Translator: Anh Trần Reviewer: Robert Tucker
Good morning everyone.
The picture you can see behind me
is one of the oldest churches in the world.
It is about 1,500 years old,
and it's located in a town called Maaloula,
forty kilometers from Damascus, in Syria.
As you can see, this church is totally burned and ransacked,
and this act of destruction was done by Islamist fighters
from the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda.
If you had been in this church before 2011,
when the revolution in Syria started,
you would have seen two holy paintings, icons,
on each side of the altar.
When I was in this church before 2011,
the local tour guide told me
that those two icons were donated to the church
by a Polish general that passed through this area in Syria
with an army
and tens of thousands of civilians.
So, I asked him, "Was it General Anders?"
And obviously it was him.
So, who were the Polish refugees that went through the Middle East?
Those were people from the eastern part of Poland
that was taken up by the Soviets in 1939.
Those people, about one million, at least one million, of our compatriots,
were put in cattle wagons, in 1940,
and were transported to the Soviet part of Siberia
in Soviet Central Asia,
when they were put in labor camps.
In 1942, as many of you can recall,
a Polish army was created in Central Asia,
and this Polish Army later on moved through Iran, Iraq, Syria,
to the territory of today's Israel,
and later on fought the Nazis in northern Africa and Italy.
This army was accompanied by over 40,000 Polish refugees.
We were refugees, millions of us, many years back.
Those 40,000 Polish refugees that went alongside with the army
got an incredible welcome and hospitality
in Iran, in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, where we work right now,
and in many other places.
Later on, those people were resettled all over the world.
I lived in Zimbabwe once,
and in Zimbabwe, which is in southern Africa,
there are 2,000 people with Polish passports.
And those are descendants of those refugees.
Unfortunately, right now, our response to the largest humanitarian crisis
we see right now, after the Second World War,
is vastly different to this great welcome and hospitality
our own compatriots received.
Obviously, I’m talking about Syria.
Obviously, I’m talking about the crisis in the Middle East.
This civil war that started in 2011, which has ransacked the church,
has also totally ransacked the country.
Thirty percent of the buildings in Syria are in ruins.
About six million people have nowhere to live.
The wars in Syria and the wars in Iraq combined,
creating a massive conflict
that forced over 15 million people to flee their homes.
This is a situation where - This is the -
By volume, this is the biggest humanitarian crisis
since the Second World War.
And those people did not stay in those countries;
they went to other places in the Middle East,
inundating countries such as Jordan or Lebanon or Turkey
with waves of refugees.
Lebanon, where we work, is a tiny, tiny, tiny country,
about the size of Kosovo,
or a quarter of the territory of Denmark,
or maybe ten percent of the territory of Poland,
which hosts 1.1 million refugees from Syria.
If you compare this tiny country to Poland, which is 38 million,
this is a situation as if our own country has hosted nine million refugees
from Ukraine or from other places in eastern Europe.
Our own country would not survive such a great economic burden,
and neither can the countries in the Middle East.
So who is a refugee?
A refugee is not an economic migrant:
those are the two different types of people crossing the borders.
Economic migrants escape poverty, escape bad living conditions.
However, refugees are the people who are escaping terror,
killings, and discrimination, in their home countries.
A refugee can be a person who, a man who,
is escaping his country because he is afraid of being arrested
or tortured or killed because of his political beliefs.
A refugee could be a woman
who is escaping her country with her children
because she can be killed, raped, or have her house bombarded
because she belongs to a certain ethnic or religious group.
Millions of Poles were refugees during the Second World War
and in subsequent decades.
And now, over five million Syrians are refugees as well.
So, many people in Europe
think that we all help refugees by welcoming them here.
This is complete rubbish.
Helping refugees -
If we help refugees coming here, those are people who have money,
who had sometimes even $2,000 per person to pay to people smugglers
to cross the many countries between Syria and Germany,
or between Afghanistan and Greece.
Their aid, the focus should focus on the poorest of the poor.
And they are there, close to the conflicts.
One of those poorest of the poor is this woman living in this cellar.
Her name is Maria.
She is a 29-year-old refugee from Syria.
She lives in this basement in Lebanon,
and for this terrible place, with no windows,
she has to pay $150.
She cannot afford it because she has no work,
so she’s selling her food in order to pay rent for this.
This means that her children have no proper food,
and she can feed them only with a tiny soup
made of grass, herbs and mushrooms
that she can find and collect in the local fields.
If this family had been given a humanitarian aid package
of $200 per month,
she could get a better house and better food for her children.
But this humanitarian aid is not enough.
Or this woman, her name is Nibol,
she is a citizen of South Sudan.
She has five children,
and her husband is missing due to the civil war.
She has been trying to grow food for the last several years,
but, because of the drought, all the crops are failing.
Right now, what she is holding in front of her,
those are the tiny, tiny seeds of grass
that she is trying to mill into flour and feed to her children.
But how can you feed children on grass?
No wonder her youngest child is dying, dying of hunger right now as we speak,
and her other four children will probably not survive
to the crops that come in August.
If she had received a package of humanitarian aid, valued $50 -
so what you spend for a dinner for two -
we could secure her a bag of grain of 50 kg,
and enough oil, sugar, and beans,
to last for an entire month for an entire family.
Those are the differences we are talking about.
In 2015, the European Union was affected by
the largest wave of refugees and migrants for the last many decades.
Over two million people came to the European Union borders.
Where did those people come from?
Over 75% of people arriving into Europe through the Balkans
were escaping the wars in Syria and Afghanistan.
