The United Nations says an international donor conference has raised about $500 million for humanitarian relief efforts inside war-ravaged Syria.
Most of those funds are likely to go to aid agencies operating out of Damascus under official Syrian government supervision. But some relief workers say unofficial methods are better for reaching many Syrians in need of help.
U.N. humanitarian chief Valerie Amos said the donations offered Wednesday in Kuwait will be used to provide food, health care, water, blankets and mattresses to some of the estimated 2 million internally-displaced Syrians.
She said the pledges will boost an already “large-scale” operation inside Syria, led by five Syrian government-approved U.N. agencies.
They include the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Health Organization, the World Food Program, the Food and Agriculture Organization and the U.N. Population Fund (UNFPA).
The International Committee of the Red Cross also has been using Damascus as a base to organize aid convoys to parts of Syria where the government allows it to operate.
The ICRC funds aid programs in Syria and elsewhere using contributions from the European Commission, national governments, national Red Cross and Red Crescent societies and private sources.
The Red Cross System
Damascus-based ICRC spokeswoman Rima Kamal told VOA that the organization either transports relief supplies into Syria overland or buys them from local manufacturers.
She said those supplies have been stored in two warehouses, one in the Damascus district of Akraba, and one in the town of Adra, about 40 kilometers from the capital.
“We have not been able to access the Damascus warehouse for a while due to heavy fighting in the area,” she said. “We are currently looking into the possibility of having a third warehouse somewhere closer to northern Syria.”
Kamal said ICRC personnel determine where to send the supplies by making field trips from Damascus to examine the needs of other Syrian communities.
Speaking by telephone while traveling to the northern city of Latakia for a field visit, she said that once local needs are assessed, the ICRC relies on members of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent to drive the aid convoys.
“The Syrian Arab Red Crescent is the main partner of all international agencies in Syria. They are actually doing a great job of helping us to get to very difficult areas that are often cut off (by fighting),” Kamal said.
An Alternative Strategy
Paris-based aid agency Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has been using a different approach to provide medical support to desperate Syrians.
For more than a year, its members have been crossing into Syrian rebel-held areas from neighboring countries, without approval from Damascus.
The group has said it cannot ignore the medical needs of Syrians in those places, despite the government’s repeated refusal to authorize its privately funded work.
In an interview with VOA, MSF president Marie-Pierre Allié said her personnel have supplied drugs and equipment to a network of Syrian doctors, especially in the north.
“Step by step, we have been establishing three hospitals that we are running ourselves,” she said. “We are providing medical care for wounded people and for any other emergencies in these hospitals.”
Allié said MSF members have won the trust of armed groups by explaining that their mission is to provide impartial aid to the population.
In a statement issued Tuesday, MSF said the opposition regions where it operates have received only a fraction of the aid provided by agencies in Damascus.
“When aid is distributed with the Syrian government’s blessing, [aid workers] have no possibility to cross front lines and come to the [rebel] side because of the impediments created by the government,” Allié said.
Evaluating the Official Method
Amos, the U.N. humanitarian chief, acknowledged that U.N. agencies have been unable to operate in some areas reached by other groups.
“We must further strengthen our ties with opposition groups on the ground,” she told the Kuwait conference.
That could be a challenge for U.N. workers. Amos said Syrian rebel factions are not well-coordinated. She added that control of towns can shift on a daily basis.
Kamal of the ICRC said her agency has had some success in negotiating humanitarian access to rebel areas.
She also said the organization is “ready to explore the possibility” of delivering supplies to Syrians directly from neighboring states rather than through Damascus.
But, Kamal said, any cross-border aid missions would have to be fully transparent and conducted in consultation with the Syrian government.
She also warned that such operations have their limits.
“They will not solve the problem of aid reaching certain areas because you have a lot of victims concentrated in and around urban centers that are very difficult to reach from the border,” Kamal said.
Source: Voice of America
In other words, the UN is working with Assad and the rebels can get stuffed. This is unbelievable. The people who are being slaughtered and blown out of their homes by Assad’s forces and who badly need medical aid will not receive it, per this article, and the thousands upon thousands of refugees in the camps in Turkey and Jordan who are starving and freezing are not included in this $500M administered by the UN.
