ANKARA: Turkey will like to learn from experiences of countries like Pakistan for tackling the massive influx of refugees during the first ever UN World Humanitarian Summit being held in Istanbul from May 23-24 which is expected to be attended by 50 heads of state and 40 heads of governments.
The letters of invitation by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon have been sent out to all the countries and a galaxy of leaders are expected to grace the occasion as the summit is on a humanitarian and global crisis needing attention of the international community, Ambassador Levent Murat Burhan of Turkish Ministry of Foreign Affairs told a group of visiting journalists at a briefing here on Wednesday.
Pakistan still hosts 1.2 million Afghan refugees and has been using its own scant resources on their welfare and basic needs since last many decades. “We are one of the leading donor countries globally and we are the country hosting the biggest number of refugees in the world so Istanbul was the right choice for the World Humanitarian Summit,” he said, adding this summit was not an end but was a starting point of discussion on a very important subject.
Turkey has already spent $10 billion from its resources to take care of Syrian refugees and received only $500 million from the international community. The world is spending $25 billion for 120 million people displaced across the globe which is the biggest number since the World War Second. So there is a gap of $15 billion which needs to be bridged for meeting the basic needs of such a huge number of people, the ambassador said.
He said that the UN summit would discuss some core areas to tackle the humanitarian crisis as at present there was no proper mechanism to address such an issue and quite often the response of the international community was too late, too little. There is need to be a global leadership to prevent the conflict as 80 percent of the current humanitarian crisis were due to conflict hence its prevention could provide a durable solution to this problem. If half of the conflicts in the world could be prevented this would be a huge relief in humanitarian assistance, he said.
The other areas which would be debated by the world leaders, non-governmental organisations and academia would include respecting humanitarian laws, reaching more vulnerable people and investing in humanity in crisis. These are people requiring assistance for a short period of time but that were not a durable solution to their plight. Rather a balance between the humanitarian assistance and enabling such people stand on their feet should be struck for a permanent solution of a human crisis being faced by Turkey in form of three million refugees (under the protection status) mostly from Syria as a result of a conflict there.
– No terror threat; safety for all –
Ambassador Burhan said that besides having a holistic discussion on how to tackle humanitarian crisis, the world leaders would try to think about new finance mechanism. They would discuss if a small percent of Zakat and alms money, collected across the world, could be diverted to deal with the humanitarian crisis, this could provide a huge relief to the affected people. A report in this regard had already been submitted to the UN secretary general so this will be seriously looked into on this occasion, he said.
He dismissed the possibility of any terrorists threat to the summit, saying Turkey had just successfully held the OIC summit so all steps would be taken for ensuring safety of all the participants.
