Original subtitles

Where's your mommy?

Okay.

It's very difficult to say.

Obviously, we don't have a crystal ball to forecast,

but all the elements that have driven people to flee

are still there.

The conflicts are still waging.

Syria, the biggest driver of displacement,

is very much volatile. Uh...

Even though right now it's slow, and over the past two days

there have hardly been any arrivals,

but it's also extremely cold.

Winter has v-very much set in.

With the improvement of weather, with coming of spring,

it's, uh, very likely that the numbers will grow once more.

And it's difficult to forecast how many,

but we should be prepared, we should be prepared to receive

probably the numbers that we have seen in 2015 again.

This extraordinary event that has unfolded

has also impacted Europe in many ways.

We are here, right now, on Lesvos Island.

This is the point where half a million people,

most of them refugees, set foot and entered Europe.

An... An extraordinary way that people have been coming through.

And just the last year alone, over one million have come

to Europe through the Mediterranean Sea.

And although these are movements we haven't seen in decades...

In fact, it hasn't been since the Second World War

that so many had fled and come to Europe...

It's still something that we need to consider

in the global context with so many millions

that are actually displaced.

The situation in the camp is bad,

because the borders are all closed now.

First, the Macedonian border was closed.

Then the Slovenian and Croatian and Serbian borders were closed.

So there is no way for these people to advance

on their journey to try to get to Germany.

They're now trapped here.

There is about 13,000 people in this camp.

Most of them are from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan.

They are fleeing from war.

Uh, I talked to people who just fled from the bombs

just a few weeks ago. And they're trapped.

It's been raining since Monday.

Everybody is completely wet.

They have no way to dry their clothes.

Um, just to get a little bit of food sometimes...

It takes two hours to get one cup of soup.

So it really is a desperate situation.

So through this little gate,

last year more than a million people

walked their way to Europe.

This is the gate that they pass through

along these railway tracks,

going first through Macedonia,

then to Serbia, then through Croatia.

A million people walked through this gate.

How long are you on duty today?

Europe is an interesting case,

because Europe of course is the continent

where the refugee convention was born.

This was one of the essential, crucial initiatives

that came out of the Second World War

and of the horrors of the war.

Initially, the focus was very much on Europe.

It's interesting that we have gone full circle

and now the focus is again on Europe.

But 1951, of course, one of the main refugee problems,

or perhaps the main problem then

was refugees coming across the Iron Curtain.

So there was a strong focus on individual cases

fleeing the Soviet bloc.

The European member states

traditionally have had very good asylum mechanism.

This was happening in a smooth way

when numbers were small.

When people started coming in large numbers,

then the system collapsed.

Should be taking... Take a picture of him like this.

- Sorry. - Yes.

You know, Jordan historically, um,

has been truly a crossroads for peoples.

Um, whether it's... it's from antiquities with caravans

or today as a host for people from throughout this region.

And we have tried to play a role in keeping an open door

and enabling people to find a refuge here.

Um, a-and to retain, you know, some sense of dignity,

a home, until they are able to return to, um, their homes.

You know, the average stay I think of a refugee

is 25 years or... or some number like that.

A-And this humanitarian side I think is very, very important.

You must always hold onto humanity.

And the more immune you are to people's suffering,

I think that's very, very dangerous.

And we... You know, our region is very challenging.

We have difficulties every which direction you look at.

And I think it's critical for us to maintain this humanity,

for our own... you know, the health of our own society

and community and relations.

Let's go!

Get up! Get up. Get up.

Being a refugee

is much more than a political status.

It is the most pervasive

kind of cruelty that can be exercised

against a human being by depriving the person

of all forms of security,

the most basic requirements of a normal life...

By cruelly placing that person at the mercy sometimes

of very un-or inhospitable host countries

that do not want to receive this refugee.

You are forcibly robbing this human being of all aspects

that would make human life not just tolerable

but meaningful in many ways.

Uh-uh, uh-uh...

Uh-uh, uh-uh...

Hey, hey, hey.

Inhaler, inhaler!

Hey, you. You.

Inhaler.

The officials came here and told them,

"Look there is no way you gonna get papers to continue."

So, you're going to be deported.

"Either you go voluntarily or we arrest you."

And yesterday, it started with...

police coming here and actively arresting people.

They are very afraid of being brought back.

I mean, there is a reason Why these people are here.

Sorry.

It's okay, it's okay. It's okay.

Okay. A little water.

Come on, man!

This is one of them.

Hold it. Hold on.

Hey.

Today, we're here at the Ein al-Hilweh Camp,

which is one of the most populated areas in the world.

In an area of 1 km,

there is approximately 100,000 different people living,

and as one knows the history of the Palestinian people,

this camp has been here for more than 60 years.

Generations of children have grown up

within the walls of this camp.

If children grow up without any hope,

without any prospects for the future,

without any sense of them being able to make something

out of their lives, then they will become very vulnerable

to all sorts of exploitation, including radicalization.

Young, particularly men who are...

They're teenagers,

they're on their way to adulthood,

many of them are traumatized by unimaginable losses at home.

Uh...

They're angry, they're frustrated,

they want to make a difference in their...

in the lives of their communities.

