Tuesday, December 17, 2013
The United Nations announced a record appeal for victims of the Syrian conflict on Monday as part of the largest request it has ever made for global humanitarian emergency financing.
Valerie Amos, the under secretary general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief
coordinator, told a news conference in Geneva that aid agencies needed
nearly $13 billion for humanitarian relief operations worldwide in 2014.
“This is the largest amount we have ever had to request at the start of
the year,” she said.
Half the total, $6.5 billion, was needed for Syria, in what Ms. Amos
said was the biggest appeal ever for a single crisis. The conflict in
Syria, now heading toward a fourth year, has created the worst
displacement crisis since Rwanda’s genocide 20 years ago, said António
Guterres, the high commissioner for refugees, calling it “the most
dangerous for global peace and security since the Second World War.”
Humanitarian aid is not the solution to the crisis in Syria, Ms. Amos
said, but expectations of what may emerge from a peace conference
expected to begin on Jan. 22 were only “modest at this point in time.”
Senior officials from Russia, the United States and the United Nations
are to meet in Geneva later this week to consolidate preparations for
the peace talks. But Laurent Fabius, France’s foreign minister, sought
to lower expectations last week, expressing pessimism about the outcome.
More than half of Syria’s population of 22 million is now in need of
aid, according to United Nations estimates, and with no letup in the
ferocity of the conflict, relief agencies are forecasting a further
sharp rise in humanitarian needs in 2014.
Around 1.7 million Syrians fled the fighting to seek shelter in
neighboring countries in 2013, bringing the number registered with the
United Nations refugee agency to 2.3 million in 2013. Although the
number of new registrations has slowed, the total is expected to exceed 4
million by the end of 2014.
More than 9 million people inside the country are now in need of help,
United Nations officials say, including more than six million driven
from their homes by fighting, often forced to move many times and facing
an increasingly tough battle to survive.
A survey released Monday by the International Rescue Committee, a
refugee relief group, found the price of bread in many parts of Syria
had risen 500 percent over two years and more than three-quarters of the
communities surveyed rated food as their greatest need.
“These findings show that starvation is now threatening large parts of
the Syrian population,” David Miliband, the group’s chief executive,
said in a statement released with the survey findings.
“With polio on the loose, and a subzero winter already here, the people
of Syria now face months of more death and despair. We are witnessing a
humanitarian catastrophe that is receiving far too little attention and
funding around the world.”
Although aid agencies
continue to get relief supplies through to most governorates, Ms. Amos
said more than 2.5 million Syrians are living in areas where fighting
prevents sufficient or consistent aid deliveries; a quarter of a million
Syrians are trapped in areas under siege by the warring factions and
cutoff from any humanitarian aid.
An airlift of supplies from Iraq to Syria’s northeastern Hassakeh
governorate began Sunday, bringing aid to one area where fighting has
hampered previous attempts at humanitarian relief.
But Ms. Amos saw only a “modest” easing of bureaucratic barriers in
response to Security Council calls for improved access for relief
agencies, and was emphatic that “we are seeing no progress at all” in
calls for demilitarizing schools and hospitals.
The scale and cost of Syrian relief operations, meanwhile, is imposing
acute strain on the resources of relief agencies whose 2013 aid appeal
was financed at only 60 percent. “This is not sustainable at current
rates of contribution from the world, that’s why we call on other
countries to do more,” Anne C. Richard, an assistant secretary of state
who was visiting Geneva for consultations on international relief, said
in an interview.
“It’s clear that the appeals that are being made cannot be met only by
the traditional donors,” Mr. Guterres told reporters, appealing to
emerging economies and Arab countries to support the United Nations
effort.
The $13 billion appeal presented by Ms. Amos is intended to address the
needs of more than 50 million people in 17 countries, including new
crises in the Central African Republic, relief to victims of the typhoon
in the Philippines, and the “persistent” crises in Afghanistan and
Haiti, she said.
Appeals this year for the Philippines, the Central African Republic,
Haiti, Somalia and Djibouti are all less than half funded, said Jasmine
Whitbread, chief executive of Save the Children. Money for programs like
education was also far short of goals, she said.
Ms. Amos left little doubt, however, that the Syrian conflict will
create pressures for years to come. “We have to accept that even if
there was an end to the violence in Syria tomorrow we would still have a
major humanitarian crisis on our hands,” she said.