The people of Syria need a massive new aid programme. The short-term efforts that were started in good faith a few years ago are no longer adequate and will collapse under the weight of hundreds of thousands of new refugees. The United Nations should lead another initiative to get the world to recognise that these people’s desperate plight will not end in the foreseeable future as the fighting in their country will continue to rage unchecked with no reasonable expectation of a political solution. The generous aid promised at the Kuwaiti donors’ meeting will not be enough for the new reality.
More than 12 million Syrians need assistance, of whom more than seven million are displaced internally and three million have fled to neighbouring countries. “This is the largest number of people displaced from conflict in the world,” Valerie Amos, the United Nations Under-Secretary General for Humanitarian Affairs, said, pointing out that three quarters of the population now live in poverty. The strain on fragile states like Lebanon and Jordan is obvious. There are four million Lebanese who are involuntarily hosting 1.14 million Syrian refugees. The 6.5 million Jordanians are looking after another 650,000 refugees (although some estimates put that figure close to one million). There are immediate issues to be sorted out as these huge numbers of people need water and power for their basic needs in countries that are already inadequately provided. But such a huge number of refugees also brings the inevitable danger of political destablisation. The Syrians may drag their neighbours into their fighting, or the other way round.
There is a movement to resettle some of these unfortunate people in host countries for the duration of the civil war. For example, Britain has accepted only 100 Syrian refugees into the country and British charities and aid agencies have urged Prime Minister David Cameron to take thousands of them. No one will deny that potential host countries like Britain should be able to take in more, but this should be part of a worldwide effort in combination with a large number of other countries so that the total numbers that can be resettled become meaningful in the context of 12 million displaced people.
