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Illegal migrants wait to enter a newly built migrant camp near Roszke, a village on the Serbian-Hungarian border, Hungary, on Sept. 7, 2015. (Xinhua/Attila Volgyi)
by Xinhua writer Mao Pengfei
MEXICO CITY, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- While the West is slow to act to cope with a refugee crisis that appears to have taken them by surprise, developing countries have stood up to actively respond to the sizzling global issue.
Brazil, Venezuela and Chile are among the South American nations that have officially announced that they are ready to take in more of the mainly Syrian refugees fleeing their homeland, which has been torn by years of conflicts between government troops and West-supported opposition forces.
Blatant intervention in Syria's domestic affairs by the United States and some of its European allies, which have been pushing for a change of regime in Syria and militarily supporting the opposition factions, has contributed to the exodus of refugees.
Prior to Syria, the U.S.-led wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drove millions from their homes and into neighboring countries.
However, the way of these Western countries have tackled the refugee crisis of its own making is disappointing and irresponsible as they have adopted a wait-and-see attitude and retarded to respond.
U.S. President Barack Obama said Tuesday he was still "actively considering" how to respond to the crisis. British Prime Minister David Cameron said Monday his government would take in 20,000 refugees by 2020, the same number as Venezuela has pledged to host.
"The major refugee-hosting countries in the world are all in the Middle East, Africa and Asia," the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said in its 2014 mid-year report, listing the top 10 refugee-hosting countries as Pakistan, Lebanon, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, Ethiopia, Kenya, Chad, Uganda and China (home to 300,000 Vietnamese).
In other words, the world's developing countries are shouldering the burden of the wealthier nations' irresponsible military interference and its devastating consequences.
As recently as June, UN High Commissioner for Refugees Antonio Guterres warned: "We are witnessing a paradigm change, an unchecked slide into an era in which the scale of global forced displacement as well as the response required is now clearly dwarfing anything seen before."
The UNHCR also spelled out the factors driving the crisis: "Since early 2011, the main reason for the acceleration has been the war in Syria, now the world's single-largest driver of displacement. Last year, a daily average of 42,500 people became refugees, asylum seekers, or internally displaced, a four-fold increase in just four years."
Today's refugee crisis gives the lie to the argument Washington often uses to justify many of its "military exploits" on foreign soil: that death and destruction are necessary evils toward the greater goal of democracy-building, as there can be no democracy at all where there is only ruin and despair.
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BEIJING, Sept. 9 (Xinhua) -- The West should regard the ongoing refugee crisis as a costly and painful lesson of its hegemonistic foreign policies and interventionism in the Middle East that have not only brought wars and chaos to the region, but also boomeranged.
The tensions between the West and the Arab world has its roots both in their respective histories and in their thorny historical relations. Only through talks between the two sides as equals and through recognition of the complex historical plights of the two sides can hostility and tensions be reduced. Full story
Spotlight: U.S. aware of "urgency" in refugee crisis, yet far falls short of action
WASHINGTON, Sept. 8 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. government said Tuesday that it is aware of the urgency of the refugee crisis in Europe. However, it has so far fell short of actions to deal with the problem.
"Everyone is well aware of the sense of urgency," White House spokesman Josh Earnest said at a daily briefing with reporters. Full story
