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Introduction
If the 60 million refugees scattered around the
world today were gathered together under the
umbrella of a single state, it would be the world’s
twenty-fourth largest in terms of population
with only slightly fewer citizens than Italy. An in-
credible 60 million human beings have become
nameless “pariahs”: men, women, children and
seniors who have been reduced to mere statis-
tics. These are people who have lost everything
they might have once had. Everything, that is,
but their dignity.
A number of such a magnitude –60 mil-
lion!– does not materialise overnight. The hu-
manitarian crisis we are now witnessing at the
gates of Europe is nothing new and, even more
tragically, was entirely foreseeable. Human
rights organisations have been pointing out the
severity of the situation to anyone who would
listen for some time. The intensification of a
number of conflicts over the past few years,
particularly those in Middle Eastern and African
countries such as Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan,
Sudan, Somalia, Eritrea, Nigeria, Mali and the
Central African Republic, as well as European
indifference regarding these problems, has
made the personal situations of many in these
countries so untenable that hundreds of thou-
sands now find themselves in need a place in
which to remake their lives.
The alarming rise in the number of people in
need of refuge is the result of uncountable vio-
lations of human rights, invasions, conflicts
emerging from animosities that have simmered
for decades, the actions of political powers
more interested in protecting their interests
than avoiding massacres, the displacement of
entire communities due to multinational corpo-
rations’ exploitation of natural resources and
the subsequent environmental contamination
of entire regions and governments that perse-
cute their countries’ social and religious minori-
ties or give free reign to paramilitary factions to
do so, permit violence against women and seek
to stifle the voices of those who question or
speak out against such practices.
The reality that as many as 60 million human
beings could be forced to flee their homes
under such circumstances in the twenty-first
Refugees: Europe sits
on its hands in response
to the tragedy
Estrella Galán and Paloma Favieres