It wasn’t a ‘good news’ weekend. On Saturday afternoon there were clashes between protestors in Dover when far-right protestors and anti-fascist protestors came head to head at one of the UK’s main ferry links with the continent.
Three people were wrrested, several were injured and pictures from the clash show people who are visibly bleeding. Kent police said they seized more than 20 weapons, including a knuckle-duster.
Meanwhile, in Sweden, local media reported that up to 100 men in masks stormed through Stockholm’s central station on Friday and Saturday giving out leaflets which threatened to punish ‘north African children roaming’ in the city and, allegedly, attacking people who they believed to be refugees.
As the migrant and refugee crisis worsens across Europe, tensions are rising. According to the UN Refugee Agency in 2015 more than a million people landed on the beaches of the Mediterranean and, so far in 2016 62,397 people have been recorded. The majority of these people came from Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
So, in amongst this bundle of pretty bad, sad and unsettling news Malala Yousafzai has said that she is seeking to raise $1.4billion to educate refugees and calling on world leaders from rich countries to help.
The 18 year-old Nobel laureate will appear at a conference in London this Thursday where heads of state and government members from around the world are set to discuss how they can support Syria.
According to the Malala Fund around 700,000 Syrian children are living in refugee camps across the Middle East are not getting any kind of schooling.
Writing in the Guardian yesterday, she and Muzoon Almellehan (a student and Syrian refugee) wrote,
‘Without significant increases in funding, thousands of Syrian young people will remain out of school again this year.’
‘Every year that’s missed will cost them dearly in terms of lost opportunities for themselves, their families and their country.’
‘Border countries like Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, Egypt and Iraq are opening their doors and their schools to Syrian children, but they don’t have resources to help every child. The world’s richest countries encourage refugees to stay in the region instead of coming to Europe, while not providing the funding border countries need to deal with the crisis.’
They concluded by saying that while $1.4billion sounds like a lot of money, the cost of doing nothing will be much higher,
‘Experts say we risk having an entire “lost generation” of Syrian children.’
‘The children of Syria are not lost. But they are waiting. They are waiting for world leaders to make and keep bold commitments that match their own determination.’
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.