The first session of 2018 Aurora Dialogues in Armenia, attended by prominent humanitarian and human rights figures, opened with welcome remarks from moderator Jane Corbin, award-winning BBC journalist and filmmaker, followed by an address from Aurora Co-Founder Vartan Gregorian, who reflected upon the uniting nature of the Dialogues, saying: “There are many people of good will in Africa, in Asia, even in Antarctica, everywhere. They need an opportunity not to feel isolated, to be part of something – part that matters.” 
 

Samantha Power, Aurora Prize Selection Committee Member, then talked about what it feels like to be overwhelmed with the world’s humanitarian problems, and what could be done to fight indifference and fatigue. “Each of us – and I suffer from this as everyone in this room does – has to not be paralyzed by the fact that we can’t solve these big structural problems all at once. I always try to think that chances are, there’s always something one can do,” said Ambassador Power.

The first session featured the presentation of the 2018 Aurora Humanitarian Index by Dirk Jacobs, Full Professor in Sociology, Université libre de Bruxelles. This was followed by a discussion, during which two members of the Aurora Selection Committee – Co-Founder of Médecins Sans Frontières Bernard Kouchner and Ernesto Zedillo, former President of Mexico – joined Refugees Deeply Co-Founder Preethi Nallu and the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative Co-Founder Ruben Vardanyan.

Ruben Vardanyan has commented on the logic behind selecting the specific countries for the Index survey and explained what results they were hoping to achieve. “We took the countries with different mentalities, different religions, to see if those differences would be reflected in the index. You can see some of those differences in perception, for example, in Russia and in Iran,” he said.

Preethi Nallu then drew the audience’s attention to the fact that the countries hosting most refugees in 2017 – Turkey, Pakistan and Lebanon – not only do that without getting proper international recognition but often without sufficient funding, if any at all. “We need to show that a lot of these countries are resilient. The European funding has not gone through or decreased in the last few years, yet they are devising new ways of helping those refugees who will be staying there for a while,” she stressed out.

Ernesto Zedillo lamented the misconceptions that are circulated around by the media, which is making it very hard to get rid of them. “What we have heard in the last few years is that trade is bad, migration is bad, that the Chinese are a threat. Always blaming the others with whatever ill is happening in the world. And people listen and eventually become convinced that that is true,” he explained. Bernard Kouchner agreed with that, adding: “The fear is very high. But the refugees are not criminals. This is absolutely not true. This is partly the responsibility of the media, but this is also equally the responsibility of the politicians.”

On June 9, 2018 the Aurora Humanitarian Initiative hosted the third annual Aurora Dialogues in Armenia, entitled “Inspire, Empower, Impact.” The conference was made possible by the support of the Federal Foreign Office of Germany and through the collaboration with the Global Perspectives Initiative (GPI). Additional information about the second and third sessions is available here and here.