UN
Report Reveals Nations Producing Most Refugees Were Targets of US
Intervention
A UN report
has shown that more than 65 million people were forced to leave their
home countries last year, becoming refugees due to deadly conflict.
The top nations from which refugees fled have one thing in common,
they were all targets of US intervention.
22
June, 2017
A
United Nations report has
shed light on the world’s burgeoning crisis of displaced peoples,
finding that a record 65.6 million were forced to vacate their homes
in 2016 alone. More than half of them were minors.
The Office
of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR),
which drafted the report, put the figure into perspective, stating
that increasing conflict and persecution worldwide have led to “one
person being displaced every three seconds – less than the time it
takes to read this sentence.
UN
High Commissioner Filippo Grandi called the figure “unacceptable”
and called for “solidarity and a common purpose in preventing and
resolving the crisis.”
However,
what the UN report failed to mention was the role of U.S. foreign
intervention, indirect or direct, in fomenting the conflicts
responsible for producing most of the world’s refugees.
According
to the report, three of the nations producing the highest number of
refugees are Syria
(12 million refugees created in 2016), Afghanistan (4.7 million) and
Iraq (4.2 million).
Watch the UNHCR’s New Global Trends Report:
The
conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan are known to be the
direct result of U.S. military invasions in
the early 2000s, as well as the U.S.’ ongoing occupation of those
nations. Decades after invading both countries, the U.S.’
destabilizing military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan has
continued to increase in
recent years, with the Trump administration most recently
announcing plans
to send thousands of
soldiers to Afghanistan in the coming months. It is worth noting
that each U.S.
soldier in Afghanistancosts
U.S. taxpayers $2.1 million.
While
the U.S. has yet to directly invade Syria, the
U.S. role in the conflict is clear and
Syria’s destabilization and the overthrow of its current
regime have
long been planned by
the U.S. government. The U.S. and its allies,
particularly Israel and Saudi
Arabia,
have consistently funded “rebel” groups that have not only
perpetuated the Syrian conflict for six long years, but have
alsocommitted
atrocity after atrocity targeting
civilians in Syrian cities, towns, and communities – a
major factor in
convincing Syrians to leave their homes.
The U.S. must stop supporting terrorists who are destroying Syria and her people.
The
report ranks Colombia as the world’s second-largest producer of
refugees, with 7.7 million Colombians displaced in 2016. Like Syria,
the U.S. has not directly invaded Colombia, but is known
to have extensively funded paramilitary groups,
also known as “death squads,” in the country since the 1980s,
when then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan declared a “war on drugs”
in Colombia.
U.S.
efforts have
long helped fuel the
civil war between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC)
and pro-government, U.S.-funded paramilitary groups. This conflict
has lasted for more than half a century.
In
2000, then-President Bill Clinton’s administration funded the
disastrous “Plan Colombia” with
$4 billion in U.S. taxpayer funds, ostensibly to fight drug
trafficking and insurgents. Almost all of this money was used to fund
the Colombian military and its weapon purchases. “Plan Colombia”
ultimately intensified armed violence, military deployments, human
rights abuses by the Colombian military, and – of course – the
internal displacement of Colombians. The legacy of U.S. policy in
Colombia and its continuing support of the nation’s right-wing,
neo-liberal regime have ensured that the chaos continues into the
present.
Clinton ran on Plan Colombia and its sponsoring right wing death squads.
In
addition to the above, U.S foreign policy is also to blame for the
conflict in South Sudan, where the UN report found was home to the
fastest-growing displacement of people in the world. In 2011, the
U.S. pushed South Sudan to secede from Sudan, as South Sudan holds
the vast majority of Sudan’s oil reserves — the largest oil
reserves in all of Africa. The U.S.’ push for the creation of an
independent South Sudan dislodged
Chinese claims to
Sudanese oil, as the Chinese had previously signed oil contracts with
the (now Northern) Sudanese government.
But
when nation-building efforts went awry and civil war broke out just
two years later, some
analysts suggested that
the conflict only started when South Sudan’s president began to
cozy up to China. According to the UN report, approximately 3.3
million people in South Sudan have fled their homes since the war
began.
Grandi
has called on the world’s nations to help prevent and resolve the
global refugee crisis. But he would also do well to point out the
common cause uniting many of the world’s worst conflicts – the
U.S. military-industrial complex’s insatiable lust for conquest,
power and profit.
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