Time to stop bombing and make peace in Syria and Yemen

Here's my two cents.

The term 'refugee' has a strict legal definition at international law and a much wider meaning outside the law.
In international law (Geneva Convention) it means a person fleeing specific forms of persecution who has made it to one country and is applying to go to the closest next country.

Outside the law it means a person is fleeing risk of death to one country seeking safety in another safer country. In this larger meaning, the person fleeing might not be specifically targeted in his own country; he might simply be one of millions suffering in a war. An entire population might be considered 'refugee' under this meaning. The notion here is, however, still political and at risk of violence, possibly death. But it's not the 'legal' definition.

A person who is not in immediate fear of their life but whose potential for healthy survival is affected because s/he cannot make a living in a country whose economy has been destroyed or greatly damaged by war does not fit the 'legal' category of refugee. They are an economic migrant.

In reality most people are not going to leave their home if it still provides them with decent opportunities to make a living, for it is extremely difficult to survive in a new country unless you have family there and money, skills and influence. Extreme poverty will cause people to migrate for survival.

Overpopulation, wars and colonialisation can all reduce certain sectors or large swathes of populations to extreme poverty. This is what we are looking at in the Middle East at the moment.

The overpopulation is the result of the destruction of long-held intertribal territories and traditions which kept populations in check through kinship rules that limited fertility opportunities both exogamously and endogamously. [1]

Characteristic of wars and industrial 'development' are new land-laws, new definitions of ownership, privatisation of property, border redefinitions, and mass movement of populations, with rural to urban drift. Displaced clan and tribe members must seek waged work in urban centers where kinship rules are almost irrelevant, marriage opportunities are many and niche opportunities for child labour provide the only opportunities to increase family income.

Wars, colonialism and development are all part of the same displacement and economic destruction syndrome. We see the same thing in the 'developed' countries, like Australia, Britain and the United States, where power elites have kept those populations in constant disorganisation with forced accommodation of huge quantities of mass migration.

It has been much harder to disorganise continental Europe, due to its Roman legal codes (based on the Napoleonic code) which guarantee its citizens (and legal immigrants) certain rights at law. The right to housing and economic survival guaranteed by the state made mass immigration policies impossible to implement. It took this huge recent engineered crisis to provoke a situation where it became possible, momentarily, for a corrupt press to manufacture the appearance of consent to mass migration of refugees and economic immigrants in Europe. That was this recent 'Syrian refugee movement' that Angela Merkel has abused that has ripped open Germany's and Europe's borders, with downstream consequences that no-one can predict. She should be held to account for this at law.

To get those immigrants to leave en-masse required bombing and terrorising Syria for years and the neighborhood for decades. It required the financing of gangs of professional terrorists by foreign powers, notably the US and NATO pouring arms into the region, with Saudi Arabia, Israel, Qatar and Turkey delivering them. Finally the creation of the demonic ISIS seemed to do the trick, with Turkey then organising the bus-loads of immigrants to the coast and the rafts into the Aegean Sea while the Turkish police turned a blind eye. All probably organised in cooperation with the United States, Britain and some European powers - all allies of Australia.

The only people to blame in this situation are the leaders of the powers that tried to remove or succeeded in removing governments and thus destabilising entire countries. They have engineered false flag attacks, 'color' revolutions, and terrorism. They have misrepresented what was happening to the world, through corrupt media (which should also stand trial) and dumbed-down education institutions. These agents would take us past the brink of World War. As Russian President Putin said recently at the UN: "Do you even know what you have done?"

No country should be destabilised by war or by mass immigration or emigration.

Refugees and stateless persons can best be stemmed by the world somehow prosecuting world leaders who intervene in the affairs of relatively peaceful states in efforts to cause 'regime' change. We have a huge line-up of war criminals today, many of them very very rich, in the US-NATO bloc. Somehow they need to be tried and imprisoned. Then their wealth - much of it from aggressive development and the arms trade - needs to go to restore the environments and economies of the countries whose people were made refugees and economic migrants. As far as that is possible. And to provide temporary asylum and accomodation for those who have been forced to leave their own countries by the consequences of foreign interference.

It should be noted that the United States has attempted to put itself outside normal international criminal proceedings. [2] How do we deal with this problem - beyond writing about it? Do we appeal to Americans to find ways to hold their leaders to account in domestic law?

[1] It is a popular misconception that 'all' non-industrial peoples had huge numbers of children, who mostly died in infancy and that adults had short life-expectancy. Thus the theory that human populations grew due to modern medicine causing more children to survive and longer adult life-expectancy. This theory can be attacked on so many levels that I cannot be bothered to start, except to say that classically overpopulated 'third world' countries lack the 'modern medicine' that is supposed to have prevented the high infant mortality and huge families which characterise them. Further that places like India and Africa had rich intact biodiverse environments that could not possibly have survived centuries of human overpopulation such as has characterised the last couple of centuries. I have written a book on this: http://www.lulu.com/shop/sheila-newman/demography-territory-law-rules-of-animal-human-populations/paperback/product-21735874.html#

[2] The United States government has consistently opposed an international court that could hold US military and political leaders to a uniform global standard of justice. The Clinton administration participated actively in negotiations towards the International Criminal Court treaty, seeking Security Council screening of cases. If adopted, this would have enabled the US to veto any dockets it opposed. When other countries refused to agree to such an unequal standard of justice, the US campaigned to weaken and undermine the court. The Bush administration, coming into office in 2001 as the Court neared implementation, adopted an extremely active opposition. Washington began to negotiate bilateral agreements with other countries, insuring immunity of US nationals from prosecution by the Court. As leverage, Washington threatened termination of economic aid, withdrawal of military assistance, and other painful measures. The Obama administration has so far made greater efforts to engage with the Court. It is participating with the Court's governing bodies and it is providing support for the Court's ongoing prosecutions. Washington, however, has no intention to join the ICC, due to its concern about possible charges against US nationals. Source: https://www.globalpolicy.org/us-un-and-international-law-8-24/us-opposition-to-the-icc-8-29.html