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We are all children, we are all refugees
68.5 million people worldwide — a record high — have been displaced worldwide due to war, poverty and persecution.
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Much needed assistance: Refugees receive clean clothes from volunteers and social activists. (JP/ Rifky Dewandaru)
D
o you remember Alan Kurdi? Tragically, his claim to global headlines fame was having his lifeless 3-year-old body washed up on a beach in Turkey after he drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on Sept. 2, 2015.
Kurdi was the child of Syrian refugees of Kurdish descent, who trying to escape the civil war, had settled in Turkey but hoped to join family members in Canada. On that fatal day, he and his family boarded a small plastic dinghy filled to twice its capacity, and no life vest to boot. Doomed from the start, the boat capsized five minutes after it left the shores of Bodrum, a city on Turkey’s southwest coast.
Given the heartbreaking starkness of the image of Kurdi’s corpse, you’d have thought it would move anyone and everyone to actually do something. Yet a year later, in 2016, 200 children have drowned in the Mediterranean. How many more have died since in the same manner and in other ways through neglect, violence, disease and suicide?
World Refugee Day is observed June 23 each year to raise awareness of the plight of refugees worldwide. The theme this year is “Now more than ever, we need to stand with refugees”. And with good reason.
