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.
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.
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.Refugees, however, are not just victims. They can also in time become actors in the societies to which they have moved.
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.Zaatari at one year old underlines the unavoidable conclusion: we need a plan and we haven't got one.
Guardian UK