The United Nations’ Refugee Agency launched the #WithRefugees petition, in June 2016, to appeal to governments to help refugees as best they could.
World Refugee Day is commemorated every year on June 20, which is a day identified to bring awareness of the crisis facing millions, including women and children, across the globe as warlords pursue their various destructive agenda to decimate their enemies, inevitably and invariably with terrible consequences for the social fabric that protects and promotes the wellbeing of mankind.
On December 4, 2000, the United Nations General Assembly, in Resolution 55/76 decided that, from 2001, June 20 would be celebrated as World Refugee Day. In this resolution, the General Assembly noted that 2001 marked the 50th anniversary of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees.
African Refugee Day had been formally celebrated in several countries prior to 2000. The UN noted that the Organisation of African Unity (OAU) had agreed to have International Refugee Day coincide with Africa Refugee Day on June 20.
In the Roman Catholic Church, the World Day of Migrants and Refugees is celebrated in January each year, having been instituted in 1914 by Pope Pius X.
Displaced peoples around the world are trekking on long and dangerous journeys, seeking sanctuary from their own war-torn home countries. Oftentimes the gruelling journeys take tolls that ensue in the loss of family members, rape and sexual molestation of the vulnerable – children, women, and even men. Many times refugees are robbed of their sparse belonging by other migrants.
The refugee situation has assumed crisis proportions and host countries are overwhelmed, with overburdened social services and economies that are in regression because of the influx of a parallel population that is a constant drain on overburdened taxpayers. The cultural differences are also straining relations between even the most liberal nations and their migrant population, which is currently becoming renowned for what some describe as being parasitic and problematic, causing severe dislocations to the cultural and general wellbeing to legitimate citizens of host countries.
Women and children in some locales are complaining of sexual abuse, men and the elderly are being attacked in their own home territories; then there are the terror attacks, which justify, perhaps, the fear and the negative reaction of citizens to any kind of invasion of their homeland by migrant from other countries.
It is being rightly said that most of the refugee groups comprise of young, able-bodies men who should stay in their homelands to fight against their oppressors so that their families could return to familiar homes and cultures.
US President Donald Trump rode into the White House on a promise to his constituents that he would minimise the radical individuals and terror groupings; as well as migrants with a criminal history.
Some countries are banning refugees for fear of murderous radicals infusing the groupings of genuine refugees who merely want a safe haven for themselves and families.
Displaced by famine, war, and/or oppression, by the end of 2016, more than 65 million people worldwide were forced to leave their homes due to conflict and persecution, data published by the UN Refugee Agency reveals. That’s an average of 28,300 people per day, almost 20 people every minute.
The plight of the refugee is caused by their own leaders, power-drunk, corrupt despots who have no compassion or human tendencies to mercy and these are the ones who should be made to flee into exile, not allowed to create a wave of people fleeing from their own homelands into often alien and contentious situations in host states.
