Aid groups defy Syrian government's diktat

Damascus: For 48 hours, the two Damascus residents struggled to reach the besieged city of Homs by car, trying to deliver boxes of blood bags so surgeons there could operate on the wounded. But gunfire made the roads impassable.

Finally, they strapped their contraband to their backs and, led by a shepherd through back roads and dirt paths, hiked 100 kilometres to the city.

As the violence across Syria reaches a treacherous new phase and the numbers of displaced and injured swell, such individual and ad hoc efforts have grown into an increasingly organised underground network of volunteers willing to brave injury and arrest to deliver relief supplies to those trapped, wounded or displaced by the fighting.

The government sees the network as an affront and has detained anyone caught distributing aid, especially medicine. Activists say the government considers any aid, even humanitarian, as a comfort to its enemies and an opportunity for a long-repressed civil society to gain a foothold.

The threat of arrest has only forced the operation underground as a growing number of people struggle to provide food, clothing, medicine, shelter, services and money to a population that the Syrian government has victimised and the international community has so far largely failed to help. The Red Crescent said last week that as many as 1.5 million people need help getting food, water or shelter.

"All our lives we were raised to be afraid," said a university student who is involved in the relief effort. "But you get to a point where you realise you are strong because you can speak and do."

Those involved with the network also say it undermines the government's effort to divide and conquer, whether on sectarian, ethnic, class or geographical lines. For the past year, the government has been stoking fears of ethnic conflict and the prospect of a militant Islamist takeover as a way to coerce tacit support from Syrians of all sects and ethnicities.

By taking an active role in the conflict, Damascus residents can push back against the capital's facade of relative normalcy.

Stockpile

But they risk arrest by doing so. Two women were taken in broad daylight from a cafe last month, as was the son of a doctor this month, for helping stockpile and deliver medicine, activists say.

Another man was arrested after collecting Easter chocolate to send to Christian children in Homs and was held for several weeks. The authorities have even detained a psychiatrist who was training volunteers to help children who have been traumatized by an uprising that has churned for more than a year.

"They want to get rid of the idea that the people can help each other. They don't want there to be solidarity among the Syrian people,'' said a social scientist who is a participant in the network and, like others interviewed, did not want to be identified.

Those involved say they were moved to act by the realisation that the government had no intention of responding to the humanitarian crisis caused by its own siege of Syrian cities, which has resulted in the internal displacement of hundreds of thousands of people.

Illegal

Those with the means have filled Damascus hotels, which have offered drastically reduced rates to Syrians fleeing the violence, and those without have been welcomed in the homes of less affluent Syrians on the outskirts of Damascus.

Providing relief is "not disallowed in law, but we understood from the security that it was illegal," said one participant who noted that the most dangerous items to smuggle were medicines. "We began to fear for our people so we stopped medicine, stayed to food."

Syria has a strong cultural practice of charity and giving, with several hundred institutions available for Syrians to contribute to. But government restrictions have rendered them ineffective for providing aid during the conflict.

Several of these organisations are also now working in secret, people here said.

The government has tried to appear responsive to the crisis. In April, President Bashar Al Assad and his wife, Asma, were shown on state television at a stadium full of euphoric volunteers filling bags with sugar and rice to be distributed to those in need throughout Syria. The undertaking was staged by Syria Trust, a non-governmental organization, whose board chairwoman is Asma Assad.