The emergency arrangements of the last two years have evolved into permanent, often sad, communities
That refugees will go home is one of the myths governments find useful as they recoil from the costs of helping the displaced and struggle with recalcitrant public opinion. The truth is that many refugees never go home, and, even when they do, it is often years later than they or anybody else envisaged. This is the realisation that has been slowly dawning on the world as Syria's war has slipped into stalemate.
With neither side able to achieve victory, the only thing clear about the conflict is that it will continue to uproot hundreds of thousands of men, women and children. Already a quarter of Syria's population have fled to camps in neighbouring countries, or left their homes to find a precarious haven in supposedly safe parts of their own country, "safe" parts which could at any moment become unsafe. This presents us with both a daunting humanitarian problem, with so many lives destroyed or damaged, and a looming political crisis, as these population shifts threaten the already frayed stability of the region.
A French proverb says that nothing lasts as long as the temporary. Guardian writers report on how the emergency arrangements of the last two years have evolved into permanent communities, albeit often sad and dysfunctional ones. The Zaatari refugee camp in Jordan, founded a year ago, is now the country's fourth largest city or, to put it another way, it is as if Deraa, from which most of the refugees come, had been picked up and relocated in Jordan.
In parts of Turkey, Syrian refugee families are having more babies and sending more children to school than the locals, in admittedly sparsely populated border regions. In Egypt, middle-class refugees who made it to Cairo and other cities face a prejudice which is a consequence of Egypt's own political divisions rather than anything they have done. It is not that arrangements in the host countries are ungenerous, or that international organisations such as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) have not done a decent job.
Rather it is that life in this sort of exile, pushed out of one society and held at arms length by another, is inherently miserable. People may not starve but they have no employment or status, and while personal security is better, it is far from perfect. Refugees, however, are not just victims. They can also in time become actors in the societies to which they have moved. Lebanon learned that when Palestinian refugees started to play a role, often an aggressive one, in the country's politics, a process which helped bring on a terrible civil war. Now Lebanon is looking after 600,000 Syrians and the strain is telling.
Who can say how the vexed relations between Sunnis and Shias in Lebanon or between moderate Sunnis and Islamists will be affected by this influx? In Jordan, there are similar memories of how the clashes with the PLO led to a traumatic internal war. The parallels are of course incomplete, but they are a reminder that refugees rarely turn their backs on the conflict that displaced them.
They follow it passionately, they often carry on fighting, and they can embroil their hosts in their battles. The Syrian humanitarian crisis is now worse than that in former Yugoslavia in the 90s. It demands more money, and the international community could begin by honouring the pledges of assistance that they have made to the UNHCR, some countries having so far failed to give what they promised. Western countries should also consider taking some of the burden by offering to take a proportion of refugees. But real relief will only come through a political settlement.
Yet the Geneva conference is still just an empty room awaiting a booking that may not be taken up. Diplomatic channels continue to echo with dispiritingly repetitive restatements of irreconcilable positions. The US fiddles with ideas about military action. Iran and the Gulf states continue to feed the fire with arms and money. Zaatari at one year old underlines the unavoidable conclusion: we need a plan and we haven't got one.