Arabs seethe at Gulf state inaction over refugees

As European governments wrestle with the question of how wide to throw open their borders to a flood of refugees fleeing the insufferable conflict in Syria, many Arabs are riled that the oil-rich Gulf states have so far failed to take in any asylum seekers.

Using the Arabic phrase for “receiving refugees is the people’s demand” as a hashtag on Twitter, Saudi Arabian social media users have been spreading critical comments and cartoons online, the Quartz website reported.

Activist Iyad El-Baghdadi said that Saudis are incensed at the perceived callous inactivity of the Saudi Arabian and other Gulf governments, made worse because at least some of those countries have invested sizable resources in backing warring factions in the very conflicts that are fueling the migrant crisis.

“These countries lack any real institutional way for people to propagate their demands up the chain—it’s not like they can call upon their MP,” El-Baghdadi told the Quartz business news website. “They can’t go out and demonstrate either—and they can’t start to collect money (security rules)—so starting a hashtag is pretty much what they can do.”

After an international outcry last week, images of drowned Syrian toddler Aylan Kurdi, whose body washed up on a Turkish beach after his family’s failed attempt to reach safety, became a theme for much of the outrage felt across the Arab world.

Other hashtags gaining popularity include “Syrian child drowns” and “hosting Syrian refugees is a GCC [Gulf Cooperation Council] obligation.”

The Arab League has also drawn flak for not giving the refugee issue enough attention.

Ken Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch, posted on his Twitter account that Gulf states have so far not taken in any Syrian refugees.

“Burden sharing has no meaning in the Gulf, and the Saudi, Emirati and Qatari approach has been to sign a check and let everyone else deal with it,” said Sarah Leah Whitson, executive director of Human Rights Watch for its Middle East and North Africa division, in a report from the New York Times. “Now everyone else is saying, ‘That’s not fair.’”

The UN Refugee Agency says some six million people have been displaced by the four-year-old Syrian civil war, with over a million finding refuge in Lebanon, 600,000 in Jordan, and 1.9 million in Turkey. Hundreds of thousands more have headed to Iraq, Egypt, and countries in North Africa.

According to Amnesty International figures from December 2014, the six Gulf states — Qatar, United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain — have “offered zero resettlement places to Syrian refugees.”

Gulf states have defended their position, saying the funding they pump into relief organizations makes a significant difference in conditions at refugee camps in other countries.

United Arab Emirates political science professor Abdulkhaleq Abdulla said the aid funding should not be belittled.

“If it wasn’t for the Gulf states, you would expect these millions to be in a much more tragic state than they are,” he told the New York Times. “This finger-pointing at the Gulf that they are not doing anything, it is just not true.”