Hold The Global Creators Of Refugees Accountable

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06/19/2015 06:58 PM ET


Members of the Burmese Chin ethnic minority group protest outside the office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees on Friday, a day... View Enlarged Image

Crisis: At 60 million and rising, the global refugee population has never been larger. But instead of blaming the states that take in the refugees, isn't it time to demand accountability of the nations that create their misery?

The U.N. refugee agency's "Global Trends Report: World at War" got virtually no press when it was released Thursday, but it should have. Its stark data signal a global crisis of refugees and a great wrong in the established world order.

Fifty-nine-and-a-half million people were driven from their homes in 2014 as a result of war, conflict and persecution, the highest number in history, as well as the biggest leap in a single year. A decade ago, refugees totaled 37.5 million. An average 42,500 are displaced each day, 1 out of every 122 people on earth, or, if placed together, a nation that ranks 24th among world populations.

"We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before," said U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres.

Guterres rightly sees the scope of the problem, and as a global bureaucrat can be forgiven for his concern about "the response required." But that focus on the response is precisely why the crummy Third World dictatorships, terrorist groups and corrupted democracies that create the refugees keep getting away with it.

Where is the scorn for the nations whose anti-free market, oligarchical and hostility-to-minority policies are the root of the problem?

It seems that the only criticism and attention that ever comes to refugee issues centers on whether the countries are able to take them in. Southern Europe, for example, is being browbeaten by the U.N., the Vatican and the European Union for not rolling out the welcome mat for the thousands of smugglers' boats full of refugees from Syria, Niger, Chad, Libya, Afghanistan and elsewhere fleeing to their shores.

The same can be said of the United States, which is watching a stop-and-go border surge of Central Americans who insist they're escaping gang violence in their home countries.

Australian and Southeast Asian states have been berated by the same actors for not wanting to take in thousands of refugees sailing from Bangladesh and Burma. The Dominican Republic is taking global brickbats for trying to preserve the integrity of its borders.

Are there any war-crimes tribunals in the works for captured Islamic State members whose terror is the No. 1 reason for refugee flight? Where's the criticism of the government of Afghanistan, which makes corruption the priority over a livable homeland?

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