Pope Francis
visited Jordan last week and made a point of reminding the world that some
600,000 Syrian refugees from that nation's devastating conflict are now living
within Jordan's borders. He asked the rest of the world not to leave Jordan, a
small country of only 6.3 million people, alone with this burden.
It takes something
like a visit by the Pope to put the Syrian refugee crisis in the news. Francis
thanked Jordan for its "generous welcome" to Syrian refugees and
called for an urgent resolution to a war now in its fourth year.
But Jordan's
not the only small country dealing with the refugees from a war that's taken an
outrageous toll on the civilian population.
Lebanon, a
country with even fewer resources, is dealing with about one million refugees. A
recent report by our daughter's company, Ibtikar Research & Consulting, looked into the UN-led humanitarian aid effort for Syrian refugees in
Lebanon. Despite a considerable international effort (though most nations have
not provided the funding the UN requested to finance its relief plan), the
report concluded that the effort is suffering from a failure to seek input from "the
Syrian refugee and host communities when designing relief aid strategy and
implementation."
Titled "The international aid community and local actors: Experiences and
testimonies from the ground," the report was written by Leila Zakharia and Sonya Knox.
Reading it,
I am driven to conclude that the bigger the organization or institution
attacking any social problem, the harder it is for that entity to turn its ear to the
little people on the ground directly affected by the crisis.
The
international humanitarian effort, the authors state, "has been
tremendous, particularly given this crisis’ evolving challenges, including the
wide dispersal of refugees in 1,650 different locations across Lebanon, with
85% of the refugee population not residing in camps."
However, "despite
Lebanon’s long history of local and civil society responses to a variety of
complex emergencies," the report states, "the relief, recovery and
development work undertaken by Lebanese, Palestinian and Syrian
non-governmental organizations and community-based organizations is mainly
overlooked by the international humanitarian community, and their insights and
suggestions ignored."
One of the
sad ironies of the Syrian refugee situation is the presence among this refugee
population of large numbers of Palestinians -- members of the Palestinian
refugee community, that is, who have remained a people without a country since
driven from their homeland by the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Now
forced to flee their homes in Syria by relentless attacks on rebel-held
territory by the Syrian government, these refugees find themselves reduced once
again to homelessness and penury.
To make
matters worse, the legal status of a Palestinian refugee in Lebanon is
worse than that in Syria where Palestinians possessed the legal right to
work -- a right they have never been granted by Lebanon's fragmented political
system.
Nevertheless,
Ibtikar's report found some
positive developments in the response efforts of the displaced Syrian community acting
in concert with small community-based Lebanese organizations. "One of the
untold stories of the relief response to the Syrian emergency in Lebanon,"
the authors state, "is the flourishing of new relief and development
organizations founded by Syrian refugees and dedicated to helping Syrian
refugees and their host communities."
The report
quotes the director of one of the larger Syrian-founded relief groups:“We were born to respond to the gaps left by the UN’s
refugee response, and our work is presented to the people as by Syrians for
Syrians.”
The full
report is on line at the "Lebanon Support" website.
The
link is: http://daleel-madani.org/story/international-aid-community-and-local-actors-experiences-and-testimonies-ground.
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