“The Middle East is in turmoil… and the level of violence is enormous,” a former Iraqi official for human rights fears, warning the growth in the number of young people within the refugee camps is a potential “time bomb.”
People are unemployed and jobs are not being filled, Bakhtiar Amin, former Minister for Human Rights of Iraq, told CGTN's The Point (@thepointwithlx), referring to over 20 million internally displaced people from the region still living in “miserable conditions.”
In the region, about eight to ten million new jobs are needed every year, according to Amin. However, around 100 million people are unemployed and 90 million of them are illiterate.
After more than six years of conflict, there are over five million Syrian refugees in the region, and that number is growing, according to the UN Refugee Agency. Elsewhere, violence and instability in countries such as Iraq and Yemen are triggering new waves of displacement.
Among the population, two-thirds are children who “have no access to any educational systems,” Amin noted. With those children growing up in the refugee camps, the number of people will jump to 700 million by 2050 from the current 400 million.
VCG Photo
Those children should be “opportunities for their countries,” not the potential to become “migrants, refugees or even extremists,” he went on.
On the fundamental cause of the “turmoil,” the Kurdish Iraqi politician said that the Middle East faces a challenge over the “legacy of the past,” claiming that some states need to “embrace and manage world diversities” for ethical, religious and political concerns. Meanwhile, he also dismissed “foreign interference” as “not always positive.”
The ready supply of arms and proxy wars have created exhaustion for societies in the region and produced human calamities, Amin said. “In Iraq and Syria, forces supporting extremist groups like IS and al-Qaeda have devastated the area.”
People have fallen victims to the “terrible force of evilness,” he said, citing the 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad as one of them, a “brave” Iraqi woman spreading a belief that “life finally defeated death.”
(If you want to contribute and have specific expertise, please contact us at opinions@cgtn.com.)