Arabs criticise region's governments after Syrian refugee deaths

In a week that saw Syrians suffocated in a truck left on the side of an Austrian road, tear-gassed at a migrant centre in Hungary and drowned in boats on the Mediterranean, the plight of the refugees trying to flee their country’s civil war has reached fever pitch.

Meanwhile, a story of Syrians trying to enter the EU via the Artic Circle,  a video of Germans welcoming a busload of Syrians have gone viral. Across the Middle East, the reaction on social media has been quite similar to much of that in the west: largely introspective and critical of a lack of governmental and social action.

After the drowning death of 200 Syrian refugees off the Libyan coast on Thursday, the hashtag 200_Syrian_Muslims_drowned_in_the_sea in Arabic (#غرق_200_مسلم_سوري_في_البحر) was used over 50,000 times.

“#200_Syrian_Muslims_drowned_in_the_sea because we have drowned ourselves in forgetting them,” tweeted the well-known Saudi religious scholar Dr Ayed Al Qarnee, who placed the blame for the tragedy on Arabs and Muslims.

“They drowned in the water and we drowned in indifference and disinterest,” Qarnee wrote on Saturday.

Using the same hashtag, Anwar Malek, a former Algerian army officer who has become an outspoken critic of the Syrian government’s human rights abuses tweeted, “Every Arab and Muslim country lets down the Syrian refugees. They are committing a crime in terms of the law, a villainy in terms of Arab identity, and a sin towards Muslims.”

Another Twitter user, Arwa, posted a short video of Syrian refugees in the Mediterranean with the subtitles: “There will come a day when we will tell our children how we sought refuge in Europe and how Syrians drowned and how thousands of Syrians drowned… we will say to them that the Arab and Islamic countries were closer to us [than Europe] but they closed their doors in our faces.”

Activists created the hashtag “Receiving_Syrian_Refugees_is_a_Gulf_Duty” (#استضافة_لاجئي_سوريا_واجب_خليجي) to encourage Gulf countries to take in Syrian refugees after imposing strict restrictions on Syrians trying to visit and closing the doors to those coming as refugees.

Kuwait-based Twitter user Salah Al-Meheney wrote, “The Syrian people are caught between Assad’s barrel bombs and the coffins in the sea. If the Gulf countries allowed them in, the peoples [of these countries] would provide for them.”

Echoing this sentiment, Abdul Aziz al-Hussan, a lawyer, tweeted, “The peoples of the Gulf have to compel their governments to deal with this overwhelming crisis.”

A Twitter user going by the name of “Uncle Kleiber” took a more cynical view: “It’s more likely that the inhabitants of Mercury and Mars will do something for the Syrians, before the Gulf countries do anything.”

However, other Twitter users defended the Gulf countries’ policies towards Syrian refugees. Saudi Twitter user Mai tweeted, “I ask you, who is spending money on the refugees in Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan? The Gulf Countries and the West are spending money on millions of refugees.”