David Miliband: As the first snows fall, Syria’s refugees are on a road to hell

The world must not become daunted by the scale of the Syrian crisis. There is no excuse for doing nothing
16 December 2013
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Last month it was polio. Now it is shortages of food and clean water. Syria is truly on the road to hell. The question for world leaders is whether anyone cares enough to pull out the stops and do something about it — if not to stop the killing with a settlement of the conflict, then at least to staunch the dying with a massive increase in the scale and reach of humanitarian aid.

The International Rescue Committee (IRC) has just completed a survey of conditions of everyday life across Syria. We found that the cost of bread has risen by as much as 500 per cent over the past two years. Four in five Syrians are concerned that food is running out. More than half of the communities surveyed struggle to access clean water.

In 95 per cent of the 500 communities we surveyed, shops had no blankets to sell at all. Across eight regions of Syria, we found severe shortages of basic medical items such as antibiotics and painkillers. The UN reports that 250,000 Syrians are in besieged cities, and 2.5 million people — 10 per cent of the Syrian population, the equivalent of 6.5 million people in Britain — are in “hard to reach areas”. Strip out the diplomatic-speak and that means they face a sink-or-swim battle for survival, cut off by fighting that has no respect for the very notion of an innocent civilian.

Syria gives whole new meaning to the phrase “neighbour from hell”. Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey and Iraq are all dealing with the fallout from the Syria crisis, with millions of refugees desperate for help.

I was told on a visit last month that 1,000 Lebanese villages and towns have seen their population more than double. In Jordan, a vital stabilising force in the region, 600,000 refugees represent a 15-20 per cent increase in the population. That is like the whole of Bulgaria coming to Britain — twice over. In Turkey, where the government has built 20 refugee camps of proper standard for some 200,000 people, there are at least 450,000 people who are not in camps.

And now winter is coming. Only a couple of weeks ago I visited refugees in towns and informal settlements in Turkey and Lebanon. It was warm enough to walk outside without a jacket. Now a blanket of snow has covered thousands of tarpaulin shelters in the very places I visited in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon. News reports show children walking around in sandals and huddling with siblings for warmth.

Meanwhile the French foreign minister says with striking candour that he has a great deal of doubt about the chances of peace talks planned for January 22 in Switzerland. The combatants cannot see the point of compromise; the regional powers are party to the fight; the neighbours are not strong enough to force international engagement; and the wider world is either too fatigued, too confused or — following the agreement between Russia and the US over chemical weapons — too uninterested to become engaged. The conflict in Syria has become all that was feared: the dissolution of a country, torn between warring factions, and a humanitarian crisis that has already claimed at least 120,000 lives.

The fact that there are no easy options is no excuse for doing nothing. That is a terrible argument. In ascending order of difficulty, here is how we can save lives this month, next month and beyond — even while the fighting continues.

First, there is the simple matter of cash. The UN is today launching a new appeal to support people in Syria and beyond. This is essential for the easiest-to-reach people in the neighbouring countries. The numbers will be big — after all, the last appeal was for $4.5 billion. But the cost of an uneducated generation in the heart of the Middle East, never mind one underclothed, underfed and unhoused, is many times more — the Marshall Plan recognised that for Europe after the Second World War. We need a modern version of that plan for the countries hit by the Syria crisis.

Second, we need to plan for the long haul with continued innovation in the way aid is delivered. Mainstream school systems in neighbouring countries cannot cope with the refugee influx, so complementary to mainstream efforts we need community-based education with accredited learning. Syrian refugees come from a tech-savvy country, so we need to use new technology to connect them to each other and to information, which is the purpose of the platform being set up by the IRC with the non-profit news organisation Internews. And we need to support the local economies so people can earn a living, for example by running programmes that encourage and facilitate trade of basic goods or by investing in “cash for work” programmes that will help refugees (and their hosts) build enterprises that contribute to the local economy.

Third, the UN Security Council agreed unanimously to support access for humanitarian organisations inside Syria. But the combatants to the fight are ignoring it. So the Security Council needs to show that its words mean something by turning its “Presidential Statement” into a fully-fledged resolution ensuring access to life-saving assistance.

If the conference scheduled for January 22 is not going to bring peace, then it needs to protect civilians during war. It would be the ultimate proof that the world has lost its humanitarian compass if having fought to get the treatment of civilians onto the agenda for the conference, we found that the conference was either cancelled or never reached the humanitarian issues. If the conference cannot achieve peace, it must restore humanitarian law during war.

Syria has become a ghost nation — to its people and to the donors, both individual and governmental, who are daunted by the scale of the crisis. I was reminded recently that in the Middle East you pay interest on your mistakes. So we had better bring humanity back to the centre of the crisis as soon as possible.

David Miliband is president and CEO of the International Rescue Committee

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