LONDON: The UN secretary-general Ban Ki-moon yesterday (Wednesday) called on the international community to resettle some 480,000 Syrians and urged world leaders to counter "fear-mongering" over the potential security threat posed by Middle East refugees.
Mr Ban's appeal came as police evacuated nearly 1,000 migrants from a makeshift camp near a Paris subway station on Wednesday and hundreds of people sought to cross the seas from Turkey to Greece despite European efforts to slow down arrivals.
"I ask that countries act with solidarity, in the name of our shared humanity, by pledging new and additional pathways for the admission of Syrian refugees," Mr Ban told an emergency summit in Geneva organised by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
Europe is preparing to implement a controversial deal to begin deporting irregular migrants - including Syrians - back to Turkey. Syria's civil war continues to fuel an exodus of 4.8?million refugees although a fragile ceasefire has held over the past month.
In the latest development in the halting process of negotiation, Bashar al-Assad, the Syrian president, yesterday ruled out accepting opposition demands for a "transitional body with full executive powers" as part of a UN-backed plan to bring peace.
Instead, Assad said that a national unity government would be formed by various Syrian political forces - "opposition, independent, the current government and others." He told Russia's state-backed Sputnik news agency: "Neither the Syrian constitution, nor the constitution of any other country in the world includes anything that is called a transitional body of power. It's illogical and unconstitutional,"
Assad said Western sanctions were the main cause of Syrian migration, glossing over his government's role in plunging his country into civil war.
Philip Hammond, the Foreign Secretary, who was visiting Tbilisi, Georgia, yesterday, said Russia must come up with a proposal for a post-Assad Syria, reiterating the need for the dictator to stand aside to help end the conflict.
The White House said it would be a "nonstarter" to include Assad in any new ruling coalition government.
The UNHCR conference heard appeals for solidarity from the countries surrounding Syria. Turkey, which hosts some 2.7 million Syrians, said the UNHCR's target of resettling 10 per cent of the Syrian refugees in the region is a good start but not enough.
Mr Ban urged governments to focus on the benefits refugees can bring to ageing economies and said leaders must push back against anti-immigrant sentiment that depicted refugees not as victims of war, but as a security risk.
"Attempts to demonise them are not only offensive; they are factually incorrect," he told the one-day conference. "I call on leaders to counter fear-mongering with reassurance, and to fight inaccurate information with the truth."
Despite Mr Ban's encouragement, analysts warned that pledges were falling well short of the places needed to address the Syrian crisis.
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