The World Humanitarian Summit was hosted in Istanbul in an attempt to tackle what the United Nations has described as the worst humanitarian crisis since World War II. An estimated 125 million people worldwide need humanitarian assistance. The summit was certainly an important event in the way that it collectively addressed the challenge facing humanity. The reason Turkey was selected to host this summit is that as a result of its neighbor’s devolution, Turkey has become one of the largest donor countries in the world, led only by the United States and the United Kingdom. The World Humanitarian Summit was a way for the UN General Secretary to acknowledge this and to encourage other countries to be generous like Turkey. Furthermore, the Secretary General, who himself was displaced during the Korean War, wanted alternative voices to emerge.A lot of the funds allocated for humanitarian and developmental goals go into administrative costs, and Turkey has objected to this process, operating its system outside the established mechanism. Turkey ranks twenty-fifth in contributing to the UN budget; instead, it prefers to follow its own way using the full-fledged agency called TIKA, the Turkish Cooperation and Development Agency. This was some kind of Islamic NGS that has given assistance to Syria, to Typhoon Haiyan victims in the Philippines, to Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar, and largely to Palestinian development projects. TIKA predominately helps Muslims countries hoping to become the leader of the Muslim world.
The humanitarian crisis requires global leadership to prevent conflict, to address pressing problems, and to prepare for the future, but global leadership must develop and also lead a reform of the United Nations Security Council, whose structure played a destructive role in preventing conflict in Syria or in ending the conflict. The humanitarian crisis requires more than just meeting to discuss resolving problems. It needs global leadership to thwart conflict and to agree on international policies that confront the repetitive and long-term causal factors of war, such as those in Syria, Yemen Iraq, Palestine, and of injustices such as poverty and diseases. America used to take that leadership role, but under the Obama Administration America has lost its global leadership. Some of the nations of the world did not even send their heads of the state to the summit, indicating how serious they are about the humanitarian crisis. Most of the these tragedies are man-made, such as the wars mentioned above as well as those in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Ukraine, and many other places around the world. War, violence, terrorism, and fear are causing people to leave their homes and gather into refugee camps in alarming numbers.
Turkey should be commended for welcoming more than three million Syrians inside its borders. We are living in a very unstable and unpredictable world. There are new environmental challenges and risks, which are now causing desertification, floods, and poverty. The number of refugees, for sure, will continue to increase if urgent preventative actions are not taken collectively. Decades ago the U.N. General Assembly created the Central Emergency Response Fund (CERF) with one mission, “to enable timely life-saving assistance to people affected by crisis, rapid onset disasters, and armed conflicts and forgotten emergencies.” Ten year ago, 32 million people needed urgent humanitarian assistance. Today, more than 125 million require assistance. Protracted conflicts have displaced millions, and more intense natural disasters are having a greater impact on people’s livelihoods. Food scarcity, climate change, migration, and extreme poverty– all require more humanitarian help. Although the world’s humanitarian needs have increased, the donations and resources have remained relatively fixed. Every year the CERF targets raising $450 million for humanitarian responses, but Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon is soliciting a billion dollars to stay abreast of the needs. Preventing humanitarian crises requires collective partnerships without which it is not possible to reduce the tragic consequences that the world is witnessing today. We live in a global village, where opportunities and threats similarly extend beyond national borders, yet most countries are left alone to deal with the consequences of regional and global problems. Without solving the Syrian war, there will not be an end to the humanitarian crisis affecting the Middle East, Europe, and many other nations. The Turkish government is debating establishing a safe haven on the Syrian side of the border. Turkish President Recep Tayip Erdogan has argued for one from the beginning of the Syrian conflict, but the United States is very much against it. Such stalemates demonstrate that humanitarian crises necessitate more than just having a meeting; an adequate response requires global leadership to prevent conflicts and thoughtful agreements on international policies to confront the destructive, and usually distressingly repetitive, deeper roots such as war and displacement.
Dr. Aland Mizell is President of the MCI and a regular contributor to Mindanao Times. You may email the author at:aland_mizell2@hotmail.com