Iceland review - 2015, Page 63

ICELAND REVIEW 61
REFUGEES
WELCOME TO ICELAND
Within three days, 12,000 had joined in
and by week’s end—when the event for-
mally ended—16,000, or four percent of
the nation (activity on the site contin-
ues and over 18,000 people have now
joined). The outpouring offers of support
are many and diverse, including accom-
modation, furniture, clothes, toys, food,
jobs, assistance learning Icelandic, adjust-
ing to Icelandic society and even adopting
children. During the same week, roughly
1,200 people signed up to volunteer for the
Red Cross, which works with refugees and
asylum seekers in Iceland, thereby boosting
the organization’s volunteer base by about
40 percent. The number of new volunteers
is now up to 1,400.
Bryndís said in an interview on national
broadcaster RÚV on August 31 that while
on the one hand she was taken aback by
the success of the campaign, on the other
hand it didn’t come as a complete surprise.
“I think people have had enough of seeing
news from the Mediterranean and refugee
camps of people dying and want to do
something immediately,” she stated.
CREATING A POSITIVE FORUM
As of mid-September, around half a million
refugees and migrants have crossed the
Mediterranean so far this year—up from
218,000 in 2014 and 60,000 in 2013—and
close to 3,000 people have died in their
attempt, according to the United Nations
Refugee Agency, UNHCR. As a result of
ongoing conflict in Syria, over four million
Syrians have fled the country and 7.6 mil-
lion are internally displaced, according to
the UN.
Bryndís acknowledged that while these
public offers would not be enough in them-
selves and that the resettlement of refugees
needs to be carefully planned, she argued
that it must be possible to simplify the pro-
cess and that time is of the essence. Apart
from gathering information about available
assistance and creating pressure on the
government to act, Bryndís had also wanted
the campaign to create a positive forum for
discussing the issue. The initiative sparked
international media attention with even
people abroad asking how they could help,
or expressing interest in using the idea in
their countries. Similar initiatives have also
taken place overseas and following ‘Kæra
Eygló’ at least one similar project was set
up, in the United States: ‘Open Homes,
Open Hearts.’ In a separate Facebook ini-
tiative in Iceland, over 8,800 people have
called on the government to accept not 50,
but 5,000 refugees.
In Iceland, as in the rest of Europe, the
issue of refugees has dominated headlines
and been a major issue of discussion for
weeks. In the days leading up to the launch
of the ‘Kæra Eygló’ initiative, images of
people being met by riot police with tear
gas and stun grenades at the Macedonian
border and the discovery of the bodies of
70 people in the back of a truck in Austria
caused shock and outrage. Then, the pub-
lication of the image of Alan Kurdi, the
three-year-old Syrian boy whose dead body
washed up on a Turkish beach several days
after the initiative was launched, marked a