Syrians are displaced within their own territory and, as such, form an enormous source for further foreign refugee migrations in the future. Nearly half of all Syrians are now displaced either internally or externally and observers say the last five years of war have been so utterly devastating and divisive that the country is on the verge of disappearing as the world knows it.

Attention has only been drawn to the world refugee crisis in general and to the Syrian refugee crisis in particular in this past year, in which about a million migrants have washed up like the fractured remnants of a humanitarian nightmare on European shores. Clearly, the press being given to this phenomenon has topped news schedules because it is Europe, and not some largely ignored other part of the world that is being affected, since although a million migrants might seem a staggering number, it only represents around one and  half percent of the total refuge-seeking universe. While a Western Europe that has been—along with the United States in a much larger role—instrumental in the creation of this crisis appears to be taken by surprise by it, its commitment to accountability has been tepid at best. Of all European countries wringing their hands over the crisis, only Germany (and Sweden to a lesser extent) has moved to actually do something about it, offering resettlement to 75 percent of all Syrian migrants entering Europe to date.

But if Europeans have looked askance and pretended the droves of Syrians riding the tide to their continent have nothing to do with them, the United States has been significantly more hypocritical in its handling (or not handling) of the refugee crisis. To date, the US, which could not have been more deeply involved in the Middle East political phenomena that have generated the war in Syria, as well as directly generating the terrorist scourge known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), has accepted only a paltry 2,174 Syrians fleeing the combined carnage of endless civil war and insurgent Islamist extremism—or equivalent to only about 0.0007 percent of the US population. By comparison, Turkey has accepted 1.9 million Syrian refugees, or a total equivalent to about 2.76 percent of the Turkish population. In Lebanon, where 1.2 million Syrian refugees now live, one out of every five people is a Syrian migrant. Jordan has taken in another 650,000 Syrian refugees and Egypt some 132,000. Even war-torn Iraq, with internally displaced people of its own numbering some three million, has accepted 250,000 Syrian war refugees.

If the wealthy nations of the West are, for the most part, going to ignore their culpability and accountability in the growing crisis that is affecting the Middle East today, the least they could do is throw money at the problem, in order to assuage, to some extent, their role in this humanitarian disaster. But their hypocrisy (especially that of Washington) seems to know no bounds, considering that, to date, the United Nations has only been able to raise 40 percent of the funds that it needs to properly manage the Syrian refugee crisis alone, to say nothing of the plight of the world’s other 48 million displaced people.

In the cases of both the world refugee crisis and the world environmental crisis, leaders have demonstrated an unconscionable lack of greatness and have pushed the world to the absolute brink of disaster in both instances. That is, however, almost as much the fault of us, the governed, as it is theirs, because we’ve been gullible, ignorant and apathetic enough to fall for their lies and evasions and have done far too little to press for solutions to world problems that affect us all. In fact, we’ve done our level best to delude ourselves into believing that it’s none of our concern, that the 20-odd wars currently raging around the world are local and divorced from international interests, that peace is unattainable and that climate change is a “natural phenomenon” over which humankind has no control.

Despite our own lack of a sense of accountability, as citizens of the world we live in and as people with everything to lose and nothing to gain from either war or environmental degradation, world leaders have finally had to admit on their own that, when it comes to protecting the habitat we must all live in, they’ve dropped the ball, and that this could be fatal for humanity if we don’t start doing something to reverse the ill-effects of decades of irresponsibility right now, before it’s too late—if it isn’t already!

It remains to be seen how this historic new commitment to the environment by 200 leaders will play out in the materialization of effective measures. But the fact that, for once, a consensus for real change toward a healthier environment was finally reached begs a question pregnant with significance on this first day of a brand new year: If world leaders could finally weigh the extent of the environmental crisis and commit to doing something about it, mightn’t they, in some near future, realize the need to attack the current humanitarian crisis at its source by promoting an end to wars worldwide and to finding creative ways to live in peace, harmony and worldwide cooperation aimed at creating a vastly better world for the generations to come? If it turned out not to be utopian for such an environmental pact to take shape, then mightn’t there be real hope for a future of world peace as well?

These are queries I want to leave with you as we start this New Year together, and my wish for you and the world at large is that the responses to these questions materialize as positive changes for an ever more ecologically sound and peaceful world.