Worldcrunch
-Essay- PARIS — There are times when it is necessary to compare things that are not comparable. There’s a chance at least that it will wake up some anesthetized minds. Between 1933 and 1940, several million refugees who had escaped from Germany, Poland, the Baltic countries and elsewhere, fleeing Nazism, were met with closed borders. […]
PARIS — Shocking photographs of the body of a Syrian toddler, whose body had washed up on a Turkish beach after his family’s failed attempt to reach Europe, are sparking global outcry. Will the publication of the hard-to-look-at images mark a turning point in raising global consciousness of the plight of refugees? The series of […]
CALAIS — Three rows of men gather side-by-side, their heads bent down. A coffin lies on the sand, in front of them. They silently pray and place the coffin down a deep pit. Moussa Houmed was 17; he was Eritrean. He dreamed of setting foot on English soil, but ended up drowned in the retention […]
New waves of migrants, including Syrian war refugees, seek to reach the gates of Europe at the Hungarian border.
Portrait of Yar Yar Kan, one of the many Rohingya Muslim minority rejected by the Burmese — and shunned by other Asian countries in an attempt to emigrate.
As part of 2011’s uprising against Assad regime, Alaa Arsheed fought for his country’s freedom before he was forced to flee to Beirut. Now safely in Italy, he plays to forget.
-Editorial- BOGOTÁ — Colombia’s more than half-century old civil war has been, if nothing else, an environmental calamity. Besides causing tens of thousands of deaths and forcing millions from their homes, the protracted fighting between state forces, left-wing guerrilla forces and right-wing gangs has led to massive amounts of crude oil being poured into the country’s rivers, streams and wetlands. Data released by the oil industry suggests that over the past 30 years, some 4 million barrels of crude have been dumped in Colombia. That’s 10 times the amount the infamous Exxon Valdez tanker released off the coast of Alaska […]
Nicolas Ngwabije fled his native Congo in 1966, a political refugee. He ended up working for decades at a French migrant center, a reference point for generations of refugees. And they keep coming.
ISLAM QALA — It’s almost midday when, under a blazing sun, the first bus transporting Afghans expelled from Iran arrives. At the border crossing of Islam Qala, in western Afghanistan and 460 miles from the capital Kabul, two metal sentry boxes are built opposite one another. Over one flaps the Iranian flag, on the other […]
A popular hot spot for European summer vacationers, the Greek island of Kos is now also a prime destination for undocumented immigrants from places like Syria and Pakistan.
The six Nigerian women had each risked their lives like so many crossing the Mediterranean. When they found each other in church in northern Italy, they discovered they had something else in common.
Thousands of asylum seekers are passing through the small Balkan nation on their way to the European Union, but the short journey is far more arduous than it seems.
Syria Deeply had a rare opportunity to hear from Palestinians facing violence and starvation in the Yarmouk refugee camp in southwestern Syria.
Pope Francis’ recent encyclical on the climate had a major blind spot: cattle farming and meat consumption. Nowhere is the damage more evident than his native Latin America.
BRUSSELS — Moved by the dramatic situation of the Christian population in Aleppo, Syria’s largest city, a group of Belgian activists, with support from the government, orchestrated a remarkable rescue operation to save nearly 250 Syrian Christians. In Aleppo, the Christians were under continuous assault by ISIS, the al-Qaeda-aligned al-Nusra front and the Assad regime. […]
From Hungary to Switzerland, fortifications are rising in the heart of Europe, where the once-heralded borderless zone is being diminished by the day.
The number of Brazilians living and working in the United States is growing fast, yet neither government has taken the steps necessary to mobilize this community.
LANGSA — It was 8 p.m. and the sea was calm in the Strait of Malacca, at the northern tip of Indonesia’s Sumatra island. Ibrahim, a local fisherman, was pulling in his first catch of the night when he received news that a nearby boat was overcrowded and in trouble. “We met another small fishing boat and they asked us to help,” Ibrahim recalls. “The fisherman said there were more than 1,000 people that needed help, but his boat could only take around 20 to 30 people.” He immediately released his catch and headed towards Malaysia. Half an hour later, […]
Reflections on the influx of (mostly) wealthy Chinese students enrolling at New York’s Columbia University.