They have seen their homes demolished,

they have seen their families killed. Uh...

They are children who want...

they themselves want to go fight

because they think that this is

the way they can seek revenge or get revenge for the horrors

that they have lived through.

Without memory, you are nothing,

memory is part of your history

and history is part... Part of your geography.

Where can the Syrians go?

Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Europe.

So now, they are helping us,

they want us to keep these refugees.

Okay, we will keep them.

They want to give us money

so we have to profit out of this money, to educate the Syrians,

to make them work so one day they might come back.

But now they are pouring money in Jordan,

in Lebanon, in Turkey.

They don't want to hear anymore about refugees.

That's their new policy now.

It's quite a hypocritical policy, but...

I was terribly violent along time ago,

I was a feudal, I was a warlord along time ago.

Lebanon is small, with...

It's a country of 18 communities,

Christians and Muslims.

So we have to preserve it, and not to think about the past.

See the future.

And to forget about old, about our old hatred.

Because somewhere in our subconscious,

we hate each other.

We have to, at any price, compromise.

Dialog is important in life.

Much more important than anything.

In this new world of total uncertainty, nobody knows,

I don't think somebody knows where this world is going on.

Gaza could be, could be on Mars.

It's like as distant as you could be.

An hour's drive from Tel Aviv...

those 1.8 million people, that, you know, are our neighbors,

living in conditions, you know, of a third world country

on the way to collapse, right?

Already people there, for many hours in a day,

don't have electricity, right?

Uh, the quality of the water is deteriorating.

We are talking about, like,

the most basic of human needs, right?

This is, like, almost as basic as it gets.

Is this fair? Is this equal? Is this just?

Just as a human being, identify that,

you know, what you are looking at is injustice.

We are helping the returnees

to come back with the cash grant

and with some supplementary assistance

for the more vulnerable people.

And in addition, we are helping the government of Afghanistan

to be a refugee hosting country for the first time.

So, Afghanistan is actually hosting people

who have fled for their safety also here.

So, I think the main challenge will be the security situation,

because it is a country where there is ongoing conflict.

And that affects the ability of people to come back

and restart their lives.

People are sometimes unable

to go back to their place of, uh, origin,

because it may be in war-torn area.

That means they have been displaced across the border

and now they are coming back

and becoming internally displaced as well.

So that's the sad part about it.

And so the people who are returning today...

are in a very difficult situation.

They are probably going to have a very difficult time

restarting their lives,

but at least they are now citizens of their own country.

So a lot of these people

can't go back to their villages,

particularly the people coming from Pakistan,

because they have been displaced for 30 years,

in some cases 40 years.

They no longer have the connections in their villages.

They can't go back and claim the land

that their grandfathers tilled.

In some cases, their villages are too insecure for them

to go back, and so they end up in urban areas,

displaced and disconnected, landless and dislocated.

As we have huge logistics, we of course have to design,

have to decide where people can go with their stuff.

We're here now.

And you can see, we have one, two, three, four hangars.

Three hangars already have people living in them.

- Hello. - How are you?

I mean, one thing is to make sure that people get food.

And one thing is to make sure that people have,

like, the possibility to shower. But the hardest is to actually

make them feel like they are a human being,

and they are not just one of, I don't know,

one million who came to Germany.

So I really, on a daily basis, make people feel like

they are human beings and we actually care about them.

No, no, no.

Every time We took people off the deck

more people appeared. It just never stopped.

We thought it was going to be around 400,

but I guess it's somewhere between 720 and 730 people.

As a group, they were

the sickest people I've seen yet

on this mission.

Uh, we had adults with severe malnutrition.

I had a woman who weighed 36 kilograms,

she was very, very sick. Uh... there was

a high, high amount of diarrhea and dysentery.

And, uh, there were people who had scurvy

as well as chronic vitamin C depletion,

like sailors used to see.

A lot of them came from Eritrea,

a few also from Somalia and other places.

But the journey they have made through Sudan,

through Khartoum up into Libya,

it was really shocking to hear some of the stories,

to hear what they had been through inside Libya,

often kept for several months

and just exploited, just, uh... giving up anything they have,

any money they have to pay for this journey

and to make it out to sea.

There were a total of eight pregnant women on board.

Two of whom were due any day,

and one lady went into labor our first morning.

We knew that she would have complications that would not

allow her to successfully deliver on the boat,

so we came to the decision

that we needed to medically evacuate her.

So she went onto a Coast Guard ship from Malta,

straight to the hospital,

went on to deliver a healthy baby girl.

If that baby had been born 24 hours earlier,

the mom and the baby would have died.

I think we've entered a period in world history

where movements of people across borders

has accelerated.

Maybe social media plays a role in this.

Maybe the fact that transportation has become

so much cheaper and more effective plays a role in this.

And also that globalization,

though it has had very positive outcomes,

it also has created greater inequalities.

And inevitably, people are going to move from locations

that are insecure and economically nonviable

to areas where there is more opportunities

and more stability, and prospects of prosperity.

It's going to be a big challenge to recognize

that the world is shrinking,

and people from different religions,

different cultures are going to have to learn

to live with each other.