While Europe is up in arms amid a wave of migrant movements, countries surrounding war-torn Syria are hosting millions of refugees. Maltese humanitarian worker Karl Schembri tells Sarah Carabott the situation at the frontline is at breaking point.

The migration of Syrian refugees has changed the face of the entire region, especially Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Iraq. Suffice to say that unemployment, water shortages and property prices in Jordan have spiked as more refugees seek shelter.

“We meet a lot of families who are continuously displaced as they run out of savings and cannot keep up with the rent,” said Mr Schembri, Regional Media Adviser in the Middle East with the Norwegian Refugee Council.

While Turkey is hosting nearly two million registered refugees, one in every four residents in Lebanon is now a refugee. Lebanon hosts the largest number of refugees per capita, followed by Jordan, which has given refuge to more than 625,000 people.

Karl Schembri at the Jordan-Syria border.

The volume of refugees has taken a toll on these countries, and aid agencies, including NRC, are calling on wealthy nations to shoulder responsibility and resettle refugees who made it out of Syria alive.

“A year ago we called on the international community to host at least five per cent of refugees. The number of refugees, currently at four million, keeps going up but countries have not lived up to their moral obligations.”

Jordan and Lebanon were not prepared for a situation of this magnitude.

Can you imagine if over 90,000 of the 400,000 residents in Malta are refugees?

“There are 232 refugees per 1,000 inhabitants in Lebanon. Can you imagine how that would work out in Malta, if over 90,000 of the 400,000 residents would be refugees,” Mr Schembri asked.

The crisis had been building up for years, but it was tragic it had to take the picture of a little dead boy to open the eyes of those in power, he said.

“It’s a failure of our humanity. It took this picture to mobilise people into petitioning their governments to take in refugees. So many have died in the past, but very few hearts were touched.”

Refugees kept moving beyond neighbouring countries because the conditions had also reached breaking point.

The latest example was that of the family of Aylan Kurdi, the three-year-old Syrian who drowned while trying to reach Europe. Like many others, they had fled from the bombs in Kobani, Syria. But when they were in Turkey, they still faced the constant struggle for survival.

“People are being forced to take this desperate journey and to try find a better place because ultimately countries are not shouldering the problem fairly,” Mr Schembri insisted.

Although Gulf countries had provided aid funding, they had not taken in any refugees, so the agency was calling on them, and countries like Russia, Japan and South Korea, to open their doors to refugees.

However, despite the desperate conditions, hope has not yet perished, because the root causes are solvable.

“These are largely man-made conflicts and problems, which countries with influence have allowed as they did not exert their diplomatic influence.

“The solution to migration is not building walls or getting hysterical with every boat of survivors, but looking at the source of conflict. In Syria, the solution is diplomatic, and that’s where the UN and influential countries have an enormous responsibility in getting it solved. It can be solved but we haven’t seen the commitment.”