Kos is one of the Greek islands closest to the Turkish coast and receives hundreds of Syrian and Afghan refugees every day, a heavy burden for a country already ravaged by economic crisis.
KIGOMA — The outline of the MV-Liemba looms on the horizon. The oldest ferry in the world drops anchor off the coast of Kagunga, a Tanzanian village just three miles from Burundi’s border. Around 600 Burundian passengers are subsequently brought on board after arriving from the shore on small fishing boats. The MV-Liemba will steam […]
Europe’s immigration crisis has also been gathering under a Metro overpass in the French capital. Officials have now acted, but that hardly means there is a solution.
Katrin Dölz is one of 385 officials in Germany handling cases of asylum seekers. Her days are filled with tragic immigrant stories and the power to change lives.
PARIS — Up to 8,000 Rohingya, a long-persecuted Burmese minority, are still reportedly stranded on rickety boats in deplorable and perilous conditions, weeks after being abandoned by human traffickers in the Andaman Sea. Denied safe passage on the shores of countries in the region, the plight of this Muslim ethnic group is however just one […]
As boatloads of desperate immigrants land in Italy, the debate is highly charged. One writer reminds his countrymen of their own emigrant past.
Young men who left Eritrea, by way of Libya, may have all ended up in Lampedusa, but they took many different paths getting there.
At the border between Serbia and Hungary, the number of illegal arrivals has increased dramatically over the past few months. Syrians and Afghans who take the road in the Balkans cross paths with migrating Kosovars.
On this southern European island, some of the hundreds of corpses have arrived from the latest migrant tragedy. They will be processed and buried without knowing their identity. It is not the first time.
GARABULLI — Two unfinished houses on the sand, facing a Mediterranean sea in shades of grey. So this is where they left from. According to various Libyan sources, the vessel carrying more than 800 people left Libya on what became its fateful crossing between Saturday April 18 and Sunday 19 from this long stretch of […]
-Analysis- TURIN — Thousands of people — calling them people, i.e. men, women and children, is the first step — have died in the Strait of Sicily since 2010. Sunday saw the worst tragedy yet, but it was not the first, and unfortunately it won’t be the last. Many of these people are fleeing the […]
Newspapers around the world featured the tragedy in the Mediterranean Sea on the front pages of their Monday edition, after as many as 700 migrants reportedly died when their boat capsized. Sunday’s tragedy is believed to be the worst maritime disaster in Europe since World War II. ITALY FRANCE GERMANY CHILE U.S.
In southern Tel Aviv, some 50,000 refugees amass on the margins of society. Too many in Israel, once the refuge for European Jews, have turned their back on these migrants.
Hundreds of thousands have left Spain, until recently a land of plenty with a booming real estate sector, to seek work abroad. American countries are favored destinations, even if recession is now raising its ugly head there.
Details emerge of poisonous links between local politicians and organized crime networks in Sicily working together to siphon public funds and exploit migrants arriving via Lampedusa.
Recent beheadings highlight an ongoing exodus of Christians from territories targeted by ISIS. Some have taken refuge in Lebanon.
Surveys show that Germans are much more welcoming toward refugees than they were 10 years ago or even last year. The robust state of the economy helps, and they want young, skilled labor to meet demand.
Buildings, tarmac and air conditioning are turning some cities into fetid, airless saunas. Experts urge more trees and grass to mitigate the heat of increasingly hot cement jungles.
MUNICH — Dirk Rateike values ecologically friendly living and runs an organic hotel in the north of Hesse. But he’s facing anonymous threats from his own neighbors in the village of Gilserberg, between Marburg and Kassel in central Germany. The intimidation has included warnings that he shouldn’t go out at night lest he should face […]
Countless displaced by the war in Syria include those forced to move from one part of the country to another. Misery tends to follow.
-OpEd- TURIN — Geography is inexorable: Italy can never be isolated from Libya, which is just 300 miles from the coast of Sicily. Still, the Italian public tends to be isolated from the rest of the world. The government knows both these truths. Unlike any other European or Western country, Italy kept its Libyan embassy […]