So, those two wars, several thousand kilometers away from European capitals,
literally came to us.
We can no longer pretend to be living in ivory towers
when the countries to the south and to the east of Europe
are collapsing because of long-lasting civil wars,
because of economic crisis.
Several countries that you see on this map here -
or on this map behind me -
actually only exist on the map,
because, in reality, they have fractured and splintered
into a number of small, tiny statelets or fiefdoms
that fight each other through wars,
some of them lasting 20 or 30 years.
No wonder people are escaping such conditions.
So, perhaps we should wait for the people to arrive on our borders.
This is probably the worst thing we can do
because we have to focus and deliver aid to people
as close as possible to their homes
because we are helping the poorest of the poor,
and if people don’t run away far away from their homes,
they will also one day go back and try to rebuild their lives.
If you talk to people from Syria or from Afghanistan
who arrived in Europe,
well, they may even declare that they may one day come back,
but, in reality, we as humanitarian aid agencies
really doubt they will ever go back.
Those people who have severed their ties with their home countries
probably will never go back home.
Helping refugees,
helping people affected by humanitarian crisis,
in the place where they come from, or in the next safe country,
is many times cheaper than
social aid packages for migrants or refugees in Europe.
If we, for instance, take Germany,
the package of social assistance
that is provided to a migrant family in Germany,
comprised of food, of shelter, of education, and health,
the expenses for this package could -
with this money, the humanitarian aid agencies,
or the United Nations,
could provide really comprehensive humanitarian assistance
to five, sometimes to even ten, families
in places such as Lebanon, Syria,
or any of the countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
So, for the aid to one family,
we could feed and shelter sometimes ten more people.
As a case in point, Germany, in 2015,
has spent €20 billion, so 90 billion zloties,
to provide social benefits and social assistance
to refugees and migrants in Germany alone
during one year.
This amount for us, as humanitarian agencies,
is a total shocker
because this is twice as much money
[as] would have allowed aid agencies
to provide humanitarian aid to every person in need
in Syria and Iraq and in neighboring countries.
So, in fact, we could address the challenges there,
instead of dealing with them here in Europe.
So, what we can do?
In this year, we’re going to see a crisis with two levels.
On the one hand, we’re going to see the continued war in Syria and Iraq,
and those refugees are too scared and afraid to be going back.
On the other hand, we’re going to see the largest famine,
which is like a catastrophic hunger,
expanding from Nigeria in the West
to Yemen and Somali in the East.
Twenty million people are at threat of being affected by hunger,
and even as many as four million children can die of starvation this year alone.
This means, [during] the time I'm on the stage,
and I can see my clock already ticking,
about 50 children will have died of hunger.
This is the level of catastrophe we’re going to be facing this year.
So, we are asking for support.
We are asking for generosity.
Because we don’t have to wait for governments to act.
Every society in Europe has a tremendous fundraising capacity
to assist us in operations, and to address crisis out there before they come to us.
If every one of us were to contribute only a few dollars of private donations,
the aid agencies could assist
both Maria, the refugee in Lebanon,
who’s collecting seeds and grass to feed her children,
and Nibol in South Sudan, who’s seeing her five children dying of hunger.
We don’t have to wait for the crisis to come to us;
let us help the poorest of the poor
in the places where the humanitarian crises are taking place
for a fraction of price
we would be spending on social benefits here in Europe.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Ralph Talmont: The question of coordination always comes up
when we talk about humanitarian aid.
And, in case you guys haven’t looked up Wojtek's bio,
he runs a very large and professional
humanitarian aid organization
here in Poland,
so he’s the guys to ask such questions.
The question of coordination comes up
because, you know, invariably there is -
we’re aware of massive numbers of activities.
About 18 months ago,
friends of mine in London
began within the tech community a thing called Techfugees.
If you are into software and hardware and stuff, look it up.
It’s an amazing thing.
We had a hackerton here in Warsaw 18 months ago or so.
There are these groups of people doing good stuff all over.
What is the one place where we can actually -
Is there a one place where we can go for information
and have our questions answered?
Wojtek Wilk: First and foremost,
we have to know who is supposed to coordinate the humanitarian aid.
This would be either the authorities of the country
where we are supposed to help the people,
or the United Nations.
In Europe it's going to be, obviously, the authorities,
the social aid and refugee institutions.
In the Middle East, very often,
those are the agencies of the United Nations.
So, if you want to coordinate, you have to reach to them,
you cannot pretend to be going and thinking you’re working in a vacuum.
However, once you’re talking to other people working in the same field,
this is a great place to use data,
to use cloud, to use computing.
In Lebanon, where we work,
the United Nations has a database of 250,000 Syrian families
where we can see name by name, family by family,
who is helping them in what respect over what time.
This is a fantastic step forward
because, right now, we can really cross-check
at the level of the individual household
whether they get enough assistance,
and whether the next year, or the next month,
they will be left nothing.
However, there is a great amount of goodwill,
yes, but let’s remember
that helping people in need is much more effective
in the places they come from, or in the first safe country,
not even because of the cost,
but because we’re helping the poorest of the poor,
and we are helping people who eventually go back home.
This is what the refugees from Syria that we’re helping are dreaming of,
to go back home one day.
[One is] too scared [to] even think about [the challenges],
and we are racing with the situation that the crisis of Syrian refugees
may last another 10 or 20 years,
and this would be a catastrophe.
RT: We'll leave you with that.
Thanks Wojtek, thank you.
(Applause)