While Europe takes the burden of the migrant crisis
While European countries are
being lectured about their failure to take in enough refugees, Saudi
Arabia – which has taken in precisely zero migrants – has 100,000 air
conditioned tents that can house over 3 million people sitting empty.
The
sprawling network of high quality tents are located in the city of
Mina, spreading across a 20 square km valley, and are only used for 5
days of the year by Hajj pilgrims. As the website Amusing Planet reports, “For the rest of the year, Mina remains pretty much deserted.”
The tents, which measure 8 meters by 8 meters, were permanently
constructed by the Saudi government in the 1990’s and were upgraded in
1997 to be fire proof. They are divided into camps which include kitchen
and bathroom facilities.
The tents could provide shelter for almost all of the 4 million Syrian
refugees that have been displaced by the country’s civil war, which was
partly exacerbated by Saudi Arabia’s role in funding and arming jihadist groups.
However, as the Washington Post reports,
wealthy Gulf Arab nations like Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait and others
have taken in precisely zero Syrian refugees. Although Saudi Arabia
claims it has taken in 500,000 Syrians since 2011, rights groups point
out that these people are not allowed to register as migrants. Many of
them are also legal immigrants who moved there for work. In comparison,
Lebanon has accepted 1.3 million refugees – more than a quarter of its
population.
While it refuses to take in any more refugees, Saudi Arabia has offered to build 200 mosques for the 500,000 migrants a year expected to pour into Germany.
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