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Ten years of war in Syria have destroyed the country and countless human lives. The question is whether the willingness to donate has also been affected when the EU and the UN now convene another aid conference.
A refugee boy from Syria in a camp in Bar Elias in Lebanon. Stock photo.
Seven-year-old Lara in a refugee camp in Idlib has never experienced peace. The war in her homeland started before she was born.
Now he dreams of another place.
– I want to live in a country other than Syria, where it is safe and where there are schools and toys. It’s not safe here, the dogs scare me, and the tent isn’t safe, Lara says in a new Save the Children report.
The report presents a bleak picture of the situation of young people, with insecurity, harassment and lack of education.
“These ten years have cost the youth of Syria their childhood. The world must not allow them to lose their future too, ”Jeremy Stoner, regional director of the Middle East aid organization, said in a press release.
However, that the world stands up is not a fact. As the EU and the UN now jointly host their fifth fundraising support conference to help Syrian refugees, there is clear concern about willingness to donate.
A similar donor conference for Yemen recently collected only half of what the UN expected.
Now the goal is to raise at least $ 10 billion, almost SEK 90 billion.
“It has been ten years of despair and disaster for Syrians. Deteriorating living conditions, economic recession and COVID-19 have led to more hunger, malnutrition and disease,” said Mark Lowcock, head of the UN coordinating body. Ocha, in a statement before the conference.
The online donor meeting started on Monday but will accelerate on Tuesday under the leadership of Lowcock and EU Foreign Minister Josep Borrell.
At 20 o’clock in the evening, the EU Commissioner for Crisis Management, Janez Lenarcic, will report on how much has been raised.
The EU and its member states have been by far the largest donor of war casualties in Syria, with the equivalent of almost SEK 250 billion in the last ten years.
The UN now warns of the risk of new refugee flows into Europe if more is not done for the millions in camps in Turkey, Jordan and Lebanon.
– This is a wise investment. If people can’t stay, they will move on. A crisis cannot be postponed, Achim Steiner of the UN agency UNDP told a news conference on Thursday, according to the Euractiv news site.
The war in Syria
The conflict in Syria began in 2011 with an uprising in the form of peaceful protests, which turned into a full-blown civil war.
There are no official figures on the number of deaths in the civil war. Estimates from, among others, the UN and the opposition Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR) vary between around 400,000 and almost 600,000 deaths.
More than twelve million people, about half the country’s population, have been forced to flee. Most of them are internally displaced or are in one of the neighboring countries.
Most Syrian refugees live in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Iraq, and Egypt.