The UN has behaved reprehensibly in my humble and most ignorant opinion; however, in my opinion as a human sharing the planet Earth with my fellow Syrian people, the UN is part of the problem. Nothing it has done has been in the direct interests of the people under attack by Assad. In fact, nothing it has done. What the UN and the US and Europe most feared by intervening in Syria has come to pass, and who knows now what end it will reach, even as Israel reared its ugly warhead today.
So the inaction of those bodies has been a direct and proximate cause of the chaos in Syria today, not the least problem being the factions that will continue to war with each other even after Assad goes. The battle between the different tribes inside Syria and the outside influences (Iran, Hezbollah, Al-Quaeda and other terrorist groups) will surely follow and would just have surely not have eventuated had the world powers been smart enough to have just done the right thing back then. See how allowing fear to dictate your judgments and actions results in fearful situations? Or perhaps it was something more sinister and informed than fear. Perhaps it was a knowledgable position that was taken, knowing full well that by doing nothing, the UN, the US and Europe would manipulate the situation to its liking.
I just don’t get the UN. Here it has a chance to do some good, at last, and what does it do but hand the moola over to the monster.
Hi Eleanor :
There so few of us who care about Syria. Welcome, I thought , I was all alone.
“Syria has the ability to kill tens of thousands with its chemical weapons,” she added. “The world must come together to prevent this by unified action which results in the secure containment of Syria’s significant stockpile of chemical weapons.”
( L.A. Times )
It seems that the U.S. is now more willing to act in Syria because they have reports of Assad using chemical weapons. But the U.S. government has been talking too much about Syria and doing nothing much to help the revolutionaries. Oh, but they fear Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda is doing something about Assad not the U.S.
The U.N. is a crook, Eleanor. Do you trust the U.N. ? I don’t.
I don’t trust the U.N., Fredy. Based on evidence, it fails to act when it is the only entity with the mandate to act. It constantly renegs on its unique obligations. The U.N. held in its hands the power to change the course of Syria’s tragedy but, as I stated earlier, fear stopped it.
I propose a global body, comprised of a representative from every country on Earth, with only responsibility, no power as such, to maintain a particular level of treatment of humans and once any one country sinks beneath that level, this global body steps in and takes control of that government, in the name of humanity, to ensure that no peoples are maltreated. Once any country proves itself unworthy of governing its people, it no longer has the mandate to do so and it forfeits any power with which it was vested.
We are all humans inhabiting one planet. We are all connected to each other. Even Brian Greene, the physicist, proves that an action in one part of the world can have a reaction in a far distant part of the world without ever touching it. When a child in Syria is beheaded, I feel that deeply in Los Angeles (and I’ve never gone a day without feeling it deeply in my bones). It is this that determines why and how we are all responsible for and to each other. We are NOT divided by boundaries which governments and wars establish. They are false and very, very, fleeting. Humanity is true and lasting. Therefore, this new global body has only one function – to maintain a standard of living for every human, a standard of safety, health and welfare regardless of geographic location. It does not have any power so it cannot be corrupted and no country has a choice but to participate. The US cannot refuse on grounds that it will cost too much, or the politics are too difficult. No choice. So far, we’ve done a yeoman’s job of effing up the place royally. Henceforth, wipe out every standing, corrupt, insidiously useless bunch of initials (UN, NATO, USA, UK, SEATO, GROUP of 8, 20, this that or the other). We have to admit the failure and begin anew.
So no, Fredy, the U.N. is useless and untrustworthy. (Aren’t you glad you asked
)
I am glad to meet a caring human of the opposite sex.
I don’t think it was fear I think they just don’t care. Assad has legal representation after the mass scale genocide and brutal murder of many innocent people.
The Jerks in D.C. say that Libya is not Syria. The Daily news said the U.S. was a coward after it’s response to Assad. Excuses are for losers.
The Syrian people will defeat Assad genocide machine. I think that no later than this year that S.O.B. will die .
Thank you for your kind response to the Syrian people. Please keep posting.