The idea that the system to protect and deliver quality healthcare to those displaced because of conflict or persecution remains broken is not particularly novel. It is self-evident now. Funding to support distressed communities has all but evaporated, and whatever fiction of international law we believed in, is no longer believable.

Yet, our attention tends to focus only on the most recent episode of conflict and devastation, putting the previous one that remains just as acute in some distant corner of our memory with a do-not-disturb sign.

This all may seem like a sudden series of events of the last couple of years, but communities that are impacted, and historians, will tell you that this has been happening for a long time. Global financing for supporting the forcibly displaced has followed donor priorities, not actual need. International law has always been applied selectively. Health of some has been advertised as critically important and the safety and well-being of others has always been invisible.

For the last two years, a group of........

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