Oleskandra from Ukraine is now living a refugee life in Poland; her husband is fighting against the Russian invading army. To check the news on the ongoing war, I called her at 8 PM, her local time, but she didn’t answer my call. I could manage to check the news another way, but I was worried about her not attending my call. In my childhood, I had a bitter experience of refugee life. So, I believe that refugee life is very different in the world.

However, Olesk called me back after a few hours, and then she said that she had seen my call on her cell phone, which had been silent before, and she could not pick up my call because her two babies were sleeping then. I understood that she got shelter in a room of a Polish family’s house, and for the sake of her babies’ sleep, it was impossible to attend any telephone call.

After reaching the Polish border and taking shelter, she told her story of how they had reached there.

It is not the only story of Oleskandra; it is the story of refugees worldwide. It may be the refugees from the Syrian border to the Myanmar-Bangladesh border. It is even the story of the 120 million refugees in the world now. Moreover, the story is, to some extent, similar to my childhood.

The people who create this story year after year are always the most powerful. On Poland’s border and inside Poland, not only Oleskandra and her babies but nearly one million Ukrainian stories are here and there, and 41% of them are school-age children, in addition to babies and older adults.

Ukrainians are not only living a refugee life in Poland but also another 5.5 million Ukrainian refugees recorded around the world. According to a weekly newspaper in Poland, 3.7 million Ukrainians are internally displaced. That means out of their nearly 37 million population, more than ten million are now internally and crossing their country’s border, living a refugee life.

On humanitarian grounds, two things get priority in refugee life: food and shelter. Not only humans but every animal needs food and shelter. So, man needs food and shelter as an animal, but as a human in this modern world, sometimes some issues arise before sufficient food and shelter, that is, the certainty of living and the education of the children. In refugee life, more dangerous issues are the uncertainty of living and not getting the proper education opportunities for their children.

Refugees first count a month and then a year; at some stage, they forget counting. The refugees in Gaza already forget counting. They even forget a promising future with the education of their children. The same has happened to Syrians who crossed the border and took shelter inside their territory. The same path is in front of the Rohingyas in Bangladesh now. In the same way, Ukrainians have already passed two years. When and how will the counting of the Ukrainians end?

The man who has thrown them into this life, Vladimir Putin, sometimes the president and sometimes Prime Minister of Russia, is the way he is running; it is tough for ordinary people or a political scientist to predict where his ending is and the fate of Ukrainians. If anyone had gone through history, he would say that throwing many people into a refugee life always works the madness of a dictator.

In this present world, Putin is one of the dictators who have that iron hand that can kill his opposition leader inside the jail, arrest any opposition voice anytime, and even make any decision like the head of a mafia state for the assets of the country and the people. He is now expanding his hand to make military bonding with another dictator of the world, the president of North Korea. In this context, someone may say that the death count in Ukraine and the date counting of Ukrainian refugees is not the end of the tunnel—there is no way to see any light now.

What an irony! The people of the world must live with 120 million refugees; the people of Gaza, Ukraine, and even the Arakans must live in uncertainty and with a large number of displaced and refugee persons! Generation after generation, many children will grow up without proper education and a free circumstance. The world will not think together to search for an ending to this artificial problem.

The problem’s creator is always someone or a group of people, or some unholy economic interests are suppressing the people’s voice, even if they are making people powerless in the name of a controlled state or the name of war. On the other hand, peace always stays at the end of a war in that context because autocrats never sit at a table. Besides, humanity, human rights, and the rule of law have no value to an autocrat. On the other hand, the refugee crisis is a humanitarian issue.

In every humanitarian cause, all conscious people worldwide have a duty; they have a duty to ensure that an older adult from Gaza will get food, that young Syrians will get jobs in a war-free land, that Oleskandra’s babies will go to sleep properly, and that counting the uncertainty will end with 120 million people.

The writer is an award-winning journalist and the editor of The Present World and Sarakhon.