A recurrent problem to which no feasible solution has been found so far, the desperate situation of tens of millions of migrants the world over was also debated at the UN Summit in New York a few days ago. The White House leader Barack Obama, nearing the end of his presidential term, said that mankind was dealing with a crisis of epic proportions and called on world leaders to imagine the scenario of their own families sharing the fate of the refugees. Obama hailed the fact that the countries taking part in the summit committed themselves to taking over 360 thousand refugees this year, almost double their number in 2015, and insisted that developed countries should do more for the people trying to escape wars.
Prime Minister Dacian Ciolos represented Romania at the summit, where he said that the world had the necessary tools to deal with the refugee crises. Bucharest, Ciolos said, is fully aware of its shared responsibility to deal with the refugee crisis and has the necessary resources and policies to support the international communitys efforts in this respect. Dacian Ciolos also said : “Romania has granted bilateral humanitarian aid to the affected countries, such as Turkey, Jordan, Iraq and Afghanistan. Romania, in close cooperation with the international humanitarian agencies, gives refugees the chance to a new life, by offering them temporary shelter in the Emergency Transit Centre in Timisoara”.
Ciolos also said that, besides humanitarian and educational aid and also support in finding themselves a job, the Romanian authorities were granting the refugees children the same rights to education that Romanian children had. Ciolos explained that Romania had supported, as an EU member state, the refugees transfer and relocation, with the help of volunteers. Just like most countries in central and Eastern Europe, Romania has been constantly reluctant to the so-called mandatory immigrant quotas that the EU countries were supposed to accept.
Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria or Slovakia have no experience in dealing with such situations. Unlike many countries in western Europe, they have never had colonial empires, sending waves of migrants towards the metropolis, nor living standards likely to attract millions of people from less developed countries or large Muslim communities. Just like in the case of Budapest and Warsaw, Bucharest insisted on volunteer refugee quotas and was clearly against any imposed quotas. Were not talking about figures, we are talking about people, President Klaus Iohannis said one year ago, when he rejected what he called “quotas calculated in a very bureaucratic manner without consulting the member states.”
